Young food activists.  Campaign planning.  Tomatoes.

From August 20 – 23, I attended the last of three Real Food Challenge Trainings that were held across the country this summer in an effort to prepare students to change the on – campus food system this fall.

Young food activists gathered in Santa Cruz, California; Ames, Iowa; and Boston, Massachusetts, to participate in collaborative training sessions that, hopefully, empowered them to return to their schools this fall and do something.  Take a stand.  Start a conversation.  Educate peers.  And ultimately, begin to change the food system in some way, big or small. 

Students descended on these trainings from various locations, institutions and backgrounds; some new to the food movement as a whole and others with success stories to share.  However, the common thread is a firm belief that everyone has a right to good, clean and fair food.

During the course of each training, attendees participated in an array of workshops, which provided background on the issues along with the most important strategies for addressing these concerns.  Students brainstormed about the key steps to planning a successful campaign, with particular focus on identifying the drivers and targets.  In the end, everyone went away energized and ready to take what they learned, find a crew of like-minded individuals and work to achieve a victory this fall.

And, the tomatoes.  The Boston training did not suffer from tomato blight.  We ate fresh summer tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Everyday.  The tomatoes added not only to each meal, but also to conversations with Meghan Cohorst from the Student/Farmworker Alliance about ways to connect the Dine with Dignity campaign to the Real Food Challenge.  Food for thought?  Certainly.

Heart of Chicago comes through for Eat-In

By Slow Food Chicago chapter leader Lynn Peemoeller, and as originally posted on the Huffington Post

Like all great public spaces, Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago has set the stage over the years for as many causes as there are types of people. The great walls of city hall, the Federal building, and the Chicago Picasso have been the backdrop for a melting pot of events.

When I heard about the idea of an Eat-In, which is a group of people gathering in public in order to share a meal together and make a political statement I wanted to do it in Daley Plaza with our Slow Food Chapter.

Locally we are well known for great events that celebrate food through farmers, artisans, and ethnic cultures but we have never really gone down the path of organizing people around a reason for action.

The reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act in Congress this fall and the Slow Food USA campaign (Time for Lunch) that is raising awareness for better food in school lunches and nutrition for our most vulnerable populations gave us ammunition to bring people together for an Eat-In. The Slow Food USA ‘Time for Lunch’ Campaign is proving that people all over the country are passionate and dedicated to making a difference in our food system through civic engagement and advocacy for change in Federal policy.  There are over 250 Eat-Ins planned throughout the country on Labor Day in all 50 states. This has exceeded expectations all around.

Now, I’ve been to plenty of events put together by big fancy event companies and they are often impressive. As a small and completely volunteer-run organization, for us to do something of this scale requires not only time and money but also dedication from scores of people.

I was the kind of student who always wanted to go first to get my presentations over with. That desire was working for me, when the only available date we could get for Daley Plaza this summer was on August 26th. So we started down the path of planning a simple yet impressive event, the first in a nationwide series.

Even the most-simple events are complicated.  I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the rain coming a week away.

More after the jump

Obama Brings Up a New Side of School Lunch: Student Taste

by Debbie Lehmann

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

President Obama has been talking about school lunch a lot lately, but last week he touched on a new side of the issue. In response to a question about healthy eating at a forum on health care, Obama brought up what I see as one of the biggest obstacles to improving cafeteria fare: the unfortunate reality that what kids like is not always what’s best for them.

Here’s what Obama said at the forum:

Because sometimes you go into schools and — you know what the menu is, you know? It’s French fries, Tater Tots, hot dogs, pizza and — now, that’s what kids — let’s face it, that’s what kids want to eat, anyway. (Laughter.) So it’s not just the schools’ fault.

That’s absolutely right — it’s not just the school’s fault. School meal programs are stand-alone businesses within school districts, and they need students to come in and buy the food they offer so that they can break even at the end of the year. In fact, you can think of school cafeterias as restaurants on school grounds (restaurants that, admittedly, have to meet federal requirements and submit huge piles of paperwork to the USDA). Without student sales, cafeterias go out of business. School lunches would be great if all kids loved carrots and spinach. But the reality is that kids like pizza and hotdogs, and school lunchrooms are responsible for pleasing their customers.

