School Lunch debate picking up speed

The debate around school lunch and child nutrition is gathering major momentum.  The 2 big reasons why:

   
• On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack will speak at a National Press Club luncheon, where he will highlight the Obama Administration’s priorities for reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act and call on Congress to act swiftly to pass a strong reauthorization bill to improve the health and nutrition of America’s children.
   
• On Tuesday, Michelle Obama will be announcing her big new initiative around preventing child obesity. She’s been doing a big ol’ ramp-up this week including an appearance on the Today Show, and a meeting with some key cabinet members and senators, covered extensively on Obamafoodorama.  Also, click here to read Jane Black’s interview with Senator Harkin, in which they discuss Michelle Obama and nutrition (Harkin: “I sensed among all the people there a real desire to make significant changes and put some emphasis on this”).
What a good time to get involved in the Time for Lunch campaign! You, too, can be part of all the hubbub. Sign our petition; write a letter to your legislator; heck! have a party for lots of people to write to their legislators!  Click here to get the lay of the land.

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Food safety updates and action items

Poop and salad: two great tastes that go great together? Bleccccch.  Consumer Reports tested bagged leafy greens and found “bacteria that are common indicators of poor sanitation and fecal contamination—in some cases, at rather high levels.”

Scale-appropriate legislation:  With all of these discoveries of food contamination, there is a need for some regulation—but as the food movement has been squawking about for several months now, it is IMPERATIVE that small and mid sized operations are not thrown in together with the big guys.  A new Act on the table might help. As the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition explains: “Fortunately, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) has introduced the Growing Safe Food Act (S. 2758) to create a national food safety training and technical assistance program.  It would deliver training and technical assistance appropriate to small and mid scale farms to reduce the incidence of food borne illness.”  Click here to find out how you can express your support, by urging your Senator to co-sponsor the Growing Safe Food Act (S 2758).

How about a crowd-sourced sustainable cookbook?

We’ve been talking a bunch recently on here about the future of food writing—how is being affected by new media?  How come awesome food bloggers end up getting book deals, bringing it all back to the old fashioned paper format?  (i.e. will the future be jet packs and silver jumpsuits? or something more interesting we haven’t thought of yet?)

That’s why I am interested in this new crowd-sourced digital cookbook—Mastering the Art of Sustainable Cooking—produced by Brighter Planet and their online community. It’s got energy conservation tips, stories, and recipes from different submitters from around the country. I like the hodgepodge mix—how to save energy while BBQing (tin foil, baby); how the freezer can be your friend; stuff like that. I also like how it was made—reminds me of the old church cookbooks, spiral bound and community derived. It’s real short—not so very much there there, but it’s a cool beginning. Click here to check it out.

Brighter Planet is a web-based community that is all about getting people engaged in the fight against climate change. On the site, people can measure their climate impact—various actions are connected to carbon footprint numbers, and by tracking your actions you can watch your footprint change over time as you learn to live more carbon free. Also, it seems to be all about community—online community, that is.  So they’ve got a bunch of online campaigns, including the contest they hosted to create this cookbook (with an introduction by Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Yogurt).

One teacher’s brave look at school lunch

by intern Jackie Fortin [a closer look at the story we touched on in last week’s “Latest School Lunch News.”]

“Let’s think about what we give students to ingest,” says Mrs. Q, an anonymous Illinois elementary school teacher who is choosing to eat school lunch every day in 2010 and review the results in her blog, Fed Up: School Lunch Project.

Not one to “make waves” in her professional life, Mrs. Q considers herself a “whistleblower” for school lunch.

“I think every child no matter how much money their family has deserves to eat quality food at school,” she said. “Most teachers do feel the same way that I do … We’ve all discussed the lunches and how bad they are in passing. Then we go back to teaching. No one has done much.”

Mrs. Q’s project, which began Jan. 3, consists of buying a $3.00 school lunch Monday through Friday, bringing it back to her room for a ‘working’ meal, and taking pictures of each tray’s plastic-wrapped contents with her phone camera.

Despite her concealed identity, she admits to feeling “majorly exposed” and nervous about the traffic her blog is getting three weeks deep. “I could absolutely lose my job over this,” she wrote.

But the overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging comments are piling up. She has been interviewed by Small Bites blogger Andy Bellatti as well as by Robin Shreeves of Mother Nature Network, nutritionist Marion Nestle, Serious Eats, Chow.com, Food Safety News, Diets in Review.com, Treehugger, Grist  and several bloggers have all cited Fed Up in online posts.

