Learning to Collaborate

This afternoon I met Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore's Dilemma. His writing about local food systems has already inspired me. The movement toward buying locally grown food ties in well with my own advocacy for open air markets, including farmer's markets and street vendors. I went to an event sponsored by Dosa, Inc. in Los Angeles where I heard Pollan was going to speak, expecting to hear more about local food. I learned so much more than that.

Pollan didn't speak about food per se, but rather about collaboration. He engaged in a converstation with his wife, Judith Belzor, an artist, and Christina Kim, a fashion designer. The theme of the talk was collaboration. Pollan and Belzor shared space while each worked on their own project, and Pollan, an editor by training, would "edit" the artwork being created by Belzor, suggesting an addition here and a deletion there. Kim and Belzor collabored on an art installation, with Kim supplying the space-- an open and airy top floor of an old Broadway office building-- and Belzor supplying the art that fit so well with the space.

"There is a myth that the artist creates in solitude," said Pollan. Artists are part of an artistic tradition and context, and so collaboration is an essential part of the creative process.

The same can be said about academic and policy writing. It can appear to be a solitary pursuit-- reading, thinking, and writing alone at a computer. But the act of reading before writing demonstrates a collaboration, if not a live collaboration, certainly a collaboration through the medium of the written word. We need not stop there, though. Even academic and policy writers can engage in live collaboration.

Yesterday I spoke about Regulating for Healthy Food Vending at the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, hosted by Mark Vallianatos. Vallianatos and I were the only law- trained people in the room. The rest were architects, planners, and nutritionists. I spoke, but I also listened, as we had a rich, round table discussion about the opportunities and challenges relating to using street vending as a way to bring nutritious food to food deserts. It was, in other words, a collaboration across disciplinary lines.

I had thought that the nutrition program, WIC, was only mildly nutritious, relying too much on dairy products and not enough on fruits and vegetables. One of the discussion participants shared with us that change is in the offing, and that come later this year WIC will become much more focused on fresh fruits and vegetables.

Getting a license from a health department to sell food on the street often requires the vendor to have access to a commercial kitchen-- a significant barrier to legal food vending in the inner city. I had thought that public schools would be a good place to experiment with preparing nutritious food in commercial kitchens to be sold by street vendors in the immediate area. There may be an opportunity to do this, but not at every school. A participant informed me that many schools in the LA Unified School District do not have a commercial kitchen.

This is just a sample of what I learned by reaching outside my discipline to talk to others about street vending. The bigger lesson is not lost on me. Collaborating across disciplinary lines can speed progress toward developing useful ideas. Here's to learning to collaborate!