Lunch Love Community is an episodic “open space documentary.” It has evolved through a transmedia approach – from a social media interactive “watch and share” project into a completed and cohesive suite of short episodic films that interconnect and build upon one another. Central to Lunch Love Community is the democratic process at work, and what happens when ordinary citizens share a simple dream, and work together to change minds. One neighbor, one politician, one piece of legislation at a time.
I uncovered this process here in my community when I found a document called the “Berkeley Food Policy,” that had been adopted by the city’s Board of Education in 1999. It laid out all the major goals and strategies that would become the historic and pioneering Berkeley School Lunch Initiative. And it only took another ten years of citizen activism to make it real, and connect the issues of childhood nutrition and health with educational success.
How are citizens transforming local food systems? How are innovators changing the way children eat in schools? How do we talk about culture, identity and responsibility through the lens of food and health?
Lunch Love Community explores these questions through a mosaic of these twelve beautiful and engaging short documentary films, ranging from 3 minutes to 12 minutes in length. Each uniquely crafted episode is interconnected, and looks at how a diverse and visionary group of pioneering parents, educators, food professionals and health advocates came together to tackle food system reform and food justice in their Berkeley, California schools and neighborhoods.
Lunch Love Community explores this rich and multi-dimensional story of passion, creative energy and idealism: how we teach our children to eat and understand food in its environmental context is the embodiment of how we transmit values to the next generation.
