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07/01/05
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
It's one thing to offer salads in school cafeterias. It's another thing to get kids to get it.
Tracie Thomas>> You know, when I go on a campus, be it secondary or a high school, and I see a kid eating a bag of chips and a soda, it breaks my heart because these kids are not going to be able to perform academically.
Val>> And then, they built a national reputation on taking theater to places where it's never gone before. We profile Los Angeles's Cornerstone Theater.
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val>> Getting kids to eat healthy food these days is a major challenge and many times the food they serve at school cafeterias isn't much help. But now the Compton Unified School District has a solution. As Toni Guinyard tells us, they've found a way to make -- would you believe it -- the salad bar a popular spot.
Toni Guinyard>> Jim Churchill knows produce. He's a farmer in Ojai. His crops include twelve acres of tangerines. The Pixie Tangerine is helping him forge a somewhat unlikely relationship with a new crop of customers, children miles away in Compton.
Jim Churchill>> When you say we'd like to bring locally grown fresh produce into the school lunch program, most people say, well, yeah. You know, I mean, it's like a "duh" kind of an idea. It's difficult to implement because the institutions are not set up for it on both sides.
Toni Guinyard>> Despite the obstacles, and there are many, a group of Ventura County farmers has succeeded in getting their produce delivered to some Los Angeles area schools.
Martin Anenberg>> "One carrot, one cucumber, one romaine, two tangerines."
Toni Guinyard>> It's part of what's called the farm-to-school program and it's aimed at changing the eating habits of students by getting locally grown fruits and vegetables from farms to campuses and into school lunch meals. Thirty school districts statewide have established a farm-to-school plan, including the Compton Unified School District.
Tracie Thomas>> It's harvested on Mondays, it's delivered to our kitchens on Tuesdays and our kids are eating it on Tuesdays. You can't get any fresher than that and there's nothing like it.
Martin Anenberg>> What we hope they're going to get, one, is obviously better eating habits and not reach for nachos, not reach for the Doritos and instead reach for a piece of fruit, a Pixie Tangerine, something like this. I mean, this is amazing. Pixie Tangerines. The kid that's small, they can open it, they can eat it.
Toni Guinyard>> It's fruit from Jim Churchill's orchard delivered to Rosecrans Elementary in Compton by self-described social entrepreneurs, Martin Anenberg and Jeremy Moy. They connect schools with Ventura County family farmers by purchasing the produce and making daily deliveries to schools within a one hundred fifty mile radius.
Jeremy Moy>> The more that we expand our business, the better it is for the community and really we wouldn't be in this business if there wasn't such a huge need for, again, fresh produce that is sustainably grown, organically grown.
>> "In the center aisle, come on."
Toni Guinyard>> Five days a week, the fresh produce appears on salad bars at the elementary schools. The students have a choice, salad bar or hot lunch. On this day within minutes of the start of the lunch period, the line for the salad bar snakes out the door.
Lauren Bates>> I have some cheese and cucumbers and oranges and some grapes and some milk and cookies.
Toni Guinyard>> What's the best part of it?
Lauren Bates>> The salad.
Toni Guinyard>> Why?
Lauren Bates>> Because it's good.
Tracie Thomas>> We don't force-feed them. We have a fabulous hot lunch program. We have a fabulous salad bar program. But when students come in and they choose the salad bar over the traditional hot lunch as an everyday option for them, that's indicating change.
Toni Guinyard>> Tracie Thomas is the Assistant Director of Student Nutrition Services for the Compton Unified School District. She used to hold a similar position for Santa Monica-Malibu schools where she was instrumental in helping build a relationship between the schools and the local farmers' market. Santa Monica's salad bar program made headlines when it was introduced years ago, but this is different territory. There are no farmers' markets in this community and nearly all students enrolled in Compton's schools qualify for the free school meal plan.
Tracie Thomas>> It's the low-income communities. There are some kids who don't know what they're going to have for dinner on some nights.
Toni Guinyard>> If anything?
Tracie Thomas>> If anything at all.
Anupama Joshi>> Tracie's done a remarkable job at, you know, with the salad bar programs at the different elementary schools.
Toni Guinyard>> Anupama Joshi is the national farm-to-school program manager with the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College.
Anupama Joshi>> We've done some evaluation studies and we're going to be doing evaluation studies at Compton as well that show us that kids are eating more fruits and vegetables as part of the program. Kids are also getting a better understanding of why is it important to eat what they're eating from the salad bar.
Toni Guinyard>> Joshi and her colleagues are supporting Assembly Bill 826, legislation that will create the California Farm-to-School Child Nutrition Improvement Program. It would, in part, establish workshops and provide grants to expand farm-to-school programs statewide, putting fresh locally grown produce on the plates of more children.
Tremont Caldwell>> Carrots, grapes, cheese, oranges and meat and lettuce.