If we want to overhaul school food in America, we’re going to have to change that. It’s a change that makes obvious sense when you look at the cafeteria as a part of the school environment. Look around the rest of campus and you’ll see that the lunchroom is the only place where we give kids what they want. English teachers assign the books on the curriculum, not the books kids ask to read. Math teachers cover fractions and multiplication, even though students would probably rather be playing video games than completing worksheets.

Classrooms can function like that because they’re not businesses. Teachers are not responsible for catering to their customers because they don’t have customers. They have students. If we’re serious about dietary reform and health reform, it’s time to translate that to the cafeteria as well.

Obama gets it: food=health

Earlier this week, in an interview with 11 year old Damon Weaver (yes, eleven. I was at ballet class at eleven), Barack Obama talked about the importance of getting healthy food into schools.

Then, yesterday, during a conference call on health care with Organizing for America organizers, he continued:

“part of what we also have to do, though, is teach our children early the importance of health…When it comes to food, one of the things that we are doing is working with school districts, and the child nutrition legislation is going to be coming up. We provide an awful lot of school lunches out there and reimburse local school districts for school lunch programs. Let’s figure out, how we can get some fresh fruits and vegetables in the mix?

And so what we’ve got to do is to change how we think about, for example, getting local farmers connected to school districts, because that would benefit the farmers, delivering fresh produce, but right now they just don’t have the distribution mechanisms set up.”

Anyone else’s head spinning?

Now we all know that just because Barack and Michelle are on board, it doesn’t equal a better Child Nutrition Act and a reformed Farm Bill, BUT, I think we are guaranteed an interesting conversation when the Child Nutrition Act does finally make it to the floor.

Slow Food USA Staff Organize Warm-Up Eat-In in Brooklyn Bridge Park

by Gordon Jenkins

If the office workers on lunch break in Brooklyn Bridge Park could hear anything over the roar of Q trains crossing the Manhattan Bridge, then they were treated to a rare public performance: Slow Food USA Executive Director Erika Lesser, in makeshift headdress, giving a passionate reading of the Slow Food Manifesto. As she hit doleful lows (“We are enslaved by speed”) and soaring heights (“Slow Food guarantees a better future”), twenty of her colleagues cheered and hissed in unison. Eyewitnesses in corporate offices across the East River report seeing the industrial food system shake in its boots.

Lesser’s performance was a highlight of an event billed as a warm-up to the National Eat-In taking place on Labor Day, Sept. 7, 2009. On that day, people in communities across America will gather for public potlucks that send a clear message to Congress: It’s time to provide our children with real food at school. As organizers nationwide prepare for their events, the staff at Slow Food USA headquarters in Brooklyn decided to practice what they preach and cook up their own favorite dishes for a lunchtime Eat-In.

Roast beef and fruit salad and pickled okra and homemade baba ghanoush appeared on the table, alongside plum cake and chocolate mousse for dessert. While they ate, staff members took turns giving performances to rally spirits in preparation for the final stretch to Labor Day. A school nutrition director named Margo Roundbottom made a brief but moving appearance to knight Leah Gorham and Callie Gleason in the Order of the Lunch Lady on their second-to-last day working on the campaign (it’s August, and they have to return to school); Jenny Trotter sang a very beautiful song; Deena Goldman, Jerusha Klemperer and Julia Middleton sang their bosses’ praise and folly; and Josh Viertel closed the meal by channeling his inner chain-gang member and leading a passionate rendition of a 1930s Mississippi work song.

If they couldn’t hear, the office workers sitting nearby did stare and smile appreciatively. Everyone likes to watch people enjoy a meal together, even if it’s a ragtag group of food activists who interrupt their meal with manifesto readings. On Sept. 7, many thousands of such food activists will impress many thousands of such passerby in parks and town squares across America. Join the effort today at http://slowfoodusa.org/timeforlunch.