According to Bellatti, the project, likened to “a more realistic Super Size Me…perfectly captures the problems of school lunch — poor nutrition, odd flavors and textures, environmental unfriendliness (plastic, plastic, and more plastic!), and the effects of cheap crop subsidies on individual health.”

More after the jump

Dinner from the Dumpster

by Emily Vaughn

No matter how sustainably produced your food purchases are, food that goes uneaten is a waste of resources and a major pollutant.  Food scraps make up nearly 13 percent of municipal waste in the US. That percentage includes discarded trimmings like carrot peels and apple cores, but the bulk consists of surplus or aesthetically imperfect items from food service providers. Organic material like food waste produces methane as it decomposes in landfills: a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.  What’s a conscientious consumer to do? 

One solution is to reclaim discarded food from the dumpster.  The new documentary,

Dive!: Living off America’s Waste by newcomer director Jeremy Seifert follows a lighthearted a group of bearded, freegan friends as they rifle through the trash bins of LA’s big-box grocery stores, and rattle off the code of containering (eg. “Never take more than you need”). One dive’s haul includes plastic cartons of blueberries, presumably thrown out because a handful of berries were bruised or moldy.  The next morning the director’s towheaded toddler grins with a mouthful of blueberry pancakes as he explains the meal’s origin to the camera. 

But after a few dives that reveal the extent of the food available for scavenging, the film matures from a youthful how-to into a serious examination of the industrial and corporate practices that make dumpster diving possible.  In a pivotal scene with cleverly balanced gravity and cheek, Seifert does some quick math—written out on a driveway in freecylced Reddi-wip—to show that reclaiming just one percent of the food thrown out in LA County would more than triple the food deficit of its food banks.

The focus then shifts to getting grocery stores to step-up their donation programs, and inspiring citizens to make it happen.  The film closes with a quote from Noam Chomsky, “Change and progress very rarely are gifts from above—they come out of struggles from below.Ԡ And it looks like the dumpster is the new battleground.

Dive! is screening at several west coast film festivals in coming months. You can also set up a screening in your area or purchase a copy online for $10.

Flagstaff Youth Garden

by Alaine Janosy

Youth gardens have become an integral part of spreading Slow Food USA’s message of good, clean, and fair food to young people throughout the country. Conserving and promoting a biologically diverse food system is a critical element of this message so those managing such gardens are encouraged to plant crops found on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste. This year, Slow Food Northern Arizona co-leader, Gay Chanler, was instrumental in ensuring US Ark of Taste foods were part of the Flagstaff Youth Garden at the Museum of Northern Arizona.

The garden has been experimenting with the three sister crops of the Southwest—corn, beans, and squash—since it began in 2002. This past summer, Anna Normandin, garden coordinator and undergraduate student at Northern Arizona University, wanted to expand the diversity of the garden by growing out eight varieties from the USA Ark of Taste. Her goal was not only to increase the number of heirloom varieties in the garden, but also to find out how these varieties would grow in an arid environment 7,000 feet above sea level.

Anna and Gay worked together during the seed selection process, using information from the Native Seeds/SEARCH catalog to select varieties most likely to flourish in the Flagstaff climate. Native Seeds/SEARCH donated the seeds selected for the garden, including L’Itoi Onions, Palomas de Chihuahua Popcorn, Nambe Supreme Chili and Valarde Chili, Amaranth Paiute, New Mexico Tomatillo, Colorado Bolita Beans, Hopi Red Lima Beans, and Hopi Yellow Pole Beans.

More after the jump

How locally owned food enterprises drive local economic development

Do you appreciate the value of local food? Have curiosity about the role that local food business can play in economic development, community development and food access?

And one more question: Will you be in DC this Thursday?  If so, you can attend these panels live, and hear Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan weigh in on the benefits of locally owned food businesses.  If not, you can listen to them on your computer and join in from anywhere at all.

The Wallace Center at Winrock International and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) present a pair of panels on their newly released report Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace (CFE). They have profiled 24 locally owned food businesses in the U.S. (and internationally), including The White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia, Lorentz Meats in Cannon Falls Minnesota, and The Intervale Center in Burlington Vermont.  These studies examine the financial, social, and environmental performance of each enterprise, revealing milestones, challenges, and strategies for replicating successes, and demonstrating how locally owned food enterprises are an increasingly powerful driver for local economic development.

