The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum opens a free weekly soup kitchen at lunch time on Tuesdays.  Every week a featured speaker from the culinary community will address the lunchers on issues of responsible food consumption.  Listen in for a wonderful conversation regarding food, sustainable living, and other issues, hosted in the historic Resident’s Dining Hall, where Jane Addams and other important social reformers met daily to share meals and ideas.

Based on the idea that people have a stake in each other’s health, this link is what binds us together as families, communities and a nation. Nowhere are we more powerfully bound together than in the daily cultivation and preparation of food.  Within food lays vast untapped potential to uplift and connect people, to provide a medium for discourse, and an opportunity to taste our common humanity along with our differences. Jane Addams understood this.

As we seek openings to utilize the power of food, we find ourselves in a fight to salvage a food system that has been ravaged by an approach of quantity over quality, of short-term gain over long-term stability. Our sustenance is now inextricably dependent on fossil fuels. The massive injection of this energy into our food system over the past 40 years has doubled the world population, yet left a billion malnourished. Ironically, over abundance now plagues this country witnessed in the excess our community carries on its hips and thighs: in 2015 75% of Americans will be overweight or obese. The next generation now faces the real possibility that they will live a shorter life than that of their parents. Although the ready availability of food is a great achievement, the industry our society has built around food is harmful and unsustainable. It threatens our health today, and imperils the legacy of improving health we wish to pass on.

Recorded Tuesday, May 06, 2008 at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.