Massachusetts is taking a step in the right direction, Internet.

After considerable dispute, the Massachusetts state Senate voted unanimously in favor of the “School Nutrition Bill.” It is going to ban sodas, sports drinks, and all junk in general, from being sold in schools. They hope to sell low-fat dairy products, fresh and dried fruit, and 100 percent fruit juices without any added sugars or carbonation. It should also increase farm-school involvement in the coming years. Needless to say, we are very excited for this bill to be passed.

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Presenting our new Family Cook-In! Screening Toolkit. Designed to take your family through an afternoon of learning about food and cooking together — it has games and activites for all aged kids, places to record family recipes, and ideas for real ways you can make a difference.

Enjoy with curious kids and a good meal. Cheers.

News from a favorite blog: Fed Up With Lunch: the School Lunch Project

Mrs. Q — the teacher in Illinois who is eating school lunch everyday in 2010, taking pictures,  and blogging about it — has started bringing it guest bloggers. Teachers from around the country, and the world, are reporting on the state of their own schools lunches. The contrasts are quite stark. Let’s take a look:

First, a typical meal from Mrs. Q’s public school:

Here’s what she had to say about it:

Wow. Truly monumentally bad. I couldn’t get through the main entree. I was hungry too… I bit the cheese lasagna and it didn’t even pass muster as pasta! Al dente? No, al crappy. The pasta couldn’t hold its form and it crumbled. I ate two bites and I was done. Yuck.

Meanwhile, at a nursery school near Hiroshima, Japan, eating school lunch is a different experience. Guest blogger Daniel Ferguson took this photo:

From Daniel:

At lunch, we waited until all children, about 60 total, had been served soup, fish, and sushi before saying “itadakimasu”, a kind of secular grace said before eating in Japan, meaning thanks to those who prepared the food. The cook teachers also joined us and everyone thanked them for the meal they had been preparing all morning. Then they walked around the room responding to children saying “oishii” meaning delicious. And as they always do, the children ate everything, stacked their dishes, and put their chopsticks and cup away to be used again tomorrow.

Wow. Respect and thanks for the lunchroom cooks, teachers and students eating together, delicious looking food, happy kids cleaning their plates, and to top it off: reusable plates and utensils. I’m a huge fan of Mrs. Q. Not only for exposing the grossness of her own school food, but also for showing us that  another way is possible.

BIG NEWS!: The New York City Department of Health just decided today to legalize beekeeping throughout the city. For the past decade beekeeping has been illegal — under a health department code that put bees in the same category as dangerous and venomous wild animals.

The ban didn’t stop hundreds of residents from keeping hives secretly in backyards. The risk of getting caught however was steep — fines up to $2,000.

Just Food and other groups have been working hard for almost 2 years  on a campaign to lift the ban. We salute you.

Come out and celebrate tomorrow night with The New York City Meetup Group, Gotham City Honey Co-Op, The Commons, Just Food and other bee-lovers.

Internet, check this article out. Scary graphic, right? But it got me thinking. What this means, essentially, is that the way we eat is determined by a larger system of food production, which limits our choices as consumers. I think most people have known this for a long time, but bear with me. I think we pretty much asked for the food system we suffer from today. Not that we deserved it, but we voted with our dollars, with what we payed attention to and what we ignored, we gave our tacit approval (intentionally or not) to this food system, and now we live with it. What I think that means, is that it is possible to create a healthy, sustainable food system in the not-so distant future that will be every bit the unstoppable corporate leviathan that our current one is. People didn’t always eat the way they do now, and processed food was never actually forced down anyone’s throat (figuratively speaking). What happened was that these foods were invented, or a few early ones were, and made cheaply available because of the production cost, and people bought them. Then, as people began making money off processed food, the idea that people valued low cost and availability over anything else in food, processed food grew in popularity. As the industry grew, it built manufacturing infrastructure, advertising infrastructure, and lobbying infrastructure to go with it, which became entrenched and encouraged more growth in the industry until things reached the food world of today. To me, that is a story of a disastrous and harmful system built around a society that kept encouraging it, not a story of conspiracy or devious mustache twiddling on the part of food companies. What needs to happen is that we need to be extremely clear about the change in the food industry, and that will only happen with slow, deliberate cultural change. We ended up with all this terrible food because we bought it without knowing what it would do to us, and to create a new food system that is not only healthier and more sustainable, but won’t end up completely backfiring on us, we need to be better consumers. Every time we buy food or don’t buy food, that sends a message to food producers. As a country, we are still sending the message that we like our food cheap, heavily processed, and tremendously unhealthy, and that is exactly what we’re getting.

