Internet, check it out. Outlandish claims? Is there really a connection between school food and the overall climate of the school? I’m leaning toward believing this one. Maybe the results wouldn’t be so dramatic, but what we eat affects how we feel, and through that how we interact with each other in general. It really isn’t so weird to think that by eating better, a whole school worth of people could start acting more calm, even-tempered, and even more friendly towards each other. I always worry that food activists make organic food sound like a magical cure-all for health problems and social ills, but really, food is fundamental enough to effect every part of our lives.
Attention, budding and professional artists and illustrators! We need your help with the cover for the new What’s On Your Plate? book!
Here’s what we want you to do:
This is urgent, Internet, so I’m not even going to try to devise a clever post. Straight copy-paste, people, Small Planet has the lowdown:
We thought you might like to see, and take action on, this urgent and exciting message from our friends at One Tray and the Community Food Security Coalition:
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES NOW AND URGE THEM TO VOTE YES ON CHILD NUTRITION REAUTHORIZATION
If your Representative sits on the House Education and Labor Committee (click here to find out), we need your help!
Today, the House Committee on Education and Labor is marking up their Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill: H.R. 5504, the Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act of 2010. H.R. 5504 contains significant improvements to Child Nutrition Programs including increases in program access, improvements to nutritional quality and program integrity,and $50 MILLION IN MANDATORY FUNDING FOR FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAMS. Yes, $50 million!!!
Please make your call today to let your voice for healthy school lunch be heard. Your Members need to hear from you!
THE MESSAGE IS SIMPLE. Tell your Representative to act quickly in marking up the bill and moving it to the House floor for a full vote. Now is the time to improve access to food assistance programs and to enhance the nutrition quality of these programs for our nation’s children.
IT’S EASY. Call the number below, and ask to speak to the Legislative Aide listed. If they do not answer, leave a voice mail with your name, phone number, and the message to vote yes on H.R. 5504 and pass the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill out of committee.
If kids can do it, so can you! Even if your Representative is not on the committee, get inspired by watching a video of kids lobbying Congress to pass a strong Child Nutrition bill this year.
Questions? Please contact the CFSC Policy Office: 202-543-8602
Thanks for pitching in,
Anna & Frances & the Small Planet Team
Internet, did you know that leafcutter ants are about the best farmers in the world? Or maybe termites are, or it could be ambrosia beetles, I’m not sure. Why am I telling you this? And why do I keep linking you to pictures of bugs? Because bugs are totally neat, and if you aren’t already fascinated by insect fungiculture, you need to get on that pronto. You see, Internet, while it’s very impressive to see the vast, sweeping plains of farm fields in the midwest, or terraced farms in China or Peru, humans aren’t aren’t the only game in town when it comes to farms, and, really, we have never been. The three types of bugs I mentioned above (there are many species of leafcutter ants, termites, and ambrosia beetles, not all of them fungiculturists) are examples of insects that completely blow human farming techniques out of the water. Check out this fine piece of internet journalism from the blog Civil Eats: an interview with the entomologist Mark Moffett. In it, Dr. Moffett talks about the leafcutter ants he saw on a recent trip to Ecuador. Most people who see leafcutter ants carrying bits of leaves back to their nests assume the ants just eat the plants. Not so. They use the leaves as mulch for fungus gardens, which they maintain underground within their nests. The fungus gardens are inside chambers, with each garden about the size of a human brain (so two fists together) and similarly round and squishy looking. Over the years, these ant colonies get huge, going 20 or 30 feet underground and housing thousands (!) of fungus gardens, which feed millions of ants. The fungi they grow are a special species, too, that has adapted so closely to being raised by the ants that it can’t survive in the wild, nor can the ants eat anything else. The ants carefully weed their gardens, and spread pesticides, special bacteria they grow in their bodies, to help keep the fungi heathy. Sounds a lot like humans, right?
We cultivate plant and animal species for food, care for them, over time they become more and more adapted to domestication, until we rely on each other, as species, to survive. There’s one big difference with leafcutter ants: the ants go to incredible lengths to care for the environment they live in. Since they eat only one plant, and it cannot live without their care, this attention to the environment as a whole has been evolving in leafcutters for 50 million years and is the biggest reason they thrive today. They weed very carefully, and any fungus that becomes diseased is taken away to waste chambers buried deep underground, and the original garden chamber sealed off. This is why they farm their fungi in so many separate chambers: if a blight were to spread throughout the whole colony, the ants would all die. The backup plans and failsafes in these colonies are incredible, as is the ants’ attention to detail in their colonies. What humans could learn from leafcutters is this: the difference between living from drought to bumper crop is in how much care you put into keeping the environment healthy. These ants have lived in underground colonies long enough, and with a stable enough cultivated food supply to dig 30 feet down and half the size of tennis court (27′x39′ for doubles), with some waste chambers (those deep underground ones where diseased fungi go, as well as all the colony’s waste) big enough for a human to fit in. Think about it, Internet, just think about how long it would take ants to build that kind of thing, and how many ants must live in there to keep it all running. These colonies are enormously complex and efficient societies, all living on a monoculture food source, and they make it all work because huge amounts of that efficiency, the engines of ant progress, if you will, are focused on maintaining a healthy environment for the colony. They do nothing farmers don’t do, but there are no oil spills, no food poisoning debacles, no blights. Not because they don’t have the resources to let environmental disasters happen, on an ant-scale, but these things happen through neglect. And leafcutters don’t neglect their environment.