Anupama Joshi>> You know, there are two ways of solving the school food issue. One is to take out stuff that is bad or that is supposed to be bad like sodas and junk food. And the other is to give them healthy options. I mean, if you were to take out the junk food, you really need to provide them some other, you know, healthy options as well.
Toni Guinyard>> She says the farm-to-school program provides that healthy option, but it also provides local family farmers support.
Tracie Thomas>> If we take away all the agriculture in our communities, kids think apples just show up in a grocery store. They don't know that they have to actually be planted, seeded and harvested, so it's a whole education process for our students.
[Film Clip]
Tracie Thomas>> We do workshops for our teachers here in Compton on Saturdays and those workshops are geared to educate the teachers on how to incorporate nutrition education into their already mandated curriculum. They have to teach math. Can you teach math with apples? Yes, you can. How can you teach math with apples? You can do fractions.
Toni Guinyard>> Thomas is the first to admit that getting others to embrace the program takes work.
Tracie Thomas>> Is it easy, they ask me? Absolutely it is not. Well, why do we need to do it? Shame on you if you don't because it's exposing kids to a nutritional aspect that they otherwise would not be able to have been exposed to.
Yvonne Nolan>> My honest reaction was, oh, no, not another thing that they'd be throwing or dropping on our laps. But once we got involved and we got proper training, we got more educated on how important it is for kids, you know, because they're overweight with this obesity issue.
Toni Guinyard>> In the first few months that the salad bars were introduced in Compton Unified School District schools, eighty percent of the students decided the salads were what they wanted to eat. The novelty has worn off a bit, but the lessons about health have not been lost.
Umar Baba>> Nowadays, kids are eating "junk food", so part of our school program is to make sure that we bring them into the school and eat healthy food.
Toni Guinyard>> But it's clearly an uphill battle. We spotted one student getting lunch at the salad bar while clutching a bag of chips and a drink brought from home.
Tracie Thomas>> You know, when I go on a campus, be it secondary or a high school, and I see a kid eating a bag of chips and a soda, it breaks my heart because these kids are not going to be able to perform academically.
Toni Guinyard>> And it's not enough to just make sure students aren't hungry when they're in class. Rosecrans administrators want them to eat well.
Lauren Bates>> I will tell my mommy to make some salad so I could eat it and be healthier.
Toni Guinyard>> It's a lesson even a first grader understands. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.
Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".
Val>> From the Mayan civilization to the Roman Empire, why can't great societies stay on top? Why do some flourish and others decline? That's the question that inspired an exhibit at the Natural History Museum called "Collapse?"
The exhibit looks at cultures like the classic Mayans who declined apparently because of climate change and environmental damage. Sound familiar? Another room takes you to the Australian Outback where the introduction of rabbits is wreaking havoc on native kangaroos. Then we're challenged by images of Southern California's possible future.
The exhibit is inspired by the book by geographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Jared Diamond. He says societies fall because of several key mistakes like damaging their environment, fighting with neighbors or failing to fix serious problems. Diamond talked with Patt Morrison about some cultures that didn't make it.
Patt Morrison>> What strikes me in some of your descriptions of these cultures that have collapsed is that some of them didn't know what they were doing wrong, but some of them did and went ahead with the course that they were pursuing that was so damaging in the first place.
Jared Diamond>> That's the most puzzling thing in the theory. Yes, here were societies that didn't know what they were getting into. There were societies that did know and solved them, like Iceland, the most eroded country in Europe. It nevertheless has made major efforts to solve its problems. Then there were the societies that knew what they were getting into and didn't try to solve their problems.
For example, the Easter Islanders, the island with the great stone statues in the Pacific Ocean. The Easter Islanders ended up chopping down every single tree on the island and yet they depended on trees not just to have sleds and ropes to drag and erect the statues, but they also depended upon trees to make canoes to go fishing. So after they chopped down every tree, no more canoes, no more fishing, no tuna or dolphins. There's only one big animal left on the island: human. Thanks to the deforestation, the Easter Island society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. One has to wonder: what did the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree on the island say as he was chopping down the last tree?
Patt Morrison>> Well, you're not a psychologist, but you've studied the human condition enough to know how capable we are of deluding ourselves. And the example you give most vividly is that of Hispaniola, the island that contains both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Flying over it, half of it is green and half of it is brown, and this goes to a willingness to say no to some of the things that would despoil a landscape even in the face of political opposition.
Jared Diamond>> It has a long history, but it's very striking. As you say, this island is divided by a line into two halves like West and East Germany used to be. The western half is the country called Haiti. The eastern half is the country called the Dominican Republic -- where Pedro Martinez comes from -- and as you fly across the line, to the west, it's brown, and right up to the line to the east, it's green. You could stand on the line. You face in this direction and you see bare ground. You turn around and you see pine forests. It's a result of slight differences in the environment, differences in the dictators and in history, and now --
Patt Morrison>> -- dictators, some of whom said don't cut it down, don't go dig there.
