What's on Your Plate?

 After a morning of chores and bread-making, the girls and I settled down, with our various knitting and crocheting projects in hand, to watch a movie from our new favorite genre: food documentaries. The flick of the day was "What's on Your Plate?" I can't describe it any better Netflix's description, so here goes:

  "Aimed at children and adults, this entertaining documentary from activist Catherine Gund follows her daughter, Sadie, and her best friend, Safiyah, as the two 11-year-olds spend a year investigating the politics of food in America. The intrepid tweens interview farmers, school officials, chefs and ordinary folks to find out how food is grown and how agriculture can be transformed in order to improve both nutrition and profit."

 So what did we learn? Simply put:

• To eat more locally grown foods. Why? Because we're not only cutting down on how far our food has to be transported but we're also supporting our local farmers.
• To eat more whole, natural foods. 
• Children's health in our country is seriously declining thanks to our eating habits.
• And finally... deep down inside I really feel a need to grow things! One step at a time, though. We're dealing with our first year of gardening one day at a time in this drought stricken region.

Photo courtesy of Bella and her camera

 So, the home school mom came out of summer hibernation for a little while. Inspired by Sadie and Safiyah's actions, one chickling pulled out the world map, one gathered the produce in the kitchen, and 2 others had paper and art supplies on hand to draw small "portraits" of the produce. We read the little stickers on our fruit and found out that our bananas came from Costa Rica, our grapes from Mexico, our apples from Washington, peaches from South Carolina, and the blueberries simply were labeled "U.S." We used the little ones' pictures of the fruit and placed them on the countries of origin respectively. Most of these places are quite a long way from Alabama, we discovered, and yet all of these things are grown right here within a few hours of us. Hmmm....

 So, in the end, why did I love this movie? It spoke to me and the girls and made us more aware. We pinpointed things we can change and now have a goal.

Want to learn more? http://www.whatsonyourplateproject.org/