As I am typing this post The House of Representatives is debating on whether or not to pass a bill that increases the amount of money spent on American schools. Kristen Mancinelli just sent us a link about The House of Representatives debating the Child Nutrition Reauthorization act. (CNR). You can view House proceedings at this link: http://houselive.gov/
Hey, Internet! Have you heard about Adopt-A-Farmbox? Would you like to? You would? Adopt-A-Farmbox is a super cool New York City organization that simply builds farmboxes (boxes made of recycled wood, that are perfect homes for delicious plants) and sends them to schools and community centers, complete with organic soil, organic seeds to grow fruit, plan layouts, educational programs with nutrition and cooking classes, and curriculums for schools. It’s pretty awesome, especially in a city where finding the space for a school garden can be daunting, and school and community projects around growing food and caring for plants are totally the best. I mean, how could you not love an organization like Adopt-A-Farmbox? You should totally get a farmbox for your school! Or for your community center!
A new farmbox in the making. Lookin’ good, farmbox!
Young kids and their food are things that need to be settled. Often kids don’t eat school lunch because it’s not tasty, and sometimes parents don’t support the idea of their kids eating unhealthy school food. Although many people might choose school lunch over any other alternative because it’s inexpensive, making sure that your child learns, at an early age, to make a habit of replacing these unhealthy school lunches with healthier food is definitely worth it. Lesley Alderman from the New York Times recently wrote an article about incorporating healthier food into school lunch, these are some tips I found that I though might be helpful:
1. Parents who have time during the day can choose a day to have lunch with their child and see what’s being served.
2. If your child’s school has different options for each day, encourage your child to try them all.
3. A good tip that always works is packing your own healthy home-made lunch for the day. This can be done with all kinds of food, it can even be left overs from the night before.
I recently viewed a short documentary film called Plan Nicaragua that focuses on food security in Nicaragua. It was a really moving piece because it highlighted the fact the global warming was limiting growth in Nicaragua and making it hard for crops to grow. It makes me respect where food comes from, and respect the farmers and people who work in the fields.
I saw a glimpse of what farming is actually like and it looks like a rigorous job. Children are the narrators in this film, creating an accessible experience for the viewer. What’s on Your Plate? and Plan Nicaragua are similar in that aspect. Their use of children enables viewers to really understand what is going on, no matter how complicated the issue is.
Jill Richardson, at La Vida Locavore, is writing a series of diary posts that focuses on the agricultural problems in Bolivia due to pesticides and fertilizer. Apparently after these products were introduced to Bolivia, citizens began t0 get cancer and other types of illnesses. We look forward to seeing more posts about the issues in Bolivia concerning food.
Check this out, Internet. This isn’t news, per se. It’s not like I read this and spit out my coffee with a “Holy Toledo! Processed meat is terrible for me?!” For one thing, I don’t like coffee, so I would have spit out my tea or something. For another, the old “don’t eat processed meats” story is as old as the hills. The thing that makes this noteworthy is the way the message was phrased this time, “too dangerous for human consumption.” This is one of the things that scares me most about the world we live in: there seems to be a sort of lifecycle of products in which they are invented, praised, become part of our lives, and are finally discovered to cause fatal diseases.
Lead paint, for example, stays bright and fresh looking much longer than the safer stuff, and was used just about everywhere, until it was banned in the 1970s for causing serious brain damage. The use of DDT as an insecticide won the Nobel Prize for Hermann Muller in 1948 and got sprayed over just about every plant we ate until it was banned in 1972 for causing cancer. What else is lurking in your kitchen, waiting to strike you down? I mean, it’s hard not to think like a tabloid here, but it’s true. We often find out that things are harmful to us only after they are used widely.
What’s to blame for this? Are food and other industries too willing to use risky chemicals in their products? Can we really get a safe level of “riskiness” defined when the reasons that a product might be harmful might not even occur to us for decades? Is medical research too slow to identify health risks? Too underfunded to take chances on studies of innocuous products on the off chance that they might harm us in some way we haven’t thought of yet? The only optimistic point I can think of is that this kind of medical research, this kind of thinking that things we use in our daily life might harm us in unknown ways, is relatively new, and each new discovery adds to a pool of knowledge that only grows with time. For instance, carcinogens, which are the cancer-causing substances in sodium nitrate (processed red meats), DDT, tobacco, and loads of other things, were only discovered in 1910. That’s a hundred years ago, and at least 3000 years too late to prevent humans from picking up smoking habits, but once we knew what to look for, we found it. Once we found it, we started working on banning the dangerous products. It will always be slow going, but the trick is to keep working at it. And when scientists tell you that processed meats are bad for you, remember to stop buying them.
