2009 was the greatest year for What’s On Your Plate?! First, we finished a movie! As you know, it’s about kids and food politics. We also saw the Angel Family start up a CSA with the Neighborhood School, both of which are featured in the film. We had our premier at the Berlin Film Festival and we’ve received hundreds of requests for the film and shown it to over 30 audiences already! We also built a grand website that we hope you all enjoy with webgames, a place for your voice, and a spot for us all to meet each other, in the Network of Friends! Towards the end of the year, as we sealed the deal with our distributor, Bullfrog Films, we began blogging regularly. It’s been a great couple of months of tracking food issues, meeting friends through twitter, and generally joining the internet conversation about the food revolution!
We’re looking forward to making big waves in 2010 with our national broadcast on Discovery’s Planet Green on February 6th which will re-air through the weekend and into the next week. This will coincide with the national push to fund and improve the Child Nutrition Act as this may come up for congressional vote as early as February!
We’ve made a few resolutions for 2010: we’d love to screen for and collaborate with Michelle Obama, she’s right on board with child nutrition, sustainable agriculture, and reforming our national food system. We’ve been working on that stuff too! We’d also like to see schools adopt our film and beautiful curriculum (developed with Solar One) in their standard health/science curriculae. We want children across the nation to hear the news: food is delicious when fresh and local! Having a relationship with your farmer is fun and sustaining! Helping all neighborhoods get access to fresher foods means that we all can live healthier lives, with fewer visits to the doctor for diseases related to our food system- this can have a real impact on the health care debate! As the girls say, “Food that’s bad for you is never cheap.”
It costs when you have to pay a doctor. It costs when you have to take medicine. And if you have to take medicine every day you’re paying again… And again… And again. And think of all those millions… And billions… And trillions…Of wrappers… And boxes and packages… And drinking cups… And straws. When the planet has to be cleaned up, we all pay.
We have big plans to get every family thinking about What’s On Your Plate? and making fun healthy choices in their homes, their schools, and in their neighborhoods. Here’s to a happy healthy 2010!
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We’ve known for a while that the over produced cheap high fructose corn syrup that’s in everything from our sodas to our breads is bad for us. Mostly, we just knew that eating less sugar is the way to a healthier body and that it’s hard to cut down on sugar intake when HFCS keeps showing up so many of our staple foods. But finally, there’s some real science conducted by the University of California, Davis that proves that the cheap corn sweetener actually causes unhealthy growth. The study showed that fat cells appear around major organs such as the heart and liver in sixteen volunteers after just 10 weeks of eating a diet high in high fructose syrup.
“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study. “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose.”
Fortunately for us, we have partners that are working diligently to provide answers, including the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Check out Debra’s fun solutions for getting healthier vegetables to her nieces and hear them talk about how they have improved since changing their diet! (More focus for playtime and school!)
NPR’s got some holiday recipes, Internet, check ‘em out. My favorite: peanut butter-maple bacon fudge.
Illinois Governor, Pat Quinn, is talking up a new law that could pass in his state which would give state agencies the option of paying up to 10 percent above the lowest price in order to buy their food local. This could help remove one of the biggest obstacles to small organic farmers who want to sell to schools, hospitals, and other state-run institutions. Most state agencies have to ask for bids on any contract (like a new building, or providing food) and they are obligated to go with the lowest price available. But since (in what I’ve always thought is one of life’s crueler ironies) producing food locally and without chemicals or genetic modifications is actually more expensive than dunking food in pesticides and shipping it halfway around the world, it’s tough for a local, organic farm to sell at the lowest price. The reasoning behind the potential law is that the ability to buy locally, while it might cost a little more, would keep the money in the state. I always like it when I hear these ultra-rational reasons for buying local or organic food. Sure it’s better for you, sure it’s more ethical to support local farmers, but those are self-centered reasons, largely dependent on my own opinions. It’s good to remember that our food choices are connected to larger structures, and that making positive food choices can have positive results in the larger world that may not even be directly related to food.
Although it’s hard to believe, school lunches are unhealthier for your children than most fast food chains, including McDonald’s and KFC. We’re following up on Nate’s great post about cafeteria food.
A recent investigation conducted by USA Today showed that 77 million pounds of “old hen meat” are being served in schools, amounting to approximately 145 million dollars. Spent hens, so called because they can no longer hatch eggs, are not a favorite consumer product due to their brittle bones, which are prone to splintering. Although a common component of pet food, “old hen meat” cuts short for human expectations: they increase rates of salmonella, especially in children. Campbell Soup Company, as well as the KFC Company, do not use spent hens due to “quality considerations.”
But there’s still hope for school lunches. Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan revealed that the USDA was beginning Farm-to-School Tactical Teams in order to give cafeteria fresh food. In addition, they are also giving schools access to 50 million dollars so they could purchase fresh and locally grown produce. New purchasing guidelines are also being installed, focusing primarily on organic and healthier food.
Most kids consume the greater part of their daily calorie intake throughout the school day. For most kids, school lunches set an example for proper eating habits. The habits they pick up at schools now could stay with them the rest of their lives. We hope that the USDA will work on making cafeteria food more nutritious and tastier.
