The leaders of Slow Food Charleston are spearheading “Children Supporting Children for Healthy School Lunch,” a summer-long initiative where kids from the Charleston, SC community will talk about Time for Lunch at tables setup in front of local food markets. Starting June 30th, they’ll be manning (supervised) tables at the Whole Foods Market in Mt. Pleasant, at Earthfare in West Ashley and at Harris Teeter on East Bay Street. Alongside community members, the kids will discuss and answer questions about Time for Lunch, gather signatures for the Time for Lunch petition and provide market-goers with packets of information about ways to get involved.

According to Melissa Clegg, the Slow Food Charleston member leading the program, “This campaign aims to empower children by giving them the tools and the platform to take initiative for the building of their futures and the futures of children without a voice. Every child I have spoken with has identified with the issue of school lunch and been energized to fight for healthier choices that help build our local communities and reduce negative impacts on the environment.”

Slow Food Charleston’s extraordinary work with children and local food education did not start with the Time for Lunch campaign. This past Sunday, Clegg and chapter leader Carole Addlestone held a “Bring-Your-Own Picnic” fundraising event on Wadmalaw Island to benefit their organic garden project at Sanders-Clyde Elementary in downtown Charleston. Last week, the project was featured in Charleston’s Post and Courier.

As Slow Food moves forward with its campaign to give schools across America the resources to serve real food – and to plant gardens like the one at Sanders-Clyde Elementary – Melissa and Carole continue to work with Charleston’s youth. With their help, several children from Charleston schools have written letters to their legislators, letting them know how important healthier school lunches are to our nation’s future.

If you’re in Charleston on September 7th, the day of the National Eat-In, make sure to attend one of the several small community Eat-Ins Slow Food Charleston is planning. To get involved, please write Carole Addlestone (caroladdlestone[at]mindspring.com).

Cathy Giannini has been working in the cafeteria in Soquel, California for 21 years. In the world of child nutrition, that’s not unusually long (I’ve spoken with directors who have been working for over 40 years). Still, the changes she has seen throughout her career are striking.

When Giannini started out, she arrived in the kitchen at 4 am every day to start cooking. She made her own refried beans, her own hamburger meat for tacos and sloppy joes, even her own ranch dressing. She cooked 20 turkeys at a time in an enormous kettle and served the meat with homemade mashed potatoes. A baker in the district made all the breads from scratch as well.

Giannini grew up on a farm in Georgia, where food and home cooking were celebrated. Her father was a cook in the Army, and her two grandmothers were always preparing something in her kitchen. Giannini learned to cook by watching them as they added a pinch of this and a pinch of that to the pot. When she was raising her own children, Giannini always cooked from scratch. She loved it, and she is a firm believer that homemade food is healthier. “That way you can control what’s in it — the amount of sodium and the amount of oil,” she said.

Today, Giannini’s lunch program is the antithesis of her experience growing up. On a visit a few months ago, students came out for brunch and picked up doughnuts and sausage-studded breakfast pizzas — both in a package, both recently out of the freezer. For lunch, they get packaged “el eXtremo” burritos, corndogs, mini cheeseburgers (on their buns in a plastic package) and Round Table Pizza. Giannini used to spend her days flipping through recipe books. Now she goes to food shows and seeks out the newest processed products.

Last week I picked a perfectly ripe strawberry in the front yard, brought it into the kitchen and laid it on the table. Didn’t seem right to eat it, not yet. After an unsuccessful attempt to take close-up photographs without a tripod, I cut it in two and laid it on a plate. Carried it around for a while. Nice looking berry.

This is a Marshall, a variety described by Slow Food USA and the RAFT alliance in 2004 as one of the top ten endangered foods in the country. According to the first RAFT publication, it was once known as “the finest eating strawberry in America”: “exceedingly handsome, splendidly flavored, pleasantly sprightly, aromatic and juicy”. Who could resist that? I had to taste one.

