With all the nonprofits, blogs, articles, films, exposés, and books devoted to improving school lunches, I sometimes imagine that things have already changed. That students around the country are eating healthy, delicious, local meals prepared by well-paid cooks in naturally lit school cafeterias. But for every Boulder school system (currently being overhauled by Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper), there are thousands of regular public schools around the country, where kids are still eating tator tots five times a week.

We’ve reported before on Mrs. Q, an anonymous public school teacher in Illinois, who is eating lunch in her school cafeteria everyday in 2010, taking pictures, and writing about it. Her blog, Fed Up: School Lunch Project, is a straightforward and smart account of what’s being served every day in our public schools. On Day 16, a prepackaged PB&J sandwich, which she could barely choke down, brought on some post-work vomiting. Other meals, she says, aren’t so bad. One thing you’ll notice right away is all the packaging. Everything is plastic wrapped, served on disposable plates, with disposable utensils.

Now Ed Bruske, a dad, urban homesteader, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter, has spent a week investigating his daughter’s school cafeteria, writing about his findings in a six part series, Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen on his blog, The Slow Cook. Just prior to his week in the kithcen, the food service provider for the D.C. schools, Chartwells-Thompson, decided to do away with pre-packaged, military MRE-style lunches, and serve “fresh-cooked” meals. Bruske, an avid gardener and cook, was expecting to see actual cooking in this kitchen, which was recently renovated and outfitted with a new freezer and stainless steel equipment. What we found was a lot of frozen, processed foods, reheated and steamed to appear “fresh-cooked.” Not surprising. But the stories are engaging, and give a full picture of school lunches and how budgetary concerns are dictating the health and nutrition of our children.

One of the reasons school systems have been able to serve bad food for so long is that adults were not paying attention. Now that the national spotlight is on school cafeterias, and grown-ups are peeking around inside, things are going to have to change.

Thanks Huffington Post, for bringing sex appeal to sustainable farming and beekeeping. Following the excitement of their hot organic farmers contest, they have a new series of photos, profiling some of the cutest beekeepers in the land. And they are adorable. Next I hope they show us some good-looking furniture makers.

And in the world of NYC beekeeping, there is news! Did you know that beekeeping is legal in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco,  and Seattle — but NOT New York City? Sad. Fortunately, this may change soon. The NYC Board of Health is holding a public hearing on the future of NYC beekeeping on February 3, 2010! Following the hearing, the Board will decide on whether or not to revise the code to legalize beekeeping.

Our friends Just Food are on top of the issue, and have great resources for how you can get involved, submit a testimony, or sign a petition.

Sometimes corporations make good choices.

On Tuesday Target announced that they will no longer sell farmed salmon in their stores. In this press release they stated that beginning immediately they will switch to wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and will have only wild salmon in their sushi by the end of 2010. Who knows whether they are doing it because they care about the environment, its good for PR, or because of pressure from citizen activists. Regardless of the reason, when a major corporation makes a decision like this, it has all kinds of trickle-down effects on the fishing industry, the environment, other retailers, and our health.

This announcement is good news for people, fish, and the environment. Here are five reasons why it’s smart to switch to wild salmon:

1. Dye a food to make it look like that food?
Wild salmon are”salmon-colored” because they eat krill, turning them a rich pinkish-orange color. Farm raised salmon are fed manufactured pellets made of corn meal, fish meal, genetically modified canola oil, chicken feces, soy, and other discarded animal materials. In order to make them look like the salmon we are used to they are fed “salmon-colored” dye! Without it, their flesh would be a dull grey color.

2. Farmed salmon are sickly creatures.
Raised in packed pens with barely enough room to swim, farmed salmon play host to sea lice and other infections, which spread easily in crowded conditions. To combat diseases, salmon farmers shower fish with antibiotics. The antibiotics then seep into the surrounding waterways, polluting the waters and killing the healthy bacteria that live on the ocean floor.

3. Farmed salmon is full of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. These are not good for you.
Scientists have shown a link between PCBs and cancer — making farmed salmon actually dangerous to eat. The farmed salmon absorb PCBs from the fish meal they are fed — which has high levels of toxins, including PCBs.

4. Farm raised salmon are affecting native salmon populations.
When farm salmon escape from their pens (yea freedom!) they often out-compete the native salmon for food and breeding. This threatens the wild salmon population and the whole eco-system they are a part of.

5. WASTE!
Salmon are raised in open cages, which means the concentrated poop of thousands of salmon flows right into the surrounding waters. This is the same amount of waste as the raw sewage produced by a town of 65,000 people. Fish waste spreads bacteria, germs, chemicals, toxins, and diseases.