A prime example of both insect agriculture and humans causing their own food problems are bees. As you may already be aware, Internet, bees pollinate flowers, which is the only way those flowers can reproduce. Bees are the sole pollinators of many, many plants, including over 100 commercial crops just in the U.S. Bees are also dying like crazy. Scientists aren’t quite sure why, either, but most theories point to human causes, from pesticides to cell phone radiation to climate change. This ain’t a conspiracy theory, folks, bees are just dying and nobody knows why. It’s mostly bee colonies kept humans at this point, and organic bee farms are still doing alright, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to panic, because it is absolutely time to panic. Without bees, humans would be left with rice and cereal grains to eat, and that’s really it. Everything else is either pollinated by bees, or eats something that is. People of the internet, bees are heading for extinction, it’s probably our fault, nobody really knows why, and if they die, we’re gonna starve. I hate to be so melodramatic, but Colony Collapse Disorder (the vague term for whatever it is that is killing large numbers of bees) is terrifying.
So please, Internet, let’s be like the leafcutter ants. Let’s put as much work into caring for the environment around our farms as we do growing food on them, maybe even more work. It’s simply a matter of realizing that we need a new set of goals, and we need to get used to doing a little more work here and there. There is absolutely no way around it.
Internet, please direct your attention to the following piece of hogwash, a glimpse of an ad industry not yet accustomed to subtlety: For those of you who can’t read the tiny print, the block text underneath the baby reads:
HOW SOON IS TOO SOON? Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of soda and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness. – The Soda Pop Board of America
Frankly, Internet, holy crap! That first line in bold really speaks to what I think is the worst part of the advertising industry: ads are not designed to answer our questions about a product, or to provide us with information useful in deciding whether or not to buy a product, ads choose questions that assume desire and preclude choice. In an ad clearly directed toward concerned parents trying to look out for their children’s health, the question “Is soda healthy for my child?” does not exist. Instead, the question is “Am I giving my child enough soda?” the answer, of course, is no.
This ad has everything we’re all familiar with in ads, perhaps a little more obvious: happy customers, a directive from the company (at the top), a prompt for the consumer (we are supposed to ask “how soon is too soon?”), false statements in tricky language that can’t really be traced (“laboratory tests”), outrageous claims that are too vague to be technically wrong (“a lifetime of guaranteed happiness”), it should all sound pretty familiar. Compare with this Gatorade commercial, where the product is presented as an integral part of playing sports, and the company is portrayed as having invented some kind of miracle elixir (it’s just sugar water, right? Green sugar water. Wikipedia was pretty vague on what the heck “electrolytes” are, and I’m far from a biochemist, but they seem to be abundant in, you guessed it, fruits and vegetables). Shake your head and frown, if you dare, at the demise of New York’s sadly quixotic soda tax, which is getting its cavity-free teeth kicked in by as slick and vicious an ad campaign by a very, very wealthy industry.
I digress, Internet, I don’t need to tell you that advertising is insidious, despicable, and manipulative, that it’s always been that way, and that it got that way on purpose. Here’s my point: branding is a part of our lives, and it is a huge part of every choice we make. When I was little, I was (thank God) not allowed to drink soda at the dinner table. I would sit there with my glass of milk, and I remember thinking it was a bit unfair that my dad could choose to have a beer with dinner. This was not because I didn’t like the milk, or wanted to party hard at 8 years old, I am almost entirely certain that it was because of branding. I saw my dad pour the bottle with the label on it, that looked like a glass soda bottle, into a glass, and he could have it at dinner. I wanted to be a grown up and drink a grown up drink with a brightly colored logo. I’m being completely serious, I was a brand-conscious kid from day one, and I’m certain that every kid in this country is too. The end of my story is that my parents took the hard line and told me that soda was unhealthy and I couldn’t have it for dinner, and they kept telling me that until I was old enough to understand it for myself, and at 22 years old I would rather have milk for dinner because it’s delicious. Happy ending. But I’m telling you, Internet, that when kids want sugary food and soda, it has almost nothing to do with the way the stuff tastes. There’s sugar addiction, and that’s it’s own kind of bad news, but the real story here is branding. What would childhood be like in a logo-free house, I wonder? What if the fridge of my childhood was full of plain glass bottles, big reusable ones, so the logos could never get in the house. It’s not so far-fetched, simply buy the stuff at the store, pour it into the blank bottle, and throw the logos out (recycle them and get your 5 cents, of course) I’ve heard of some places that will fill big glass jugs with milk or juice or beer or whatever you keep in your fridge (there should be more of those places). When the logo is gone, you have to call a food what it is. Without the bright red label and the icy-cool pictures on the vending machine, Coca-Cola isn’t Coke, it’s fizzy brown sugar water, and that’s sort of gross. The world is full of branding, and you’ll never escape it, you’ll never protect your kids from it completely, but there is something to be said for parents who eat food and not brands, and for kids who learn that being a grown up means making food decisions based on the actual food, not the exciting label, not the happy looking people in the ads, not the snappy product name, just the food.
P.S. The kid in the ad looks a little creepy. Mouth hanging open, eyes fixed on a point in space somewhere above and past his mother, mind a complete sugar-crash blank. Mom smiles at Jr. with an air of anxious non-comprehension, as if he were telling a joke she does not understand. Weird.