More than Organic posted something pretty cool this morning. The post talks about the values that drive our society to feed itself in the strange ways it does, both in terms of attitudes toward food and in terms of food structures. The value at work here, according to the post, is quantity. As a society, we place tremendous value on quantity. When we assess our performance in an activity, it is most often the quantity of output that we judge. “How much have I done today?” “How many things can I accomplish this week?” We share a tendency, culturally encouraged, to view things and actions in broad categories and to fill those categories as much as possible.
More than Organic talks about how this desire for quantity has effected the way we eat. Because we see all food as a single category, we not only eat to satisfy a sense of a proper quantity of food, but we also produce food in great quantities regardless of its quality or necessity. More than Organic talks about how our perception of food as a matter of quantity has distorted our sense of “ordinariness” to the point where we essentially believe that all the food is the same and all the food is good. Foods like beef that, if they are of a high quality, can provide us with enormous amounts of energy are eaten as part of a normal, everyday diet, whereas they could be eaten only occasionally when the extra energy or nutrition is necessary. We eat chemically and genetically altered foods because we see the value of food as a question of nutrients measured in quantity, rather than more intuitive concepts like balance and breadth of diet, or quality in the production of food.
More than Organic makes some excellent points about our reliance on quantity rather than quality as a way of understanding food. In would also add that quantity affects the way we produce food as well. The goal in food production is most often quantity, and to this end we dedicate vast areas of land to produce a single food, and then we have to ship our food around the world to areas where it is not made. Rather than see food production as a matter of providing appropriate amounts of various foods for a small area, using networks of farms, we value a production system in which a single source must produce the greatest possible quantity of food, no matter what that food is or how it can be used. Our goal must not be to produce more food, but to ensure that a community has the means to feed itself good food.
What a weekend, Internet! The New York City Food and Climate Summit was on Saturday, a collaboration between the Manhattan Borough President’s office and Just Food. It was a pretty impressive scene, I gotta tell ya. There were talks by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Anna Lappe of the Small Planet Institute, Marion Nestle of NYU, and Karen Washington of La Familia Verde, among others. And there were workshops, too, a good 30 of them. The only downside of the day was having to choose between “Urban Agriculture: Roofs, Walls, & Other Under Utilized Spaces” and “Tackle Hunger, Health and Environment in Your Community.” We picked Urban Agriculture, and learned about Greenpoint Rooftop Farms, Manhattan Borough President’s Land Use Department and BrightFarm (we especially like BrightFarm’s Science Barge.) There were tons of other talks and workshops to go to. It was an awesome day.
But don’t just take my word for it:
Adriana Velez from the blog What I Made for Dinner was there
So was Paula Crossfield from Civil Eats
And Marion Nestle, in addition to sharing really inspiring words in the plenary session, talked it up on her blog.
Hey, Internet! Have you checked out PolicyLink’s section on access to healthy foods? It’s awesome. I gotta be real with you, Internet, I’m a pretty big urban planning nerd and this kind of website is my favorite kind. It’s got bullet points, an official-sounding tone, lots of data, resources linked on the right, and like six PDFs. PolicyLink is sort of a national think tank on a variety of issues united around a sense of equity in our communities. I say “sort of a think tank” because PolicyLink also places emphasis on getting its ideas circulated and acted upon, more of a hybrid think tank/activist group.
Remember a while ago when I blogged about chocolate milk? Well, Chef Ann Cooper, the “renegade” lunch lady leading the fight against chocolate milk, has put NPR’s story about her up on her blog. Check it out, there are some great little interviews with kids at Chef Ann’s school. My favorite: a group of girls worries that kids who don’t have chocolate milk won’t drink any at all. “But you’re drinking regular milk,” responds the interviewer. “That’s because we don’t have a choice!” That is Chef Ann’s point: chocolate milk may be tastier than regular milk, but white milk is better than no milk at all, and kids will still drink milk even if their choices are a bit limited.
I have to be honest with you, Internet. Most of the bad news I blog about for WOYP doesn’t exactly shock me. Sure, I’m pessimistic, I’m cynical, I’m infuriatingly ready to say “I told you so,” but so far my cynicism has been rewarded. But today, Internet, I am going to blog about something that blew my mind straight out of my forehead and onto the keyboard in front of me. I was shocked, I was appalled. I thought I knew where the madness ended, I thought I knew what we were dealing with. I was wrong.
I’m being melodramatic, yes, but seriously: The meat served at this great nation’s school lunches may be less safe than the meat at McDonalds. According to an investigation done by USA Today found that McDonalds, KFC, and Jack in the Box test the meat they buy 5 to 10 times more often than the USDA requires schools to. And what’s more, these restaurants have consistently refused to buy certain kinds of low-quality meats that the USDA nonetheless approves. Yes, you read right. McDonalds holds itself to a higher standard than the USDA holds elementary school cafeterias. And that ain’t all: Costo and Campbell Soup also succeed where the USDA fails. This is despicable, internet. McDonalds! As in, the terrible sensation that you are eating something as far removed from an organic source as the plastic utensils you’re eating with, and they’re more careful about bad meat than the schools we send kids to?! That’s like putting kids in a school bus that was rejected by Greyhound for being unsafe.
Internet, I don’t need to tell you how absurd this is. The Folks over at CREDO have a petition drawn up. If you click this link you’ll sign it automatically. This absolutely can’t go on. I can’t stop private companies like McDonalds from making awful food, but they had better be the worst thing out there. To have schools make food worse than those grey burgers is unacceptable.
