Teaching Leadership in the Real Food Movement

Yesterday while working with the young men in one of the facilities I travel to I posed a question to begin a conversation about leadership. What is leadership? I asked. Why be a leader? I got a lot of replies and the majority of the answers came back like: a leader is someone who doesn't follow; doesn't copy; does things their own way. Their was an obvious heavy emphasis on self-reliance. No one wanted to feel like they were dependent on others. Now, while I asked about followership, I didn't ask the obvious question: what is a leader with no followers? I believe if I had posed this question and then challenged the young men to name some leaders in their local food environment and then asked if we should be following them, then they would have had to make the decision to trust and follow someone who might not have their best interests at heart. The point I would hope to be getting across is that there exist influences (leaders) in our environments we might consider to be "emotional leaders" but they have ultimate control over resources and inevitably our health. There are leaders that reign only because of a lack of an alternative. How does this relate to the young men I see and talk with? Because as they return home they must think deeply about who or what they want to follow. And where and how far do they want to follow them. The first step though, for a group so sure of their leadership potential, to having high expectations for the leaders not so much in the foreground is to admit that we all follow sometimes. Admitting the limitations of our control in the real food environment of our lives is essential for our claiming responsibility and changing that which exists now and is unsatisfactory.

This conversation is so essential precisely because of our interest in being in control of our lives. The reality of the food environment is that we are constantly choosing from the options granted by the real leaders. In order to supply ourselves with better options we must demand better from the leaders we often do not see. So, the students just have to ask themselves if they consider themselves leaders of their food environment. If they do not, then they must be prepared to admit their lack of control. Something no teenager wants to do.