But how do you find and grow a nearly extinct berry? According to RAFT, “the only hint of this remarkable strawberry exists at the USDA’s Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon in the form of a single clone”. No one carries it commercially. In fact the only other known source is the Bainbridge Island Historical Society in Washington State, and its plants haven’t been verified through genetic testing.

This week, a New York community garden is playing host to an impressive combination: community organizing, hip-hop music, and an important message about healthy and sustainable food.  The Grassroots Artists’ Movement—G.A.ME, to those in the know—kicked off its first annual Go Green Hip-Hop Tour last Wednesday. G.A.ME’s mission is an innovative one. It uses the powerful medium of hip-hop music to increase awareness of and promote action on various socioeconomic issues in the black and Latino communities. When the organization first began in 2001, its focus was on providing a safety net and network for rap artists themselves, but it’s expanded significantly in recent years. Lawrence James, G.A.ME’s former director, presents his organization as a hybrid of a labor union and community organizing non-profit. James emphasizes hip-hop artists’ leadership potential, saying that G.A.ME works with “artists who are trying to educate and organize others so that, hopefully, our whole community can be reached.”

Here’s where the Go Green campaign comes in. G.A.ME’s leadership was quick to recognize that dozens of African-American and Latino communities nationwide face massive challenges when it comes to sustaining a diet that’s good, clean, and fair. The key to overcoming these challenges, they say, is to raise awareness. To that end, G.A.ME partnered with a half-dozen local hip-hop artists, not to mention groups ranging from the Bronx-based Green Thumb Garden to Slow Food USA.

Surrounded by Green Thumb Garden’s apple trees and beds of organic greens, these artists eloquently explained the personal, societal, and environmental importance of slow food as the event’s organizers distributed literature and spoke with passersby about how to eat well in an urban environment. As one of Green Thumb’s gardeners put it as she gestured to a box of composting worms, “I’ve been working with plants all my life—we’re trying to make sure more people can say that.”

Upcoming Go Green Tour Events:
Thursday, June 25, 6-9 p.m.: Baltimore, John Eager Howard Recreation Center.
Friday, June 26, 6-10 p.m.: Boston, Blackstone Community Center.
Saturday, June 27, 12-4 p.m.: New York, 167th St. bet. Gerard and Cromwell Avenues.
Sunday, June 28,: Richmond, details TBD.

For more information, visit G.A.ME’s website at http://www.kickgame.com.

First, Robyn O’Brien’s the Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.  Her book is a good companion piece to “Food, Inc.” I think, exploring how food is making our kids sick, and how big business is profiting from that, all from a Mom’s first-hand perspective.  As she explains it, pretty plain and simple: “the recent deregulation of the American food system allowed chemicals and additives into the American food supply that have either been banned or labeled from foods around the world in order to enhance profitability for the food industry.” Click here to read an excellent interview with her on Civil Eats.

Next up, a book I had the pleasure of getting to hear read aloud live (ok, well, parts of it) by the author the other night.  Lisa Hamilton, a photographer and writer has crafted a beautiful triptych--three stories, three farmers, and how they are struggling to keep their way of farming alive in a world pushing towards the industrialization of damn near everything.  Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness is clearly the work of a seasoned photographer; it reads like a giant photograph, with depth of field, and texture, and life bubbling up off the page.