For more information on salmon farming, check out this very informative and pleasant-to-look-at website.

And p.s., even though Target is selling wild salmon now, they are still a mega-corporation that pays employees low wages and busts up unions. May I suggest buying wild salmon at your local fish market instead?

Check out our co-producer, Tanya Selvaratnam talking about What’s On Your Plate?! Click below to see a wonderful video and article about the film and project. Thanks Big Green!

Big Green TV — The Environmental News Site & Video Program For All Ages.

I think that by now, just about everyone reading this blog must be familiar with the horrors of industrial farming. The images we are most familiar with are from meat farms: animals kept in cages barely large enough for them, nightmarish sights, sounds, and smells. Sometimes we need a reminder of just how far the industrial farming system spreads. This article, from AltNet describes industrial dairy farming, which is not much better than the slaughterhouse. It’s scary stuff. Cows are bred to produce ten times the amount of milk in a year that they would normally produce for their calves, and they are kept pregnant and lactating constantly, which can leave cows lame from the sheer weight of their udders on their skeletons. Male calves born on these farms are most often sold to veal operations, which are notoriously inhumane, for about $15-20 a calf.

Of course, this was not always the case. There was once a time when cows were only milked for a short time out of the year, when the grass was good. Factory conditions like the ones described here were once unheard of. What happened? We started wanting more milk. Too much milk. The point here, one that I keep coming back to in this blog, is that the destructive systems that bring us our food, and cause so much damage along the way, do so because we ask them to. My favorite soundbite of Michael Pollan’s is that we vote with our forks three times a day. It isn’t enough to recognize the effects of factory farming, nor is it enough to avoid factory farms in our food. We must change our eating habits to reflect food systems that can be supplied by ethical food production. We can drink organic milk, but unless we change the way we eat, the times of year we buy milk and the amount we buy, the demand for milk will remain at a level that can only be met by factory farming.

Video lecture by Jeffery M. Smith on GMOs: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/01/14/Everything-you-MUST-KNOW-About-Dangerous-Genetically-Modified-Foods.aspx

New York City reduces salt in restaurants: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/health/26brod.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Dangerous antibiotics in animal feed (warning: scary): http://www.alternet.org/story/145272/the_overuse_of_antibiotics_in_lifestock_feed_is_killing_us

Michael Pollan tells it like it is for Time Magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1955590-1,00.html

Seriously, what doesn’t get into our food at factory farms (warning: scary): http://www.alternet.org/story/145068/how_factory_farms_are_pumping_americans_full_of_deadly_bacteria_and_pathogens

make us tighten our belts on child nutrition programs while the girth of the nation grows. The government spends $1 million per soldier in Afghanistan, yet barely spends $1 on the food in a school lunch.

via Debra Eschmeyer: State of the Union’s School Lunch: Nutrition as National Defense and Fiscal Health.

Obama’s spending freeze is big, awful news lately. Debra Eschmeyer’s article lamenting the effect of the freeze on school lunch programs brings up the kind of disappointment a lot of us feel about a lot of programs that would suffer from such a freeze. It hardly needs to be repeated, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Obama’s priorities are not what the voting public thought they would be. I specifically remember heading to the polls, dreaming of a president who would pull us out of two needless wars, repair the deteriorating financial laws that could no longer hold up the economy, and begin an era of government in which the health and education of the nation (children and adults) would be a national priority. A year and a few months later, that president is talking about a spending freeze with the continuation of the wars an explicit goal, and has done little more than ask banks to pay back the money he gave them. I’m frustrated, we’re all frustrated. Where is the guy we voted for? What the hell happened?

Internet, this is my (limited) understanding of the situation: all that stuff Obama promised to do during the campaign is, in truth, impossible. First of all, most of the big sweeping changes he promised are illegal. Take closing Guantanamo Bay, for example. The president does not have the authority to do that. All the president can actually do is veto laws that have already gone through congress (not very useful, actually) make appointments, and command the armed forces. Actually, Obama doesn’t actually have the authority to freeze domestic spending, so I guess that’s good news. As much as we would like to depend on Obama to change our country for us, all he can really do is suggest things for congress to do, and we’ve seen how well health care reform has been going.

My theory is that Obama thinks a spending freeze is what we want. He’s done what we all do from time to time: he got used to praise and support during the campaign and now he can only see the criticism he faces. It’s incredible after the image of boldness and change he presented, but it Obama has caved. A year ago, I saw in Obama a president who might have the courage pursue a progressive agenda. I think a lot of people saw him as dedicated to a theory of government which prioritized the well-being of its citizens. Maybe I set my hopes too high, but the Obama of the campaign seemed ready to enact major change in this country, despite adversity and opposition, for the good it would eventually bring, but the Obama of a year later is all too ready to fold in the face of political opposition.

