Last Friday team WOYP headed over to the Neighborhood School in NYC for some screening, eating, and talking. There was a signup for the Angel Family Farm CSA (Season 2! alright!), homemade tamales, a Q&A, and a chance for parent and kids to see their school on the big screen.

Remember the part from WOYP that takes place in a school cafeteria? Going into the kitchen and kids talking about school food and their lunches? That was the Neighborhood School. There’s other neat stuff happening over there as well: a school garden which also serves as science classroom, and ongoing projects to make the school green and sustainable.

On March 17th 2010 thousands of chefs will descend on Washington D.C. and, with sushi knives and scorching cast iron pans in hand, will barge into the halls of Congress to demand that they invest $4 billion in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill. Upon seizing victory, the chefs will then cook a seasonal, well balanced meal for members of the House and Senate, and they will all eat together at the table of bipartisanism.

It might actually go down a little differently, but yes, there is a Chef’s Day of Action planned for March 17th 2010 in Washington D.C. All those involved in the culinary profession are invited to join in the action — which will involve visiting representatives and talking to them about the crucial importance of funding child nutrition programs.

It’s great to see chefs building as a political force. We often think of cooking as an entertainment or leisure activity — it’s about butter, and chocolate, and fennel — but not politics. No longer. Chefs around the country are speaking out about food justice, childhood obesity and the need to change our food system. And as lovers and masters of quality food, they are great spokespeople.

Spread the news to other Chefs, cooks, sous chefs, and culinary pros! For more information visit the NYC Alliance for CNR.

Starting a farm is a huge, daunting undertaking — requiring a serious leap of faith and streak of daring recklessness. Why would you willingly enter into a profession that hundreds of people are getting out of every year? How could you know that small scale organic farming provides no financial security, and is hard and expensive — and still do it anyway? These people are my heroes.

Mihail Kossev  is a  young farmer, a NYU alum from Brooklyn, who is, in his words:
“pursuing my dreams and starting a small CSA in southern Albany county.”

He’s looking for CSA members for his first growing season. (The drop-off location will be in Catskill, NY.) He also has a really nice and informative website where he is selling seeds he personally collected from organic farms all over the Northeast. All seeds are open-pollinated, grown and processed organically.

If you live in the area, or need seeds for your own garden — check out his Collected Seed Farm or get cozy on  Facebook.

Young farmers are courageous warriors! Let’s support them.

Just hours ago, the Center for New York City Affairs hosted “School Food Matters: Hunger, Obesity and the Reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act,” a great panel discussion on the state of school food in New York City. Especially as this very week, Congress is holding the first hearings on the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. This is a huge opportunity for school food reform, as the Child Nutrition Act dictates how schools approach the goal of feeding kids. The old act (from 2004) expired last fall, and the current hearings in congress will look at whether or not the school food system is working, and how we can make it better. There are petitions all over the internet, and sites that tell you how to contact your legislators, to let congress know how badly school lunch needs to be improved. This is a huge deal, Internet.

Anyway, the Center for New York City Affairs put together this great event just this morning, with a panel discussion featuring some big names in education and food from NYC and elsewhere. The topic of conversation was how to ask congress for what we want, and how to convince congress that a strong Child Nutrition Act is vital to the future of the country, and you can be sure WOYP was there taking notes on the whole thing.

The panel consisted of Kevin Concannon, the undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Eric Goldstein, the chief executive officer for the New York City Department of Education, Office of Nutrition and Education (he was in What’s On Your Plate?); Jan Poppendieck, professor of sociology at Hunter College (City University of New York) and author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America; Jonathan Stein, general counsel for Community Legal Services (CSL) of Philadelphia; Jim Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC); and Fred Mogul, the healthcare and medicine reporter for WNYC Public Radio, who acted as moderator.

The conference covered a huge range of issues, so our plan is to post in-depth about a few of them in the coming days. If anyone was actually at the conference, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Once we start posting our takes on the issues discussed this morning, we hope that people will respond with their own comments, and the blog can turn into a continuation of the discussion at the conference.