As Congress gears up for this year’s child nutrition reauthorization, there has been a lot of discussion about the loopholes in the National School Lunch Program. For the most part, though, those discussions have focused on the laughably outdated list of “foods of minimal nutritional value” and the junk food that cafeterias sell outside of complete, reimbursable meals. Few people been paying attention to the loopholes that affect the nutritional quality of the meals themselves. Over the past few months, I’ve been accumulating a list of loopholes that allow school cafeterias to dish out less-than-healthy lunches. Here are a few of my favorites:

Percent Calories from Fat — School meals must contain no more than 30 percent of calories from fat and no more than 10 percent of calories from saturated fat. However, regulations set only a minimum for calories, not a maximum (in fact, I’ve spoken to school foodservice directors who say they were written up for serving low-calorie meals and had to put desserts back on the menu to meet the regulations). That means meeting the percent-from-fat requirements is largely a game. An entree that is high in fat or saturated fat is totally OK to serve, as long as you put it on the menu with side dishes that are high in calories but low in fat. Recently, I talked to a director who said she had been encouraged to put small bags of Skittles on the menu to meet the benchmarks. The candy boosts the calories in a meal without adding fat, so it often puts the percent of calories from fat within the acceptable threshold (it’s also fortified with vitamin C, so it helps meet that requirement as well). So while a meal with French fries or stuffed-crust pizza may be too high in fat to meet the nutrition guidelines, adding some candy (or another source of extra calories) to the tray makes the lunch into a USDA-compliant meal.

Do you want better oversight of GE Crops? 
You have 5 days to tell the USDA what you think…

In the winter months of the Bush Administration, the former President allowed the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to weaken its oversight on genetically engineered (GE) crops. 

The Center for Food Safety writes, “Instead of tightening controls to protect the public and environment from contamination and harm, what the USDA has offered further endangers your right to choose the foods you and your family eat and farmers’ rights to their chosen livelihoods.”

The proposed rules raise concerns for many: among them, the Center for Food Safety and 83 other farm, food, public interest and environmental organizations who previously wrote to our new Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, last March about oversight of GE regulations. 

Some of the many regulation concerns include: proposed rules that will ensure more frequent GE contamination of organic and conventional crops and continued permission to the self-interested biotechnology organizations to make the decision about whether their GE crops should be regulated at all.  What’s more, the USDA published these rules before releasing the full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)—a breach of law—resulting in an absence of required public review that would provide the USDA with informed regulatory recommendations.

In the past few days the Center for Food Safety has drafted a letter to the USDA and Slow Food USA has signed on.  If you would like to submit a letter of your own, you can send this sample letter or use it to help compose a letter of your own.  You still have 5 days to comment before the “comment period” closes. 

For an interesting debate on the roots of GM opposition, the role of big agribusiness, and whether we’ve achieved real scientific consensus, click here.

Now, you might be saying: It sounds like there are problems surrounding GE, but I’m not completely convinced that GE is a bad idea.  I think I need more information before I decide one way or the other.  If I sign this form, am I saying that GE crops are bad?

No, you’re not.  And if you’re confused or on the fence about GE, you’re not alone.  By signing your name to the Center for Food Safety letter you are asking the government to follow the law and allow a public review of USDA’s GE regulations.  You will be asking for a moratorium to be placed on commercial planting of new GE crops until new regulations of GE crops are implemented—regulations will be developed from the pool of collected information and recommendations from the public.  In sum-up, you are asking for transparency—for all GE practices to be brought out in the open, and be subject to public opinion.

Rupert Murray’s documentary, The End of the Line, educates its audience about the reality of the sea: it is not an ever -replenishing body of water, and it is running low on many of its largest fish. Most likely, people who go to see the film agree that the ocean, like our land, must be mindfully utilized and not greedily mined. So what new information does the film provide to those who are concerned about fish in the sea? For starters, Murray acknowledges that the trawlers scooping hordes of fish out of the ocean rob the world not only of fish, but of jobs, a food source and the spirit of fishing communities.

Based on a book by British journalist Charles Clover, this film visually exposes the fishing industry’s incredibly powerful technologies. A boat unloads a waterfall of sardines, most of which will be used to feed farmed fish. Graphs of fish populations plummet, while graphs of their pray are on the exponential rise. The viewer is warned of the inevitable simplification of aquatic ecosystems if we continue to fish beyond recommended quotas.

