Real Moves Echo Real Food

Posted by Sara Malinowski in Campus

I leaned into the ground, popping up like a cork for each ending syllable of “Ketch-UP,” while Albuquerque poet laureate Hakim Bellamy, standing next to me, did a type of free-forward-hop to “Potato Pancake.” We had been asked to create a dance move for one of our favorite foods, and the sounds of the 40 people in the room echoed and reverberated in different frequencies, until the whole place shook with the song of us.

This was part of a surprising and educational evening: “Food Literacy, Art + Justice: A Creative Celebration of Real Food,” part of the 2014 Southwest Regional Real Food Summit, held on campus at the Forum March 1, and presented by Real Food Challenge. Approximately 40 students from 10 colleges and one high school joined together in the name of food awareness. Real Food Challenge is a national movement to increase access to healthy, local food, used multiple methods to get the message across. The event was sponsored by the university and SFUAD Student Voice.

Bellamy read his poem “Food Evolution” at the event, but “Food Evolution” was not the focus of the evening.This was unexpected; I had walked into the event expecting a poetry reading, perhaps shaped around food themes. Instead, Bellamy breezed through his poem with percussion, reading off an iPad and swaying his chest forward within the beat of his alliterative phrases. From Cherry Hill, NJ (very near my own home), and then branched off his own work to talk about his experience with food and his cynicism toward equating home cooking with community. Being from that area, I entirely understood. The industry for eating out and ordering in is bigger than ever in the New York/New Jersey area; the idea of a home-cooked meal creating friendships and relationships is foreign. Bellamy referred to this as a “business calorie transaction.” However, within the message of the Real Food Challenge, this communal eating ideal is crucial. Bellamy then had the room of 40+ students create their own six-letter poems. From this, an entire discussion sparked that moved far past the ability of any one-sided presentation. From this point on, the night was a lively interactive dance.

Some of the gems from six-word “memoirs” included: “Love, eat, smile, sleep, swell, shit,” “My history and my stomach are fighting,” “Change for those who have none,” and “Flaming Cheetos don’t grow on trees.” Later on, the entire group would circle, spreading across the entire forum in a misshapen circle. These six-word pieces then became the inspiration for six-person choreography. “My history and my stomach are fighting,” created a rhythm all its own as the group repeated it to beatbox bumps and had couples hopscotching through chewing, punching, and reaching their core.

The room was also asked to create movements representing corn, soybeans, and other genetically modified foods. The natural process of their creation was shown in the spins, arches, and stretches of our bodies; the mutated DNA was not welcome in our dances. We grew like seeds from the ground, one by one, speaking out loud “what we hope to bring into the world.” It clearly awakened the room to the life that can come out of true, locally-grown crops, and what positive energy can be left in our bodies when we eat right. By the end of the night, I thankfully felt I went against my own six-words: “We intake everywhere except our minds.”