Universal Lunch Poised to Move Beyond Philly

by Slow Food USA Interns Alex Tung and Leah Gorham

This week, the front line for getting better food into schools is Philadelphia.

After narrowly escaping the closure of its school breakfast and lunch program, which provides free meals to 120,000 low-income students without requiring their families to fill out unduly paperwork, Philadelphia has turned the tables: five Pennsylvania Congressmen are introducing bills in the House and Senate that would expand the city’s paperless program to the rest of the nation. Together, the Paperless Enrollment Act for School Meals of 2009 and Rep. Joe Sestak’s School Meal Enhancement Act of 2009 would give schools an alternative to the current application processing system and would make it easier for poor families to apply for free and reduced-price meals.

In a press release, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, a co-sponsor of the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009, said, “Modernization of the school lunch program is one of my top priorities when the Senate reauthorizes the Child Nutrition Act later this fall.... The current system is inefficient and outdated.”

More after the jump

Royal Vegetables in the Queen’s Backyard

by Slow Food USA intern Regina Fitzsimmons

Last week, Prince Philip dined on Cambridge Favourite strawberries to celebrate his 88th birthday.  But he didn’t eat just any strawberries—these were picked fresh, from just outside the Palace doors.

The Queen’s new garden harks back to Britain’s 1939 “Dig for Victory” campaign and Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 “Victory Garden.” By setting an example of growing food, the White House and Palace encouraged families to start their own gardens and use all available land for produce production—from golf courses to the Tower of London moat! 

Today Queen Elizabeth II and Michelle Obama are bringing fresh vegetables back to the White House and Palace lawns, encouraging local economic-growth as well as eating healthy foods. 
The Queen is also encouraging the preservation of endangered foods by growing out some royal varieties: word has it that the French bean Blue Queen and the dwarf French bean Royal Red have already been planted in her garden.  And there are more endangered varieties soon to go into the ground: the Northern Queen lettuce and the Golden Queen, the Queen of Hearts and the White Queen tomatoes! These heirlooms were provided by Garden Organic, the UK’s leading organic growing charity organization. 

We applaud the Queen’s attention to endangered varieties, and hope that our First Lady will take a cue from her by adding, say, some Ark of Taste varieties to the White House patch.

Check out this Daily Mail article to see a photograph of the Queen’s tomatoes, runner beans, and potatoes!

For a refresher about Michelle Obama’s White House Gardens, visit our previous blog post.

This July 4th, celebrate your food independence!

50 states. 50 governors. 50 first families celebrating July 4 with locally sourced food. 

Kitchen Gardeners International, with support from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) Food and Society Fellows, has launched “Food Independence Day” to educate and encourage consumers to source local and sustainable ingredients for their holiday meals and to request that their governors do the same.  

Food Independence Day has posted a petition on Facebook and their Web site asking governors to “Whet our appetites by publishing your planned menu in advance of the holiday. Share your recipes and the names of the local farmers, fisherfolk, and food producers whose ingredients you’ll be using. 

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“Food Independence Day brings the spirit of the White House garden effort to a state by state, and even house by house level,” said Roger Doiron, founder of the nonprofit Kitchen Gardeners International and current Fellow with the IATP Food and Society Fellows. “We hope to foster enough interest and momentum that our 50 governors and their families will take note and enjoy their July 4 celebrations by feasting on local produce, meats, beverages and desserts from their own states or as nearby as possible. In doing so, we hope they set an example for and encourage their constituents to do the same.Ԡ

For more information and to sign to the petition, individuals can visit http://foodindependenceday.org .   

Organizers will submit the petitions to governors the final week of June, in the days leading up to their July 4 holiday. 

Remembering South Central Farm and Supporting Public Green Spaces

The South Central Farm operated from 1994 until 2006 on East 41st and South Alameda Streets in South Central, Los Angeles.  The South Central Farmers, primarily poor immigrant families from Latin America, transformed a fourteen-acre plot slated for use as a garbage incinerator into 350 plots where they grew crops like corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, cactus and guava. Once considered the largest urban farm and community garden in the country, the garden enabled families to be less dependent on the food bank and provided a safe neighborhood haven.

After years of successful operation, in a devastating turn of events, the South Central Farm site was sold by Los Angeles city officials to private developer Ralph Horowitz to build a distribution center for Forever 21, a women’s clothing manufacturer and retailer.  After weeks of community protest, the farm was forcibly shut down and, bulldozed at 5 am on June 13, 2006.  The story of the South Central Farmers is told by Scott Hamilton Kennedy in his Academy Award nominated documentary film “The Garden.” Told there was nothing to be done, the filmmaker decided to chronicle this heartbreaking tale through its players: the farmers, the wheelers and dealers, the green power advocates and the moneymen.