As the scenes flash from rather bloody struggles of man and fish to decadent diners at Nobu, it’s hard not to think back to your last piece of delicious fish with a portion of guilt. But that is not the point. Like our land animals that may be sustainably raised and fed, fish can be caught using methods that ensure their sustainability, as well. The film does not ask us to reconsider whether to eat fish or not, but rather to consider the practices of those who caught the fish, and the stability of that species.

HR 2749—The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009—has passed through committee and is on its way to the House of Representatives for a vote before the July 4 holiday break.  Now, given the recent and on-going challenges our food system has faced with recalls of peanuts, pistachios, spinach and tomatoes, not to mention mad cow and swine flu—you may think a little more regulation might be in order and I would agree with you.  But how much of this is a good step forward in protecting the public and how much is using a sledgehammer to put up a tack?

The Act gives the FDA some powers that you might want in a food regulatory agency—the power to order a food recall, access to a farmer’s or producer’s records, and establishing a means to trace food along it’s chain of production.  Other aspects of the new bill may make you think Big Brother is about to take over our food system. Among the “Alarming Provisions” of the bill (as reported in the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund site) are: giving the FDA the power to quarantine a geographical area--prohibiting all food movement in that region; empowering the FDA to dictate how crops are raised and harvested; and the narrow definition of a “farm” that would be excluded from these new fees and regulations--it turns out if you make cheese, bread or use lacto-fermentation you are a manufacturer and not a farm.  How many growers at your local farmer’s market create value-added products to boost their incomes--probably no longer if this bill passes in its current form.

Last week, Michelle Obama made these remarks to a group of fifth-graders who had just harvested 73 pounds of lettuce and 12 pounds of snap peas from the First Lady’s Garden on the White House Lawn:

“To make sure that we give all our kids a good start to their day and to their future, we need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served in schools. We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids.”

It wasn’t Michael Pollan who said those words. It was the First Lady. Coming from her, the phrase “big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda” is a call to action we cannot ignore.

When children are given the chance to plant and pick and cook food that’s both delicious and good for them, they’re far more curious to give it a try—and more often than not, they like it. When those children are offered real food in the school cafeteria and at the family dinner table, they eat it. They begin to ask for it.

Michelle has said that when Sasha and Malia learned to enjoy real food, they started “lecturing” her about what she should be eating and “what a carrot does, what broccoli does” to our bodies. Her kids taught her to enjoy real food. Kids can lead the way.

The National School Lunch Program provides a meal to 30 million children every school day. By giving schools the resources to serve real food, we can teach 30 million children healthy eating habits that will last throughout their lives. That’s a major down payment on health care reform. By providing 30 million children with locally grown fruits and vegetables, we can dramatically reshape the way this country grows and gets its food. By raising a generation of children on real food, we can build a strong foundation for their health, for our economy’s health and for America’s future prosperity.

This year, the Child Nutrition Act, which is the bill that governs the National School Lunch Program, is up for reauthorization. Unless citizens everywhere speak up this summer, “business as usual” in Congress will pass a Child Nutrition Act that continues to fail our children. We can do better.

Our leaders in Congress have to hear that everyday people in their districts refuse to accept the status quo. We have to tell them that when it comes to our children and the legacy we’re leaving them, change can’t wait.

That’s why a group of us are organizing a National Eat-In for Labor Day, Sept. 7, 2009. On that day, people in communities across America will gather with their neighbors for public potlucks that send a clear message to our nation’s leaders: It’s time to provide America’s children with real food at school.

To get the whole country to sit down to share a meal together, we’re going to need the help of all kinds of people: parents, teachers, community leaders, kids and people who’ve never done anything like this before. We’re going to need everyone to pitch in, starting today—because with the President calling for health care reform and the First Lady planting a garden on the White House Lawn, we’ve got an opening to pass legislation that grants 30 million children the freedom to grow up healthy.

We can do it this year, but only if we act now. It’s time to get real food into schools.