Words We Heard: ‘Forty percent of the food in the US goes to our landfill’

Here’s our first-ever weekly roundup of “Words We Heard,” a quick Friday collection of food for thought.

  • “Media is the strongest and broadest public education tool that we have, and it really shapes how we see ourselves, how we understand others, how we understand our culture, and also, how we understand our potential in the world. This is why it’s so important for young people to be taught media literacy.” -Jamia Wilson, executive director of Women, Action, & the Media, in an interview with The United State of Women
     
  • David Simas, CEO of the Obama Foundation, shared three themes he’s noticed in the flood of feedback the foundation has gotten in recent weeks: The importance of information and education to healthy citizenship, hope and fear in the face of a complex world, and an understanding that citizenship is bigger than any one person.
     
  • “What are you reading? It’s my favorite question, to ask and to be asked. The question contributes to creating a reading culture because it assumes the person is reading in the first place. And if the person is not, if the answer is a noncommittal shrug, well, I typically take that as a challenge to find a book the person will love, taking the conversation through a game of ‘like-this-read-that.'” –Hillary Copsey in the second edition of her Make America Read Again newsletter
     
  • “Fact: Art is a $135 billion driver of our national, state, and local economy.” -Americans for the Arts’ Arts & Economic Prosperity IV report
     
  • “If a woman, or a minority, or really anyone, goes into a job early in their career with a low income, that low income is going to follow them place to place if they have to continue to disclose what they earned.” -Marianne Bellesorte, VP for advocacy with the anti-poverty group PathWays, as told to Marketplace‘s Bobby Allyn
     
  • “There’s roughly about 14,000 students within Cincinnati Public Schools, and more than 75 percent of them are Pell eligible, so it could have a real impact in terms of providing pathways forward for students to go into a college education.” -Robin Hoopes, Cincinnati State provost, on the university’s new Be Great High School Grant program, as told to WVXU’s Maryanne Zeleznik
     
  • “I’m not unisex. The alternative facility was a unisex bathroom. I’m not unisex. I’m a boy. And there’s no need for that kind of ostracization.” -Gavin Grimm, a transgender student at Gloucester High School, as told to NPR’s Robert Siegel
     
  • “Forty percent of the food in the United States that we grow today goes to our landfill, while we have 84.5 percent of our [Cincinnati Public School] kids on free and reduced lunch.” -Suzy DeYoung, executive chef and owner of La Soupe, at the SECincy 2016 Summit last October
Kiersten Wones