This Saturday, on the third anniversary of the garden’s demolition, the South Central Farmers and their supporters will reunite. The rally asks Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa to reconsider the use of this land, and subsidize the restoration of the farm with a portion of $137 million collected from developers for parks and green space.  Especially in this current economic climate, preserving public gardening space and expanding accessibility nationwide is even more important than ever.  This Saturday show your support for public green spaces in your local community by writing a letter (to local officials including city council members or parks bureau representatives), visiting parks, or buying food from local gardeners. 

Growing Out Magic Beans

by Anne Obelnicki, Chefs Collaborative RAFT Grow-Out Coordinator

Like most Tuesdays, I was working from home yesterday.  At lunchtime I took my two dogs out for a quick stroll around the three wooded acres where we live.  When we approached my tiny patch of sunlit garden nestled among the trees, I was surprised to see something that definitely hadn’t been there the day before: Five little Marfax bean seedlings had broken through their covering of compost, still bean-capped, leafless and bent over, they were nevertheless making their way towards the sun.  I’ve been gardening for years, and I love it, but I surprised even myself with the childish glee with which I observed the seedlings.  There is a reason there are so many cliché sayings about planting seeds.  I could suddenly see my whole bean-filled summer garden unfolding before my eyes, and I had equally vivid images of my bean-filled belly come harvest-time this fall!

All over New England, this little bean miracle is playing out on a much larger scale than in my tiny garden.  Marfax beans are one of the sixteen varieties of heirloom vegetables we’ve asked twenty-eight farmers in the Providence, Portsmouth, and Boston areas to grow for the RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) Grow-Out project Chefs Collaborative is piloting this year.  When their much larger fields of Marfax beans are mature, we have thirty-five chefs lined up, eager to buy, feature and promote them on their menus.  At Chefs Collaborative, we hope that the community building we’re promoting during the Grow-Out establishes connections between farmers and chefs that grow beyond the bounds of the project.  But community building will not be the only source of interesting connections to come out of this project; growing Marfax beans establishes a significant connection between all the participants and the rich agricultural history of New England.

More after the jump

FOOD, Inc. Hits Theatres (and throws a punch at agribusiness, too)

There are a bunch of sustainable food documentaries that have been kicking around our circles for a few years now.  Some of them are very good--enlightening, celebratory, inspiring, damning.  But we all have probably wondered: who sees these but the proverbial choir?

Filmmaker Robert Kenner, along with producers Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, is making a go at hitting the big time,--i.e. lots of viewers, even ones outside the usual circles-- with his movie “Food, Inc.” The movie, which opens in NYC San Fran and LA on June 12th, got some primetime coverage in the New York Times this past weekend.  The Times article will help the word spread, but so can you.  Go see the movie, and while you’re at it, go tell some others to see the movie.

Participant Media is a unique production company in that they release their movies as part of a social action campaign.  Remember “An Inconvenient Truth?” This time around they are focusing on food issues of all shapes and sizes. The movie touches on many issues, including violations of farmworkers’ rights; aggressive litigiousness on the part of large agribusiness; food safety; the role of industrial organic; and some straight up weird stuff like an irradiated fat slurry that goes into most hamburger meat produced in this country. The main theme, as the title suggests, is what goes wrong when corporations control the food system. 

Along with the movie they have released a companion book with the subtitle: “How Industrial Food is Making us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer--And What You Can Do About It.” It includes pieces by many of the faces in the movie, like Eric Schlosser, Gary Hirshberg (of Stonyfield Farm Organic), and farmer Joel Salatin, as well as a few people and organizations who did not have face time in the movie, such as Heifer International and United Farm Workers.

In addition, they are focusing on improving school lunch and the Child Nutrition Act’s Reauthorization--you can check out their “interactive cafeteria” and sign their school lunch petitionhere.

With movies like this, it’s important to head out the first few days they’re open, so run out this weekend and see “FOOD, Inc.” if you haven’t already.

Philadelphia and its Universal Feeding Program

A few weeks ago it was reported that the feds planned to discontinue Philadelphia’s universal lunch program.  For some of us, this was news--all kids in public school in Philadelphia qualify for a free lunch?  With no paperwork needing to be filed?  Amazing!  In many areas the families of children who should qualify never fill out the paper work, and hungry kids miss out.  Apparently it started as a pilot program there 20 years ago, and never left.