A Call to put away the Lunch Box

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

I get Google Alerts about blog posts and articles that mention “school lunch,” and lately the emails have had lots of links to stories about how to pack a healthy midday meal. I’ve been getting alerts about everything from packable recipe ideas to the latest stylish lunch boxes. All of this reminds me that while more than 30 million students participate in the National School Lunch Program each year, another 20 million forgo cafeteria fare and bring lunch from home.

Many parents pack lunch for their children because they don’t consider chicken nuggets a healthy meal. I don’t either. But before you resolve to pack lunch for your child every day this year, think about this: one of the best ways to get better food into public school cafeterias is to put away the lunch box and become a loyal lunchroom customer.

I’ve blogged before about how cafeterias operate much like restaurants. Since their revenue comes from a mixture of federal per-meal reimbursements and student dollars, cafeteria directors need to bring students into the lunch line to stay afloat. They do that by offering the foods kids like — pizza, chicken nuggets, nachos and French fries. The hope is that students will look at the menu and say, “Mom, I want to buy lunch today because the entree is popcorn chicken.”

That means kids have a lot of power when it comes to determining what’s for lunch at school. But it also means that parents have a lot of power. After all, parents are the ones who supply the lunch money.  If parents — and I’m talking big groups of parents — started using that power, cafeterias would probably be pretty receptive. If cafeterias had to cater to parents instead of kids, they probably wouldn’t serve popcorn chicken.

More after the jump

No More School Lunch Baloney

by Claire Stanford

My school lunch awakening began the summer after I graduated from college, in 2006, when I volunteered as a counselor at a free day camp in New Haven, Connecticut. The point of the camp was many-fold: to teach kids about the environment, to keep kids off the street and out of trouble all day, and to exhaust them enough during the day that they’d stay out of trouble when we let them out, too. And, importantly, to give them free breakfast, lunch, and snack every day, provided by the New Haven public school system.

For many kids, school lunch (and the less well-known school breakfast) serve the invaluable function of providing two guaranteed meals a day, something I didn’t realize until that summer. Kids were allowed to bring their own lunch; out of the forty-or-so kids, I could probably count the number who actually did bring brown-bags on one hand. 

Every day at noon, the kids would sit in a big circle on the floor, and we would pass out lunch, the most typical one being a baloney and cheese sandwich (one slice of baloney and one slice of processed American cheese on white sandwich bread), a bag of carrots, and a small carton of chocolate milk. In the middle of the circle were three bins labeled trash, recycling, and food waste. The plastic wrappers for the sandwiches and the carrots went in the trash bin, the milk cartons in the recycling, and anything the kids didn’t eat into the food waste. At the end of every lunch, after everything had been cleaned up, one counselor would weigh the bin of food waste. We recorded these weights on a chart posted on the blackboard; the goal was to get below one pound of food waste. If the goal was reached, the head of the camp promised, she would shave off her eyebrows.

More after the jump

How the USDA Helped Bring Processed Food to School Lunch

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

Most adults don’t have glorious memories of school lunch. It was sloppy Joes, shepherd’s pie, spaghetti with meat sauce, and it was usually on the bland side. But the food wasn’t bad, and it was almost always cooked from scratch by an army of school lunch ladies.

How things have changed. A few days ago, I blogged about some pretty dismal statistics on scratch cooking in school cafeterias. A survey by the School Nutrition Association found that over 80 percent of schools cook fewer than half of their main dishes from scratch. And almost 40 percent of schools cook fewer than one-fourth of their entrees from scratch.

What happened? Part of it has to do with rising labor costs. It takes time — and therefore money — to cook thousands of servings of meatloaf and mac and cheese. Part of it also has to do with evolving student taste. Cafeteria directors say students these days prefer packaged food to home-cooked classics.

But we can’t explain the success of heat-and-serve lunchroom fare without giving the USDA some credit. Thanks to a provision known as commodity processing, cafeterias can divert their government-donated foods to commercial processors and receive table-ready items instead of raw products. Today, schools divert about half of their commodities to processors.

According to the USDA, the goal of commodity processing was twofold: it was supposed to allow schools to maximize the use of commodities, while also opening up the school market for the food industry. By those standards, it has been an amazing success. Schools now turn commodity meat, flour, cheese and fruit into a wide variety of (unhealthy) foods kids love. And companies rake in the money from turning raw chicken into nuggets, strips and breaded patties. Today, over 150 companies — from Tyson to Jennie-O Turkey — process commodity items for school cafeterias.

