The mildest of winters here in the Northeast is drawing to a close. A winter that brought no measurable snow to the city, and except for some bitter cold days, was spring-like in temperature.

With spring just around the corner, our thoughts are returning to our ongoing discussion about community gardens. This topic resonated with our readers and in this issue you will discover three articles devoted to the subject of food.

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When I last wrote, School Food FOCUS – a collaborative that leverages knowledge and buying power of large school districts to make school food nationwide more healthful, regional, and sustainable – had worked closely with Saint Paul Public Schools and Denver Public Schools as part of our Learning Lab program to transform meals served in their cafeterias. These two districts have made major progress and continue to grow.

As we begin 2012, FOCUS has accomplished a lot in a year. We held our biggest-yet National Gathering in Denver, energizing our movement and forging new, important relationships; made real progress in deepening our work with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the national level; took the first steps toward a new regional, seven-state-wide model of our Learning Lab in the Upper Midwest; and grew to a whopping 33 member districts, representing nearly 4.3 million children across the country.

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When Jane and Larry Levine invited me to write an article for the KIDS Newletter I immediately thanked them for the opportunity to contribute but quickly found myself wondering what I could bring to a community of people whose knowledge of the challenges we face, in abolishing hunger and poverty, far exceed mine. As I thought about why hunger and poverty remain social problems, despite significant inroads made to their erasure, I began to wonder how I have contributed to their persistence. In what ways am I, are we, collectively caught in a refusal to acknowledge and act against root causes of hunger? What if the way in which we understand hunger is part of the problem? Why, despite adequate global food resources, do some people suffer from malnutrition, starvation and famine? Who are the “they” who hunger? What characterizes them in our imaginations? What is my, our, relationship to social structures that keep the end of poverty at bay? How might we act to dismantle these structures?

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