Check ‘em out!

To register to attend the DC event, click here.
To register for the online broadcast, click here.

Latest School Lunch News

The temperature is rising on the conversation about school lunch reform!

 
• Slow Food chapter leader and Better School Food advocate Susan Rubin writes about one teacher’s 2010 project: eating school lunch every day for a year.
 
• Secretary of Ag Vilsack calls for more resources for better school lunch: click here to listen to what he has to say.
 
• Jamie Oliver’s much anticipated US show has announced it’s March 26th debut. Click here to watch the trailer.
 
• Bay Area school lunch superstar Revolution Foods gets NY Times coverage this weekend for their above-standard school lunches and their advocacy to see reimbursement rates increased when the Child Nutrition Act gets reauthorized.
 
• Our Time for Lunch campaign is going strong—over 2,000 kids have written letters to their congress people—click here to get in on the action!

Why Big Ag won’t feed the world

by Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel
This post originally appeared on the Atlantic Food Channel

A year ago I sat in a room at the Earth Institute at Columbia surrounded by executives from big food companies. One of them, I believe from Unilever, clicked to a slide that read “The solution to global hunger is to turn malnutrition into a market opportunity.” The audience—global development practitioners and academics and other executives—nodded and dutifully wrote it down in their notebooks; I shuddered. The experience stayed with me and I haven’t gotten over it. Last month, I had a flashback.

On a Tuesday evening I sat in a room on the 44th floor of a building in the financial district of lower Manhattan with representatives from General Mills, Monsanto, Dean Foods, Deutsche Bank, and the Rainforest Alliance. We were there to speak to institutional investors—the hedge fund managers, bankers, and others who invest in big food companies—about sustainability and food. In particular, we were there to talk about how sustainability and hunger issues may give these companies both exposure to risk and access to opportunity.

It was not your average sustainable food panel discussion. Reflecting back on it, three things jump out at me. The first was a false premise that is taken for fact. The false premise:

Both Deutsche Bank and Monsanto made it clear that they are basing their business strategy on answering a simple question: How will we feed the world in 2050, when the population reaches over 9 billion and global warming puts massive strains on our resources? The answer for Deutsche Bank: increase yields by investing in industrial agriculture in the developing world, with an emphasis on technology; put lots of capital into rural land to shift subsistence and local market agricultures to commodity export agriculture. The answer for Monsanto: increase yields by decreasing resource dependence using genetically modified crops.

At first glance, these answers make both Monsanto and Deutsche Bank look virtuous. But they rest on a false premise: “There will be over 9 billion people by 2050. We have less than 7 billion today, and people go hungry. We need to increase food production if we are going to feed them.” Indeed, there will be over 9 billion people by 2050, and indeed, with less than 7 billion today, people still go hungry. But we don’t need to increase crop yields to feed these people. In 2008, globally, we grew enough food to feed over 11 billion people. We grew 4,000 calories per day per person—roughly twice what people need to eat.

More after the jump

Best Food Writing of 2009

by Julia Middleton

My mother and I have been arguing for years about how to make the perfect soft boiled egg so when she scanned the table of contents in the “Best Food Writing 2009” and saw Eggs Enough and Time by Margaret McArthur, she felt obligated to put a copy of the book for me under the Christmas tree.  After both of us read the article, I am happy to say we’ve solved the time disagreement amiably.

The “Best Food Writing” anthology has included answers to this question and many more food musings since it was first published in 2000.  One of the most exciting things about the 2009 edition is the breadth of sources included in this collection.  As you would expect, The New Yorker, Gourmet [RIP -ed.], Bon Appetit, The New York Times and Gastronomica were all represented.  But what is more impressive to me is the range of newspapers and blogs that published noteworthy food writing in 2009. As Jerusha explored in a post on this blog last week, online food writing is upping the ante and helping to create not only better educated eaters but also rich food communities.

This edition of “Best Food Writing 2009” is also filled with not only fine writers you’d expect—Ruth Reichl, Frank Bruni and Marcella Hazan—but others you may not.  Douglas Bauer’s What We Hunger For, an elegy to his friendship with M.F.K. Fisher, is a beautiful reminder of the conviviality of food.  The Misunderstood Habanero by Tim Stark, a struggling writer-turned-farmer-finally-turned-successful-writer, explores the spicy chili pepper and is another excellent addition.

More after the jump