Renegade lunch lady, longtime activist, author and What’s On Your Plate? advisor Chef Ann Cooper, with expertise from hundreds of school lunch reform advocates across the country, has created the Lunch Box, a project of the new Food, Family, Farming Foundation (http://www.foodfamilyfarming.org/) With headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, The Lunch Box is a comprehensive set of “why” and “how to” online tools to transition the typical highly processed school meal program to healthier, wholesome and fresh food-based menus with no trans fats, high fructose corn syrup or unnecessary chemical additives and preservatives.
We’re looking forward to using this resource for healthy lunch planning!
Our friend Lola Flash just sent us some pictures from the BAM screening on July 7th. There are some great pictures of the people that came to see the movie and from the panel discussion as well. Here are a few, but check the rest out on flickr.
Kim Perry, Jenny Clapp, and Nhumi Threadgill at the panel discussion
Nhumi Threadgill, Safiyah, and Catherine at the panel discussion
Latham Thomas, Nhumi Threadgill, and Safiyah after the movie
Summer is fun, probably the best season of the year. It’s warm enough to go outside, plants are in bloom, especially delicious food-bearing plants. Summer is about picnics, and summer is about ice cream. Specifically non-dairy coconut-peach ice cream. And it just so happens that we have a recipe, as featured in the movie, for…
Yield: 3 1/2 cups
Soundtrack: “Sweet Thing” by Chaka Khan & Rufus from Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan
Use locally grown peaches like these!
Mary Jeys, our very own Outreach Coordinator, has been working on the Brooklyn Torch Project. The Brooklyn Torch is a local currency, used in place of regular dollars and accepted only at local business. Hopefully, the new currency will catch on and people will be encouraged to shop locally in their own neighborhoods, where the Torch is accepted. It’s a great way to help out local businesses and to help out the community as a whole. The currency should be implemented sometime this fall, and we hope to see them being used at farmers’ markets and CSAs as soon as possible! Check out the Daily News article for more info.
Here at What’s On Your Plate? we’re all about healthy kids. And not just kids that eat good, local organic food and stay active either. We’re also about kids who have access to good healthcare (which should be all kids). The team over at MoveOn.org are doing great work on that particular subject, and we’d like to share a video they made, which we like.
This particular video is in honor of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel (one of our favorite weeks of the year) and talks about some real maneaters.
This week, in partnership with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, over 200 school officials gathered in New York City at the 2009 Healthy Schools Forum. Sadie and Safiyah shared their experiences with a panel entitled, “Avoiding Food Fights and Wellness Wars: Meaningful Student Engagement to Promote Health.” The panel focused on successful student involvement in school wellness activities. Watch Sadie and Safiyah at the recognition ceremony by clicking on the webcast link here.
Michael Pollan just wrote a great article for the New York Times Magazine, about how much cooking we see on T.V. and how little cooking we do in real life. We happen to agree completely with Michael and while we hope that you’ll watch What’s On Your Plate? once or twice (or more, if you like) what we really want is for you to cook. As often as you can. Food just tastes better when you cook it yourself, and as much fun as it is to watch Sadie and Safiyah and everyone in the movie cooking, it’s more fun to do it yourself.
