Recently, Common Sense media did a review on “What’s On Your Plate?” and here is what they had to say: “Parents need to know that this engaging documentary is an excellent, kid-friendly introduction to numerous complicated concepts about food, both controversial and not basic nutrition. It was seen as a non-biased film which speaks about vegetarians but did not offend meat consumers.

Whether you’ve seen the film or not, you can read a more in-depth analysis from writer; Joyce Slaton who states “Kids interested in social issues, environmentalism, film making, and activism will find some great role models in this film, and potentially some inspiration for how to turn curiosity into a tool that can really make a difference.” The film’s review and the Common Sense foundation truly safe guards the gap between media and the quality of information received by our kids.

We talk about it everyday, probably type it into Google’s search engine twice a week and order tons of books on how to live a healthier lifestyle, but the answer is right in front of your face. Your Surroundings!! Back in 2009, First lady Michelle Obama launched her “Let’s Move” campaign which empowers young kids to fight obesity and live a healthier lifestyle. “Let’s Move” is exactly what it sounds like, a movement. A movement to get healthy through physical and mental activities. It’s all about healthy physical activity and eating right. As cliche as it may sound, being healthy is easy, once you put your daily surroundings to good use.

[If you were in New York City, you would have to walk 3 miles from Yankee Stadium to Central Park in order to burn off the calories from a 12oz can of soda]

Eat Right:

Know the facts about the food and drinks you put into your body because not all that looks and tastes good is good for the body and your health.

Get Active:

Michelle Obama states “Kids and adults between 6 and 17 need to be active 60 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week for 6 to 8 weeks.” Did you know taking the steps instead of the elevator is a step towards limiting your chances of obesity? Taking the stairs is inexpensive, adds years to your life and adds up to a weekly exercise.

Below is a List of  Easy Steps to Living a Healthier Lifestyle:

1) Get Active! Move more and lessen the risk of obesity whether it’s by going for a twenty minute run, a bike ride or taking the stairs. If you ride the train get off a stop before your actual stop and walk the rest of the way.

2) Become Educated!  The more you know about the food you eat helps you to make better eating decisions.

3) Replace soda with water and fried foods with baked or steamed foods.

4) Maintain a positive attitude!

What’s On Your Plate? is a piece of the curriculum in one of the Studio in a School art education programs. The program works to promote lifestyle change in kids through visual arts. By combining nutrition lectures and art workshops, kids learn how to make healthier food choices by conceptualizing the food through art. Their Art & Healthy Living exhibit opened on February 28th and will be open for viewing until Wednesday March 14th.

Studio in a School gallery
1 East 53rd Street, Manhattan

Be sure to check it out!

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/studioimages/6935562835/

Or rather, it will be.

Elysium, Credit: Jeffrey K. Bedrick

That’s right, out in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle they’re devoting seven acres of land to what is likely our nation’s first food forest. It’s the next step forward in urban agriculture, a self-sustaining forest full of fresh food for the community.

The Beacon Food Forest started as a group project for a permaculture design course and with huge amounts of outreach, it’s becoming a reality. And seriously, they really care about what the community thinks–they even hired translators so that the Chinese-speaking residents of the area could have a say in the planning.

The best part, of course, is that anyone who happens to wander in can take what they like. No limit, no cost–pretty cool, eh? But Connie, you may ask, what if someone comes around and picks every single apple in the forest? Well according to lead landscape architect Margarett Harrison, “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.” So for all you Seattleites out there, when the time comes strike while the iron is hot!

The Beacon Food Forest folks are hoping to break ground this summer, plant the trees in the fall, and open next July. I’m excited to see how it all turns out!

Credit: http://beaconfoodforest.weebly.com/design.html

Here they are!

The Project School

The Project School’s fourth and fifth grade class, led by their teacher Sarah Jerasa, incorporated the What’s On Your Plate? program in a unit on global and local homelessness and hunger in December. They held a screening of What’s On Your Plate? as a fundraiser, raising money to carry out projects related to their studies: funding a well for a village in Africa, donating an animal to a community through Heifer International Organization, and donating medical supplies and food to area shelters.  The bundles were used to educate their school and members of their community to promote awareness of larger food-related issues, like food insecurity and local food.

It was a great success, and the response they received from the screening was incredible. The students were able to raise over $300 for their projects! They engaged their community in a discussion that later continued into the classroom.

Take a look at some pictures from their screening!

Tribe One

Tribe One of Knoxville, Tennessee is an organization founded in order to encourage leadership skills and economic self-sufficiency in the youth of East Knoxville. Tribe One used What’s On Your Plate? as a part of their after-school holistic health programming in an effort to focus students on the importance of  keeping their body, mind, and spirit healthy.

Here are some pictures showing a few of the kids at Tribe One making Sadie’s Fruit Smoothie at an after-school program:

YUM!

As for Harlem Seeds, we’re expecting an update from them soon. They’re busy organizing events to bring healthy food to kids in Harlem. Watch out for a post about their event soon.

Thank you to all of our Bundle recipients and a very special thank you to everyone who helped us give these bundles away by purchasing one for their home.

The other cool thing about ZisBoomBah is the Play section, which I thought would be some online games to help kids learn about nutrition. I was so wonderfully wrong! Play is full of activities that involve actual exercise and have little or nothing to do with computers! The web is a great tool for helping kids learn about being healthy, but sitting in front of a computer is not actually good for you (thus the great paradox of the 21st century) and the Play section is a wonderful way to solve that. In fact, from the Pick Chow section to the Chef Recipes to the activities in Play, ZisBoomBah seems to be all about getting off the internet and into a healthy, fun lifestyle, and you, Internet, should get excited about that.

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.

Tenzin is planting a tree!

Maria Finn is probably among the coolest people you will ever hear of.

Why?

Because she has a book, named “A Little Piece of Earth,” which is possibly the cutest thing in the world. It teaches you how to garden and how something as seemingly trivial as soil could grow into something amazing. As if that weren’t enough, she even helped WOYP? create our own window garden. She knows just about everything about urban gardening, which is great because not many people in the city do. We even have an apple tree on our balcony! Our little friend, Tenzin who is only five years old – and is also the cutest thing in the world, helped and he basically planted an entire garden (with Maria’s help.) You should read this book if you want to turn your apartment/house into a miniature forest.

We told you this was cool.

Click here to see Maria’s blog.

• Preparation time: 10 minutes
• Inactive prep time: at least 24 hours
• Cooking time: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• 2 or 3 large carrots (about 1 pound), peeled
• 1 cup white balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar (or any other kind of clear vinegar)
• 2 Tablespoons organic raw cane sugar
• Course sea salt

1. Cut the carrots into sticks that are 2 inches long and 1/4 inch thick.
2. Combine 2 cups water, the vinegar, sugar and 1 teaspoon salt in a medium saucepan over high heat. Bring to a boil and add the carrots. Bring back toa boil for 1 minute, then remove from the heat.
   Transfer the carrots and liquid to a glass container (not metal). Let cool and cover.
3. Refrigerate the covered pickles for at least 24 hours before serving. (They will keep for up to one week in the refrigerator)
4. Eat them and laugh.