Cook for America: Sustaining the Commons

CfA's will improve local food ecosystems to create resilient, circular food supply chains for ecological and nutritional benefits. 

CfA will train and deploy cooks to encourage local co-ops to fortify Community Gardens and Kitchens, to empower people to better feed themselves. CfA will educate and employ disadvantaged refugees, families, and marginalized communities, to improve their nutritional outcomes and sustainable practices.

Existing food systems often degrade the environment and exploit people for the profit of a small number of companies. Degradation affects our land water and atmospheric resources, while the exploitation of people happens on farms, which provide jobs with marginal subsistence and in the consumption process where diabetes, obesity and malnutrition are perpetuated by the marketing strategies of major food corporations. 

CfA proposes to develop small urban-agrarian community farms and cooking co-ops with an emphasis on educating participants on the processes and benefits of local, circular food systems.

Climate change threatens to exacerbate the challenges of feeding the Earth’s population. Our current food system's intersectional inefficiencies and inequalities harm personal-physical, social-psychological and ecological-environmental common-welfare.

In Nature, Scientific Data, "Global map and indicators of food system sustainability," the authors explain (un)sustainable intersectionality. In 2016, 815 million individuals qualified as chronically undernourished, while obesity consequences increased exponentially. Such trends correlate with a massive environmental footprint in the food production-distribution sectors, coupled with high levels of food supply-chain waste and homogeneity, crowding out smaller urban-agrarian food-operators. 

Massachusetts: Food is Medicine, a proponent of food-based public healthcare, explains how the US DoA defines food insecurity "as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life," affecting approximately one-in-ten Massachusetts households, leading to a whopping $1.9 billion in healthcare costs per year (2019). 

Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, sums succinctly,

“Continuing to eat in a way that undermines health, soil, energy resources and social justice cannot be sustained without eventually leading to a breakdown."

Rather, we need to reform and re-create food systems that are socio-ecologically self-sustaining.

For a food system to be resilient, its environmental, economic and sociopolitical infrastructure, peoples, lands and values, require organizational consilience, even as they are a decentralized many. 

CfA would -

- Create a circular urban-agrarian metabolic and behavioral ecological multi-causal-loop model of MIT neighborhood food systems, identifying the sustainability gaps, adaptive capacities and vulnerabilities of our local food-supply-chain

 - Engineer, design and begin implementing a plan for MIT’s circular food ecosystem, connecting and educating grass root growers, local restauranteurs, bakers, chefs, diners and waste managers with our residential community through an integrated socioecological network

- Partner with MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative Rapid Response Group, Massachusetts Food Systems, Abdul Latif Jamel Water and Food Systems and , Ellen MacArthur Foundation, EzHealth, MIT Dining, Bon Appetite, Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, among other possible production-consumption food-chain organizations, to sustainably integrate MIT's food system across local channels

- Scale the circular metabolic sustainable and resiient food ecosystem model regionally, nationally and globally, engineering food organizations that support our collective socioecological common-welfare across continents, bridging national ideological divides.

CfA seeks to support environmental and economic welfare, as well as social equity; we aim to balance our capitalist-socialist vision with environmentalism. Our business concept promotes sustainable, resilient and circular metabolic food ecosystem development. 

As such, our target populations include MIT, the Boston area and other local ecological communities. CfA will educate, employ and serve students across MA colleges and high-schools, as well as marginalized residents, such as the LGBTQIA+ population, African American communities and refugees in need of good jobs and healthy food. Given our circular integration-based business paradigm, we would also serve local under-represented small grass root food system businesses.

We will also work to also promote wildlife land conservation, re-organizing our urban-agrarian metabolic food system. MIT's food system boundaries do not end with our campus limits, rather our food system circles the globe. The choices individuals and institutions make on a local food scale have nth order effects on aggregate eco-communities. Factory farming, deforestation and transcontinental transportation emissions are not simply environmental issues, but also reflect socioecological and ecopolitical interests.