Jared Diamond>> Yeah, one of whom, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. He was evil. There are people who consider him worse than Hitler. He had fewer people to mess up, but he was really evil. Nevertheless, he wanted to make money for himself and so he said don't cut down the forests. They're reserved for me and we're going to manage them well so that I get a lot of money out of them. Once Trujillo was assassinated and the Dominican Republic became a democracy with various ups and downs, the democracy has maintained here for the forests so that today the Dominican Republic is the new world with the most extensive national parks system covering, I think, one-third of its territory.
Patt Morrison>> And Haiti scalped itself bare of the resources it had.
Jared Diamond>> It's ninety-nine percent deforested. The result is that, when the hurricane hit this island a couple of years ago, on the Haitian side without forests, there were massive storms. The rains produced massive landslides and about three thousand Haitians got killed underneath the mud. On the Dominican side with forests on hillsides to hold back the mud, there were not landslides and there were not lots of deaths.
Patt Morrison>> It could hardly be put any more clearly, can it?
Jared Diamond>> It's like a controlled chemistry experiment where the kids are given two test tubes and in one they add a red dye and the other a green dye, but they're otherwise identical. That's this island.
Patt Morrison>> Where do you see Los Angeles as an exemplar of these concerns and these possibilities?
Jared Diamond>> Los Angeles exemplifies the problems that other societies have had. Perhaps the most powerful part of the exhibit is the final section which is on how environmental and population problems play out in Southern California. They're the problems that everybody talks about every day. They're the problems that a survey showed something like one-third of Los Angelenos are considering leaving in the next five years.
Patt Morrison>> How do we recognize the tipping point? How do we see it coming or can we only see it in the rear view mirror?
Jared Diamond>> We don't need a tipping point. We already have more than enough information to tell us that the problems going on now will do us in if we don't solve them. It's not that they're going to do us in necessarily with a quick tipping point. They're just going to get worse and worse. In Los Angeles, the traffic will get worse and worse. For the world as a whole, global warming is increasing and, if we don't do something about it, it will continue to increase. Over-fishing of the oceans is increasing.
I view the whole thing as a horse race where there are two horses, the horse of destruction and the horse of sanity. The two horses are running neck and neck, but they're running faster and faster and faster. They're not just running steadily fast, but the rate of speed is accelerating so it's like two nuclear reactions. One a nuclear reaction of explosion, the other the nuclear reaction of protection to cap the explosion, faster and faster, but you don't know which of the two horses is going to win the race.
Patt Morrison>> Jared Diamond, chronicler of our many cultures, I always feel concerned but slightly optimistic when I come away from talking with you. Do you feel the same about all of us here on this little blue sphere?
Jared Diamond>> I feel cautiously optimistic. That is to say, yes, we've got problems, but we're the ones who are making the problems, so they're solvable, which gives ground for cautious optimism. If I did not feel optimistic, first of all, after shaking hands with you, I would go commit suicide (laughter). Secondly, my wife and I would not have had children eighteen years ago.
Patt Morrison>> Jared Diamond, author of "Collapse", your newest book. Thank you so much for joining us on Life and Times.
Jared Diamond>> You are welcome.
Val>> You can go to the website for the Natural History Museum or give them a call for details. "Collapse?" will be on display through January 15, 2006.
To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:
Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027
You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.
Val>> For those of us able to afford theater tickets, it's hard to imagine that, for thousands of Southern Californians, theater is beyond their reach. Well, that's where the Cornerstone Theater comes in. It brings theater to the people and, for many of them, their first step is on stage. Vicki Curry has their story.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> A group of people are gathered in downtown Los Angeles. They come from different neighborhoods and range in age and ethnicity, but they have one thing in common. They're all here to put on a play.
Bill Rauch>> "So tonight is our first time to begin to work toward how the play is going to end."
Vicki Curry>> This is the Cornerstone Theater Company doing the same thing it's done for two decades, taking live theater to different communities and casting local residents to work with the company.
Bill Rauch>> We make plays that involve usually first-time artists alongside professional members of our ensemble and the plays are always set in or somehow about the community that we're collaborating with and that we're performing for.
Vicki Curry>> Bill Rauch is the Artistic Director of Cornerstone. Since 1986, the company has staged over fifty plays across the country.
Bill Rauch>> We wanted to do something that was not about doing work in kind of the cultural palaces, if you will, of theater around the country, but to deliberately go into, you know, the church basements or the social hall or, you know, the community space, and create the highest level, most innovative professional theater we could in very unusual community settings.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone has built a national reputation for reaching nontraditional theater audiences. It's a far cry from how it first began. It all started when Rauch, his co-founder, Alison Carey and a group of college friends from Harvard, talked about working in theater after graduation.
