Breaking the Bread Divide: A Live GuildCast on Food Justice

The sustainable food movement has rejuvenated holistic thinking on agriculture, food production, and consumption. But lost in the movement is how to bring wholesome, quality food to all and not to just those that can afford it. In a live version of GuildCast, a monthly podcast by Guild Literary Complex, journalist Debbie Carlson talks to artists, journalists, and activists about food justice and how to address the divide.

About the Participants

Robert Nevel is an architect, urban farmer, and pioneer in the food justice movement. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Advocates for Urban Agriculture, a Director of the Resource Center, former chair of the KAM Isaiah Israel Social Justice Committee and since 2013 President of the Congregation.

In 2009 Nevel founded the award winning, nationally recognized KAMII Food

Justice and Sustainability Program. The Program is focused on transforming unproductive urban lawns into food producing micro-farms, growing and donating significant quantities of produce, teaching urban agriculture and sustainability skills and advocating for healthy, local food systems and responsible energy, land and water use.

Dave Snyder is a writer and grower. His work in urban agriculture includes the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, which aims to establish community rare-fruit orchards in Chicago; Ginkgo Organic Gardens, an all-volunteer food pantry garden; and previously at the rooftop farm at Uncommon Ground. This work has been recognized by the Mayor’s Landscape Awards and Chicago Cares and has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, GRIST, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Magazine, and others.

Dave speaks often on topics of urban agriculture, sustainable food production and crop diversity.

Angela Taylor, along with her husband Sam, used gardening to transform their Fulton Street block into a safe space where vacant lots are used to grow food. They’ve spread their vision of a greener, cleaner community throughout the Garfield Park neighborhood, mentoring teens who are learning how to garden and landscape and starting a farmer’s market where all the food sold is grown in the Garfield Park community.

This event is part of the University of Chicago’s Studs Terkel Festival Let’s Get Working and is co-sponsored by Graze magazine.

We will be serving food—soup and bread provided by the Jane Addams Hull-House.  

Don’t forget to enjoy our archive of podcasts including conversations with Yoko Noge, Mark Turcotte, Duriel E. Harris, and more on our SoundCloud page.

About Our Partners

“It is a part of the new philanthropy to recognize that the social question is largely a question of the stomach.”
—Jane Addams

Social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams (1860–1935) believed that nutrition and food security would lead to more peaceful communities. Under her direction, the Hull-House Settlement, a social center for new immigrants to Chicago, piloted creative solutions to hunger including a public kitchen and coffee house, pasteurized milk stations, cooking classes, and community gardens.

Inspired by this legacy, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum hosts Re-Thinking Soup, a community conversation series on issues of food and justice. Audiences gather each month over a free, hot meal of soup and bread to hear from activists, farmers, economists, artists, and guest chefs. Topics have included urban agriculture, hunger, food in schools and prisons, immigrant labor, cultural traditions, and food policy. We meet in the historic Residents’ Dining Hall, where Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and other important social reformers met to share meals and ideas.

For six years, Re-Thinking Soup has provided nourishing experiences that bring disparate areas of the food movement into conversation and collective action. This ongoing dialogue is an opportunity to probe some of the most pressing issues of our existence and re-imagine the food system to create a more fair, delicious, and healthy world for all of us.

Graze magazine is a semi-annual literary magazine that focuses on what’s on the table as much as the folks sitting around it. “We’re interested in the stories that food tells about us–after all, our collective and individual human histories were nourished by the food that we made, smelled, ate, threw up, fucked up, and loved.”

About the Studs Terkel Let’s Get Working Festival

Taking place May 9–12, Let’s Get Working is a three-day festival celebrating the legacy of Studs Terkel, revisiting his work and tracing his influence through oral histories, film screenings, performances, art installations, storytelling, and community dialogues.