Hi fives all around, Internet! Our pals at Zis! Boom! Bah! won a big award from Apps for Healthy Kids! Zis! Boom! Bah!’s Pick Chow! app won Best Tool for being a great web app kids can use to eat healthier. I checked out Pick Chow! a while ago and I can confirm that it is an awesome app. Planning out a healthy, balanced, delicious meal can be a tough task, but it’s a lot more fun with bright colors and cool looking nutrition meters. Way to go, Zis! Boom! Bah! You guys are internet champs!
Apps for Healthy Kids is part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and is a competition where software developers, game designers, students, and computer whizzes of all types can win prizes for using computers to help kids lead healthier lives. It’s a good idea these days when we use computers in just about every part of our lives. Apps for Healthy Kids is a great way to start making kids’ health an important goal for software developers and designers. There’s so much potential in computers as a way to teach kids, and programs like Apps for Healthy Kids can help us realize it.
Internet, it’s been a while! I’ve been real busy for the last month, because (I don’t want to brag, but) the What’s On Your Plate? DVD is out! You can buy it from Amazon, from our website or our distributor Bullfrog’s site, or you can stream it on Netflix (it even works on the Netflix-Wii instant queue thing my roomate has, if that’s how you watch movies). Basically, we’re incredibly excited here at WOYP HQ. The DVD is really cool, it’s got a music video of the WOYP song by Nona Hendryx (from Labelle! I still can’t get over that) plus a video of a Q&A session from one of our screenings and a way-mysterious deleted scene!
Okay, I’ll stop pushing the DVD now. We’re really proud of it, and we hope you guys check it out and like it, but for now, stay cool, Internet, and eat something good today.
Eggmergency? Eggpedemic? ArmEGGeddon? Maybe not, but right now, we are in the middle of the biggest egg-borne Salmonella outbreak in U.S. History. At least 1300 people are sick, a prom was ruined, the FDA is furiously telling us that everything is cool, eggs are being recalled left and right, egg prices are skyrocketing, and the whole nation is trembling at the feet of Salmonella. This whole fiasco makes me think about two things. The first is a little I-told-you-so sounding, but the reason this epidemic is so widespread is because the American food industry is dependent on a small number of huge factory farms that distribute food to the entire country. The infected eggs, it seems, came entirely from two farms in Iowa. Basically, this wouldn’t have happened, at least not as badly, if we got our eggs from local farms. I know we always talk about local farming at WOYP, because that’s what we’re all about, and it’s obnoxious for me to talk about how right I’ve been all along. But seriously, Internet, when two farms are sending eggs all over the country and some chickens in those farms get sick, those diseases get put on trucks and sent to grocery stores thousands of miles away, and we get this. And it makes it harder to track an epidemic when people are getting sick simultaneously on opposite sides of the country. Replace the small number of huge farms with a huge number of small ones, and if you do get Salmonella in some eggs, the epidemic will be small, and the source will be easy to trace.
Of course, it’s easy to say that a few huge farms are easier to keep safe and healthy than a vast number of small farms scattered across the country, and that would be an excellent point. Which brings me to my second thought about the egg recall: as linked above, the FDA does not think it is necessary to start vaccinating chickens against Salmonella. I get that it’s dangerous to over-medicate livestock (antibiotics in my milk! gross!) but chickens depend on farmers to keep them healthy, and getting your shots is part of staying healthy these days. Sure, I think factory farms and cruelty to animals cause most food problems, but this really never would have happened to such an alarming degree if we didn’t depend on huge farms and watched out for our chickens’ health. So, People of the Internet, it’s your job, as it always has been, to seek out local farmers for your eggs, and FDA, it’s your job, as it always has been, to regulate a food system that takes care of its chickens. Go forth!
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:
