Poverty, Education, and Food,

As I sit here reviewing the last couple of months, things that happened to me personally, and to many around me, it could be extremely easy to be angry, feel disenfranchised, and quickly point fingers at this or that aspect of politics, segregation, and a host of other human ills. Blame 'the Man', government, racism, the illuminati, the media, or this stat or that stat. I have my opinions on those subjects which very well will be put up for discussion.

At this point, I work within the Chicago Public School system, but I am not a Chicago Teacher's Union member or a CPS teacher. I am a chef instructor with Afterschool Matters. I love my job and I love the students that I teach. Monday is Columbus day and if CTU and CPS cannot come to an agreement, Tuesday morning, the teachers will walk out on strike. I support the teachers who have been working a long time without a contract, wage adjustment, decision on issues of healthcare, and a variety of other issues. I will not be braking the picket line, so come Tuesday morning I might not be able to earn my hourly pay as per usual.

For ill or for better, I decided as a mother to take my kids out of CPS. I moved my family to a neighboring suburban neighborhood with a very good school district. In order to do this, I agreed to pay a higher rent than I could get the same living situation within the city.  It has been costly but the result of this mandate has yielded three students with differing, and I would debate it, better outcomes. As we couldn't afford to utilize the private school offerings within the city, we could do better just by moving outside of the district. We put them where they could be within diverse school population that offered opportunities that CPS could not offer. We did this before I began working within the system in which I was educated for many years.

A large percentage of the students that our organization serves, nearly 10,000 students, are living in lower economically performing families. These kids are impacted daily by the choices made in government and by the poverty they are experiencing. There are systematic issues of race, economy, and segregation at play here. This "urban", "uneducated", "criminal" population is not as it is defined.

The teacher's union has every right to ask for appropriate compensation. The areas that they teach in has every right to question edicts and results of policies that not only have them operating on uneven playing fields from their non-minority counterparts.

Did you know, if your family qualifies to receive supplemental nutritional support (food stamps) the maximum funding that you would be eligible to receive equals $3 per meal, per person, per day. $9 a day to eat? Can you work with that budget? So whenever I hear someone decry the ills of all these 'welfare leeches' ruining our country, I find myself puzzled. At the majority of elementary and high schools within the Chicago metropolitan, they have such low dietary budgets and tight numbers of food service workers within the schools, that the meals produced are very cheap, often unhealthy, and rely upon some of the worst options available to eat. Canned foods, high fat, high sodium, easiest to prepare and serve the students. Real foods are not in the better interest of the system and often are too expensive. How can any institution produce the next generation of thinkers and leaders if it is serving foods that do not improve the health of these children and sets them up to be accustom to eating substandard foods.

Almost anyone can quickly determine that if you serve substandard food to anyone chances are that their malnutrition can result in lower thinking ability, lower academic performance, some behavioral issues, and health issues. So why does this happen? Why are so many living is food deserts?  Why is fast food so cheap but fresh fruit is not cheap?

Food is one of the universal items that everyone must consume, find, and prepare daily. I try to get my students to understand that once you begin to rely upon a corporation to feed you, you are in nutritional trouble. Corporations all have one goal, make money, year after year growth both in new exposure to untapped territories, and by finding ways to make the products quickly and as cheaply as possible.

In the good old days..... The new political rhetoric recycled yet again in America.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, sounds fancy to the unfamiliar, but the premise is at it's core is simply and yet to be discredited. Maslow theorized that when a person has their essential needs in unstable statuses, food, shelter, love, will not be able to care about philosophy or religion. Human motivation can become very base when our basic needs are not meet.

Poverty changes personal goals and can keep people from becoming the best version of themselves possible. Poverty can change people's motivation taking their waking hours from understanding geometry to hustling for money for clothes, shoes, food, transportation, and safe housing. Impoverish people often don't care about Non-GMO or organic foods, they see spending their dollars to bring home to most food for the money, mass instead of quality.

Poverty, education, and food can't truly be separated in this climate because those who suffer being born on the wrong side of the tracks, poorly born, will experience judgements from outsiders that marginalize them, label them, and attempt to push them out of the race for the best of things offered for consumption.