Well, the good news reported on all of the school food blogs this morning is that the program is thankfully safe, for the time being.  The USDA has wisely decided to wait until the Child Nutrition Act is reauthorized this fall before making a final decision.  In the meantime, many are calling for “Universal Feeding” to be expanded, if anything, into a national program.

Some are doubting: a commenter on La Vida Locavore warned us “not to get too excited,” since “the motivation has less to do with feeding children healthy meals than it does their ability get more federal funds.” And a commenter on School Lunch Talk rightfully wondered “How does making the same drek universally free improve nutrition?”

Turns out, kids love pizza

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

They say you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Cafeteria directors say you can lead a child to healthy food, but you can’t make him eat it. Well, at least when he has the option of eating pizza and fries instead.

I’m on the road this week visiting cafeterias in Ohio and Massachusetts, and I’ve been continually struck by the difference between what’s offered to students and what actually ends up on their trays. All the high school cafeterias I’ve seen on this trip have offered dozens of choices, including healthy items like fresh sandwiches and salads. Yet probably 75 percent of students buy the same two or three items: pizza, chicken patty sandwiches and fries. ”It’s great that they have all that healthy stuff,” one high school student told me. “But nobody eats it. It’s a shelf-filler.”

At a high school in Massachusetts today, students could choose from sandwiches, salads, home-made shepherd’s pie, a hot sausage and pepper sub, turkey a la king with brown rice or pizza and tater tots. The adults buy the shepherd’s pie and the turkey, the director told me. About 80 percent of the students would opt for pizza and tater tots, she said.

At the high school I visited in Ohio, the cafeteria dishes out about 1,100 servings of french fries each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It sells about 60 salads.

Cafeteria directors always show me all the healthy options available to students, telling me how hard they work to give students the opportunity to eat a healthy meal. But that’s just what it is: an opportunity. The healthy choices are there, but they’re sitting right next to those oh-so-tempting junk foods. And when you lead a student to pizza and fries, he’s almost certain to choose that over a salad or turkey a la king with brown rice.

If we’re serious about student wellness, we’re going to have to stop approaching nutrition as an opportunity. Schools have a responsibility to make healthy eating the norm, not just an option for a few students who are already health-conscious.

photo courtesy of Adam Kuban, via flickr creative commons.

Summer Reading

One of the great advents of the past few years has been “The Food Issue.” I’ve really enjoyed seeing magazines like The Nation, The New York Times, Yes magazine, Mother Jones, and The New Yorker devote an entire issue to stories around food. The Atlantic Monthly upped the ante by creating an entire website for food stories.  I mean, it’s a pretty lefty bunch, but I guess that’s not a huge surprise.

Now we’ve got Slate’s food issue, with a few choice nuggets including Tom Laskawy’s piece on how Mother Nature’s gonna bite big Ag in the butt, and a review of Mark Kurlansky’s new book The Food of a Younger Land, about America Eats, the 1930s Federal Writers Project, and how it created a new genre: food writing.  Reading this piece, I thought--this would be a great partner book for Jane and Michael Stern’s new book 500 Things to Eat Before They’re Gone!  Turns out the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle are more clever than I and they had the Sterns review the book just last week. They had issues with it--mostly that they are more hopeful than Kurlansky about the state of American food. 

No doubt the Sterns will be roadtripping this summer.  I hope I get to roadtrip too, but I’ll also be reading--probably their book, probably Kurlansky’s.  What will you be reading this summer?

Cooking for Dummies

Interesting NY Times Op-Ed from Amanda Hesser last Sunday about Michelle Obama missing an opportunity to talk up cooking. 

Our first lady has been an outstanding champion of fresh fruits and vegetables, of teaching our kids healthy eating habits that last through life by connecting them to food and where it comes from.  Surpassing any and all hopes and expectations, she has planted an organic garden on the White House lawn.  She has knelt in the dirt with her kids, and others’ and helped to grow her own food.  She has visited soup kitchens, and elementary schools.  Last week, she visited her young friends at Bancroft Elementary School. 

As reported on School Lunch Talk Michelle O. said that: “’kids can lead the way for us.’ And school lunch can help them do that. We need to make sure that “the food that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be, so that we’re bringing some of these lessons home and we’re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools.”

What more could we ask for?!  Well, Hesser points out that Obama still hasn’t stood up and supported home cooking, thereby supporting common public perception that cooking is too time consuming, too complicated, and--that old chestnut--too expensive to be worth anyone’s time.  As Hesser says, “Because terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth.”

[For more about how cooking from scratch is right for your pocketbook, read Chef Kurt Friese’s article “How I beat KFC’s Family Meal Challenge” on Grist, that also appears in this month’s Snail magazine].