Global Food Systems: Seed to Plate and Everything In-Between

Image: Cynthia with a copy of her book "From Changing
Diapers to Changing the World" at Capitol Hill in DC

Today, I’m back on Capitol Hill with CARE talking about...drumroll please...food security! Although I often lobby Congress about nutrition, usually I’m talking about child nutrition in the first 1000 days of life. That is definitely part of food security, but it’s just one tiny aspect of the great big issue.

Image: Toddler eating carrots off a plate

What is Food Security?

Food security is all about strengthening food systems to help the world weather all kinds of crises. Food systems encompass everything from seed to plate and ALL that happens in between. 

The main legislation that authorizes the U.S. to do its part in protecting global food systems is called the Global Food Security Act (GFSA). In 2016, it put our Feed the Future program - which addressed root causes of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition - into law. That successful program lifted approximately 23.4 million people above the poverty line with its innovations! Yet it will expire soon and must be renewed by 2023. 

Image: Panelists at 2022 CARE conference talk about the 
importance of the Global Food Security Act

The Global Food Security Act focuses on long term sustainability and resilience of food systems. We have seen in the last two years how disruptions in food supply from disease or war can globally affect food access for the vulnerable and food price increases for everyone. Emergency food helps people eat now. Strengthening food systems helps build long term resilience for all kinds of future emergencies. 

Build a Better GFSA

We are at a real crisis point with food security. More people in the world were already food insecure even before COVID-19 and war in the Ukraine started. We need to build up food systems, so we won't be so vulnerable to these kinds of shocks as well as things we can't even yet imagine. 

How does CARE want to make the next Global Food Security Act even better? As always, we know that putting women and girls at the center will improve policies. CARE believes the next GFSA should include:

• More support for savings groups that help women and girls involved in agriculture become more independent

• More support for small-scale farmers, particularly women, giving them better access to markets, credits, tools, fertilizer, and other assets

• Better integration of nutrition into food systems programming, including elevating women as household decision-makers on nutrition. 

How Can YOU Help? 

Call your representative this week and say, “My name is ______ and I’m your constituent living in _____. A new Global Food Security Action will be introduced soon by Representatives Betty McCollum and Chris Smith. I am asking you to be an original co-sponsor to support food systems and help make our world more resilient to disasters like disease, climate disasters, and war. Thank you.”

Image: Cynthia with Congresswoman Cori Bush

Rainbow Parfaits for #Global Goals

It's true that sometimes I am overly ambitious. I know this. I claim that my life is too short to do one thing at a time, so I multitask to a ridiculous extent and manage to work in a poverty-fighting action or lesson into almost everything I do. Sometimes to great success. Other times...well, let me tell you the story of the End of the Rainbow Parfaits.

I was browsing through Pinterest one day with my eye out for a fun dessert I might make with my daughter and her friends for an upcoming slumber party. They'd been in a baking phase and I wanted to indulge them a bit. This is when I stumbled upon the End of the Rainbow Parfaits.

Photo from Tablespoon.com

Now, I know most moms wouldn't look at these delicious treats and say "Hey, that looks like a good lesson about the Global Goals!!!" But I'm weird and that's exactly what I thought. See, when I saw that picture, my mind when straight to this infographic...

The Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which I previously wrote about here, are 17 goals for the world that will help us do three things in the next 15 years: end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and fix climate change. It's up to us as global citizens to choose which ones we personally want to work on to get there. Each goal has a color in the graphic, so I thought that it would be neat to make these parfaits and allow kids to choose the color representing the issue they felt most strongly about. Only want to help "Life Below Water?" Cool. Yours can be all blue. I can never choose just one and like to work on global health (green), life under water (blue), clean water (light blue), education (dark red), and poverty in general (bright red).

I wanted to make these with my daughter's friends and give them the message that THEY get to choose in life what THEY want to work on. Too often, we just spoonfeed kid the idea that they have to do something and give them a something that we personally want to do. In real life, we have a choice.

In the middle of the prep, I got a call from my good friend Jennifer Burden, founder of World Moms Network. I told her I was getting kind of aggravated while I was getting ready for a slumber party and putting together the ingredients for this pretty ambitious dessert/craft. She said something like, "Do you ever just do anything just for fun?" I laughed and (joking-not-joking)said something like, "I don't think so. Please help me. It's a problem!" And it was! I was stressing out about the party anyway. I had no business trying to add a poverty lesson into the mix!!! Why was I pushing myself into an "Advocate to Aggravate" campaign?

Sigh. Well, Jen talked me into a better mood and we proceeded with the craft. Let's see how it went shall we?

STEP 1: Mix up refrigerated sugar cookie dough with eggs, vanilla, and food coloring. For simplicity, I did not make 17 different colors.

STEP 2: Spoon the colored batter into cupcake cups.

STEP 4: Bake 'em up! Use this baking time to explain the Global Goals to your helpers and tell them to think about what colors and goals they would like to work on.

STEP 5: Remove from oven and admire how well you are doing so far.

STEP 6: Crumble up the colored cupcakes into separate bowls.

STEP 7: Spoon in a chosen color, cover with whip cream, repeat until satisfied. And VOILA!

U

hmmm...okay, so they didn't EXACTLY turn out the way they looked on Pinterest, but on the whole I think we...

NAILED IT!

So, yeah. It turned out to be a laughable mess. We won't be doing this for any bar mitzvahs or anything, but the girls had fun and they got some global learnin' along the way. I was not sorry we tried!! If you try it, tell me how it goes!