Here is New York there is a debate going on about soda. Specifically: should the government place a one penny per ounce tax on bottled sugary drinks? The tax could bring in $7.6 billion annually to the state — money Bloomberg says would go to support education and health care. The opposition argues: “Taxes never made anyone healthy! And this tax is unfair to poor people!”

First, let’s be skeptical about the beverage industry standing up for the rights of the poor to drink soda.

To address the real issue, of whether a soda tax is unfair to people already struggling to afford food for their families: theoretically, yes, a tax on food items will be felt more by those with less money. Sugar and fat rich foods pack in more calories per dollar, and in the U.S.A. it’s cheaper to eat heavily processed, nutrient-void food than fresh, healthy food. This is the current reality. But no one benefits from us collectively throwing our hands in the air and saying, “Oh well! That’s life!” And no one benefits from a continuation of the status quo. As so many people have argued, the cost of eating junk may be cheaper in the short term, but in the long term is is hugely more expensive. 2 in 3 American adults are overweight. 1 in 3 kids. The money saved at the grocery store is being felt on a nation-wide scale in the rising costs and expenditures in health care.

A tax on soda would be a step towards changing this discrepancy. However, the solution is not to raise the price of processed food so it is as expensive as fresh food and therefore less appealing. We must also lower the cost of fresh food so healthy stuff is affordable for regular working people.

The question we should ask about the soda tax is: what will this money subsidize? Will it directly fund school lunch programs that provide fresh healthy food to kids on free or reduced lunch? Will it be used to change our food system so healthy options are available and affordable?

So far, the soda tax is being touted as a two-for-one fix: funding Medicaid and education, and addressing childhood obesity. Bloomberg has specifically said that this money would go towards keeping teachers in classrooms and preventing further cuts to public education. But I think we should get specific: If this tax is really being done in the interests of nutrition and health, than some of the money should be used specifically to fund healthy food programs. We can’t just make junk more expensive, without making the good stuff affordable.

But that’s just my opinion. What you think readers? Soda Tax: Yay or Nay?

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.

I just watched television’s Jamie Oliver give a TED talk (TED talks, by the way, are always worth watching) and it left me with some thoughts about food education. Mr. Oliver gave a good talk (it’s interesting to see a tv star stumbling over his words a little when he speaks about something he’s really passionate about) and my favorite thing he kept coming back to was how we learn about food. Jamie Oliver recently made a tv show where he went to a small town in West Virginia with a serious obesity problem, and tried to do something about it. The families he talked to had terrible food habits, and he talked about how we learn those habits, how some kids are never exposed to cooking at home, and therefore never teach their kids to cook, and new generations are essentially cut off from any knowledge about food. During his talk, Jamie Oliver shows a few pictures and videos of people he met, and the video of him talking to a mother, surrounded by the piles of pizza and chili dogs her family eats is particularly chilling. But it occurs to me that Mr. Oliver chose, as he was probably right to do, the worst examples of America’s obesity epidemic. I’m guessing that most people who read this blog don’t eat fast food every day, but it’s still important to recognize that even if you’re better off than the people Jamie Oliver shows us, you still live in and are affected by America’s food culture. We can all learn more about food, and we can all teach more about food. The culture that has caused this obesity epidemic is one in which we all separately accept food from the same sources. We go to supermarkets and restaurants and vending machines and bodegas and we trust them. We believe that if we buy a package labeled “lettuce” we are holding lettuce, with nothing extra and nothing missing. We watch cooking shows (like Jamie Oliver’s) and assume that when they tell us how to make a meal, there’s no reason to cook otherwise. The truth is that food knowledge is communal: we have much more to learn from each other about the food we eat than we think.