In light of all this, I have one major point: Obama is not the legislative Mary Poppins we all thought he would be. Some things he simply can’t do, some things he might not want to do, but many things are still possible. If we want the Child Nutrition Act reauthorized, if we want schools to be better funded, and school lunches to be local, healthy, and delicious, and if we want this country to care for its children, we’ve got to work for it. Spread the word, make it known that America wants better school lunches. And don’t depend on Obama to make the laws you want because that’s not his job. Write to your senator, vote for people that share your views, and get other people to do the same (I’m looking at you, Massachusetts). The reason we’re looking at two foreign wars and a three-year spending freeze is that the people in power (Obama included) think we want them. I know it’s easy to despair, to give it up as a lost cause, but please don’t. I still have hope that if Obama and congress know that people want health and education to be national priorities (and not just city people with blogs) they will act accordingly. Politicians pay attention, and the spending freeze is probably a reaction to high-profile conservative groups like the tea-partiers. Getting politicians to pay attention to a cause is difficult, but at some level, they work for us. Don’t give up, internet, get louder.

So you graduate from college and get psyched up about organic gardening and food justice. You try working on a farm and decide: yes this is for me. You enthusiastically declare to friends and family: I have found my calling, my purpose! I am going to toil in the dirt and grow beautiful, pure food!

You do some research about independent farming and   . . . . WHOOA. The reality sinks in. You need serious $ to start a commercially viable farm, even a small one. Land, tools, seed, labor, insurance, and on and on.

On top of all that you have $60,000 in student loans for your lucrative Anthropology degree from an expensive University.

The economics of farming in this country are deeply skewed. Small farms go out of business every day and and it is increasingly difficult for small operations to compete with Agri Giants. As the population of farmers ages, and farms go out of business, we need a new generation of farmers to take their place.

There is a building movement to make farming a little more financially viable for young folks.

Ever heard of Public Service Loan Forgiveness or Income Based Repayment? They are two options offered by the federal government to encourage college grads to go into public service and non-profit work. Within Public Service Loan Forgiveness, remaining student loan debt is forgiven after ten years. And with Income Based Repayment, one is protected from paying more than 15% of their disposable income to repay student loans.

Farming and food activists are trying to make farming qualify as a public service in these programs. According to this article by Kimberley Hart, adding farming to the pool of public service employment could be the piece we need to make farming more do-able for a new generation.

From my own personal observations and talks with wanna-be farmers, it is not the physical labor, time commitment, or geographic isolation that deters them from trashing their laptops and picking up pitchforks. It is a real concern that you just can’t make a living as a small scale farmer.

If you want to see farming become more financially viable for a new generation of farmers, contact your representatives. You can use this handy letter to get you started.

Small farms can’t survive by themselves, y’know: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-05-it-takes-a-community-to-sustain-a-small-farm

Hunger in New York City: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348876&story_id=15271055

Obesity rates in America seem to be leveling out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/14obese.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Tell the USDA we don’t want Genetically Engineered contamination of organic food: http://ga3.org/campaign/alfalfaEIS/forward/e3s6x36rfjejixdw

A CBS video about cafeteria food: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6050936n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

Marion Nestle talks about “eco-stunts”: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/01/the-latest-eco-stunt-school-food/

Young Adult Fiction about healthy food changing lives: http://abbylibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/01/book-review-fat-cat.html

We are so honored and so excited to be a part of Oliver Taylor’s quest to be awarded a 2010 Disney Friends for Change grant of $500. He wants to bring What’s On Your Plate? to his school or local library! He is more than half way to his goal of 500 friends on Facebook and we hope he gets there before the January 29th deadline. Everyone, go become a fan of Oliver for The Urban Farmers!

From his profile:

Hi, I’m Oliver Taylor. I live in Lafayette and am a 7th grader at Stanley Middle School. I am also the Youth Spokesperson for The Urban Farmers, a pilot program in Lafayette that is striving to plant 1,000 fruit trees in 5 years. My family is planting 20 trees in our backyard this month.

My current mission is to be awarded a 2010 “Disney Friends for Change” grant of $500. I plan to organize a community wide screening of “What’s On Your Plate” at my school or the new Lafayette Library. I hope to have 500 fans before January 29th, the deadline for the grant proposal.

*PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!!!!!*