Bill Rauch>> We had read a very damning statistic that only two percent of the American population went to professional theater on any kind of a regular basis, so we were freaked out that we would, even if we were lucky enough to be successful, end up performing for a very, very tiny minority of the American people.
Vicki Curry>> They wanted to perform for people who normally didn't go to theater and decided to involve them to make their productions more exciting. They begged family and friends for donations and hit the road.
Bill Rauch>> We got in the van and we drove around the country and went to various small towns around the country, rural communities, and put on plays with people who lived there. We just picked regions of the country that we were interested in. Sometimes just places that we knew very little about.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> They went to North Dakota to Texas, Oregon to Maine, and plenty of other places in between.
Bill Rauch>> We would just move into a town and go out and meet people and it was about -- and still is -- about building relationships with one person at a time and sometimes it takes incredible perseverance. Sometimes people just pour out of the woodwork.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone originally intended to stage classic plays, but in working with the communities, they soon realized their audiences might not relate to the classics.
Bill Rauch>> It was not until we were doing "Hamlet" in North Dakota that it suddenly dawned on us that we could make the theatrical experience even more immediate by adapting the text.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> The company spent four years on the road staging plays in twelve towns. It then created what would become a trademark of Cornerstone: the Bridge Show.
Bill Rauch>> We brought people together from all twelve of those communities and we created a new show that went on a national tour back to everybody's hometown.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> In 1992 after five years of traveling, Cornerstone Theater Company was ready to settle down. The members felt they would have more impact if they moved to a big city.
Bill Rauch>> Because we could work with communities that were incredibly different in terms of culture, language, socio-economics, any number of factors, but were geographically very close to each other and we could work with these different communities and then encourage them to come together.
Vicki Curry>> But the company members couldn't decide which city. Alison Carey pushed for Los Angeles.
Bill Rauch>> She wanted Los Angeles because of how much Los Angeles was the United States of the twenty-first century. The complexity of the landscape of Los Angeles, all of that was daunting and really enticing at the same time.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone's first local production was with the Angeles Plaza Senior Housing Project.
Bill Rauch>> Our auditions were on the Monday after the Friday of the Los Angeles uprising, and it was a very grim confirmation that we'd come to the right city just in terms of anything that we might offer as artists in terms of building bridges between and within communities. It felt like, okay, we're where we need to be.
Vicki Curry>> After two more projects with other communities, Cornerstone put on its first Los Angeles Bridge show.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> Several other projects and Bridge shows followed. The Central Avenue Chalk Circle with residents of Watts.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> Broken Hearts with different B.H. neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Beverly Hills.
[Film Clip]
Vicki Curry>> A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters with representatives from ten communities of faith.
[Film Clip]
Bill Rauch>> And now we don't even conceive of doing a community collaboration without thinking about how is it leading to a Bridge show? How is it part of a cycle? And we try to think about the work very holistically that way. We've even done a Bridge show that bridges previous Bridge shows.
Vicki Curry>> As Cornerstone's reputation has grown, so have the opportunities. Large established theaters began asking the company to stage productions, but the members hesitated. They wondered if they'd be selling out, compromising their mission of community-based theater. They decided it wasn't a problem.
[Film Clip]
Bill Rauch>> It was very exciting actually because the community collaborators in the piece and community-based audience members who had never set foot in that theater felt ownership of that theater because it was their story happening on that stage.
Vicki Curry>> Cornerstone's status has also led the company into education. It now teaches other theater professionals how to stage community plays.
Bill Rauch>> We're influencing the field not only with our immediate circle and not only with people who happen to live in a community, but with theatre professionals from all over the country who want to learn how we do what we do, to take it back into their own communities.
Vicki Curry>> It's been twenty years since a bunch of kids created Cornerstone Theater Company. They never dreamt they would come this far.
Bill Rauch>> We were blessed with an idea that really inspired people from the very beginning, so I think we are around and we're as strong as we are twenty years later because of the mission and we're all here to serve this mission of bringing people together through theater. People who would otherwise never meet suddenly are creating something together and it does change peoples' lives.
[Film Clip]
Val>> The big Bridge show will be happening at the Ford Amphitheater for two weekends in June. For more information, you can go to their website at cornerstonetheater.org. Our thanks to the folks of the Natural History Museum for the use of their venue. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Toni Guinyard>> Next time on Life and Times --
With the steady climb in home prices, the question isn't how much can you pay, but how much will you give up?
>> We've been saving for a few years and we thought we were at a point where we could find a house that we liked and the neighborhood we liked and the price range we had in mind. There's no way we can put all three together.
Toni Guinyard>> That's next time on Life and Times.
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