More after the jump

Alaskans get creative about school lunch (and join the Time for Lunch campaign, natch)

by Slow Food USA campaign intern Stephanie Miller

Here at Slow Food USA, we started our Time for Lunch campaign because providing kids with local, healthy food at school is a goal worth fighting for.  Over the last few months, we’ve been talking with parents, food activists, and food service professionals from all 50 states about the challenges they have faced on the road towards a better National School Lunch Program.

Extreme environments often overlooked in the discussion of local food and nutrition are the frozen deserts, deciduous ranges, and rain forests of Alaska.  According to Kerri Burrows, manager of the Alaska Food Coalition, the main food issue in area schools is not nutrition, but supply.  Traditionally, native Alaskans have relied on a seasonally variable high-protein diet.  But schools still have to comply with the nutritional standards of the National School Lunch Program.  This means that most school food is shipped thousands of miles north from the continental United States.  When perishable foods arrive, they are less than fresh, and very expensive.  To account for these extra costs, school meals in Alaska are subsidized three times as much as the average in the rest of nation. The one thing that isn’t unique about Alaska’s school food is its impact on children’s health: as is the case elsewhere else, childhood obesity is spiraling out of control, especially among indigenous children who rely on a non-native diet full of the processed foods that are popular in the rest of the country. 

Kathryn Carl, of Haines, AK, has been working hard to find a solution to this problem.  She works with a school in nearby Klukwan, a Chilkat Indian village, to serve locally sensitive lunches.  In order to implement the program, the school has opted to not receive lunches from the National School Lunch Program.  They serve about 30 meals a day to local children and elderly residents of the small village.  The program relies heavily on donations, such as local Halibut and Salmon, as well as a garden where they can grow produce such as potatoes.  They are currently trying to raise funds for a greenhouse.  Kathryn’s husband makes fresh bread several times a week, since shipped bread often arrives with mold in the middle. 

On September 7, Kathryn and other residents of Klukwan will hold an Eat-In as part of Time for Lunch’s National Day of Action.  We hope that their example of hard work and ingenuity will inspire discussion in their region and in other local food communities, whatever the local challenges. It’s not always easy to give kids real food at school, but it’s an important and absolutely necessary job: the health of our nation depends on it.

Slow Food Russian River’s Big Plans

by Slow Food USA campaign intern Leah Gorham

Slow Food chapters, members, and non-members alike from coast to coast have started to come up with fantastic and creative ideas for Eat-ins as part of the Time For Lunch campaign’s National Eat-In on Labor Day, September 7th, 2009.

A perfect example comes from the leaders of the Slow Food Russian River chapter in Sonoma County, California, who are deeply committed to getting real food into schools. The chapter is joining forces with Landpaths, a local organization that established a small community farm in a park in an urban Latino neighborhood. By partnering with Landpaths, Slow Food Russian River found both a prime location for an Eat-In—Bayer Farm—and a way to demonstrate the connection between local food production and the value it provides to the community.

The event will be a potluck-style picnic but will also offer up delectable homemade tamales and roasted goat tacos, with ingredients for the salsa sourced directly from Bayer Farm. There will be self-guided tour info stations scattered around the property, with information in both Spanish and English. So far, the expected attendance is around three hundred people, including chapter members, community members, volunteers, members of the California School Garden Network, and local legislators and officials. The Slow Food Chapter has even managed to snag a VIP guest speaker - Maria Echaveste, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton. Representatives from Landpaths, Slow Food Russian River and the California School Garden Network will also give short talks at the event.

Many more great events like this one are being planned all over the country for Time for Lunch. Eat-Ins like the one Slow Food Russian River is planning illustrate the benefits of partnering with local organizations and planning an event that fits the local culture.  An event like this draws high levels of local interest, is fun for all of those involved, and has the power to bring a community together in a positive way.

Keep up the great work in planning Eat-Ins for the Time for Lunch National Eat-In on September 7th. If we act now, we have the power to make lasting change (and have fun in the process)!