Update on the Child Nutrition Act

On March 3, Senator Blanche Lincoln told a conference of school meal providers that she plans to start marking up the Child Nutrition Act before March 26, when Congress goes on Easter recess. If the Senator is true to her word, this will be the first progress on the bill since Congress passed a one-year extension last fall.

Lincoln also said that she’s seeking the biggest increase ever in funding for child nutrition programs, citing President Obama’s proposal to add $1 billion per year. While that amount isn’t enough to transform school lunch, it is an important step forward and we encourage everyone to let Congress know it’s a priority.

Our other policy goals – strengthening nutrition standards for all the food at school, and linking schools to local farms – have strong support from the USDA and will likely be included if Congress supports the funding increase.

Legislators will be home in your district for Easter recess from March 26 to April 11. This is a great opportunity to get their attention. Some easy things you can do are:

• Submit an Op-Ed to your local paper. One fantastic story would be to gather a group of parents to eat school lunch, and then write about it in an Op-Ed.

• Schedule a meeting with your legislator or his/her staff. Bring kids, parents, teachers and school meal providers, and let them do the talking.

• Invite your legislator or his/her staff to eat school lunch.

• Drop off letters of support at your legislator’s office. Deliver them all at once, have people stop by one-by-one, or draft a statement of support that local community leaders can sign and then deliver together.

Email Slow Food USA staff member Gordon Jenkins (that’s Gordon[at]slowfoodusa.org]) if you’re interested.

Busting Big Ag in Iowa

by Siena Chrisman, WhyHunger

Last night in Ankeny, Iowa, just north of Des Moines, a standing-room-only crowd of over 250 people called on the Justice Department and USDA to “bust up big ag!” and put the needs of people before corporations.  Today is the official listening session where the government agencies will hear from all interested parties on the issue of corporate concentration in the food system—particularly, this round addresses “Issues of Concern to Farmers"—but the scheduled panels today are heavy on business and light on actual farmers. Several local groups organized Thursday’s town hall as a venue for farmers to voice their real concerns.

The evening began with a panel of independent farmers from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri addressing concentration in seeds, dairy, and livestock; a representative from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union; and good food advocates talking about consumer issues (I had the great privilege to be one of those last speakers).

And then the floor was open to public comments. About 50 people spoke, almost all of them farmers. They told heartbreaking stories: The 29th anniversary of one man’s parents was a farm foreclosure. “The American Dream has turned into the American nightmare” for a southern Iowa dairy farmer, whose milk prices have been so low he can’t afford his feed costs. The 15-year-old son of a fifth generation dairy farmer wants to become the sixth generation, but if things don’t change in the next six months, they’re not going to have a farm.

Things are dire for farmers—as they are for so many of people who don’t have control over their food—but they’re ready to fight. They made powerful demands of the Department of Justice and Congress to enforce antitrust laws and break up the hugely concentrated ag industries. But government isn’t quite the last hope; people are. A family farmer from near Des Moines wanted to talk about power: “Industry cannot turn one wheel unless people make those machines work,” he said. “We have the power here, and we need to understand what that power means.”

More after the jump

Obama Justice Dept. is investigating Big Ag companies

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice will hold the first of five workshops to determine whether a handful of food and farming companies are exercising monopoly control over the industry. This is a big deal. If the Dept. finds that companies like Monsanto are violating antitrust law, regulators could move to break up the companies in order to protect farmers and consumers from further harm.

Friday’s workshop takes place in Ankeny, IA, near Des Moines. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney will speak on a panel, as will a selection of crop and livestock farmers from around the country. (The farmers were added at the last-minute amidst outcries that a workshop about agriculture didn’t feature any actual farmers.) Other panels will feature a Monsanto Vice President, a former President of the Iowa Soybean Association and a representative from the organization Food & Water Watch.

Farmer and consumer groups who are concerned that the Justice Dept. workshop is bent towards corporate special interests are organizing a People’s Antitrust Hearing in Ankeny on the evening prior. At the event, Iowa farmers and community leaders will share their perspective on how food company monopolies lead to higher food prices and lower farmer profits.

In December, Slow Food USA joined other groups in asking the public to submit comments to the Justice Dept. The DoJ reported receiving over 15,000 comments, and has begun posting them online.

If you’re an Iowa resident who believes in good, clean and fair food, considering joining Slow Food and getting involved in one of our Iowa chapters.

House Ag Committee Rejects Obama Cuts in Farm Subsidies

by intern Valerie Scott

In his 2011 budget President Obama proposed to make cuts in farm subsidies and the crop insurance program that would save almost 11 billion dollars over 10 years. This proposal – Obama’s second attempt to cut farm subsidies - was rejected last Wednesday by the House Agriculture Committee .

Since the passage of the 2008 Farm Bill, farmers eligible to participate in the subsidy program must make no more than $500,000 in adjusted gross income (AGI) from off-farm sources and no more than $750,000 on-farm AGI. The newest Obama farm cuts would have lowered these eligibility caps to $250,000 off-farm AGI and $500,000 on-farm AGI. Direct payment caps were targeted for cuts of 25%, from $40,000 to $30,000 annually. A cut of $8 billion from the Federal Crop Insurance Program was also proposed.

The Obama administration’s first unsuccessful attempt to cut farm subsidies in 2009 focused on phasing out direct payments to farmers with annual sales of more than $500,000. Direct payments are a highly controversial subsidy given to farmers based on the size of their farm and the commodity they grow - regardless of crop prices or production levels. In 2007, a year of high crop prices and record net income for farmers, taxpayers paid out $5 billion in direct payment subsidies. Despite the current deficit crisis, cuts in even the most controversial subsidies to wealthy farmers clearly remain an uphill political battle.

Farm subsidies primarily benefit growers of just five crops – corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice. With Congress currently giving school lunch programs just $1 per meal for a generation of children afflicted with epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes – can we really afford not to put those 11 billion dollars towards better nutrition programs?

New Obama program to bring healthy choices to food deserts

by intern Jackie Fortin

“We can create the best nutrition education and physical education programs in the world, but if dinner is something off of the shelf of a local gas station or convenience store, because there’s no grocery store nearby, all our best efforts are going to go to waste,” the First Lady said during a speech at Philadelphia’s Fairhill School on Feb. 19 to launch the Obama Administration’s new Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI).

Currently, the USDA estimates that 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million children live in “food deserts,” or economically distressed areas that are typically served by fast food restaurants and convenience stores offering little or no fresh produce.

“Food deserts,” which can now be identified using USDA’s new Food Environment Atlas, are one of the many results of the nation’s broken food system preventing individuals from making better choices and denying them the ability to vote with their forks. When an area lacks healthy, affordable food options, its inhabitants are prone to higher levels of obesity and other diet-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

In order to achieve the Obama Administration’s goal of eliminating “food deserts” nationwide in the next seven years, the HFFI will fund a movement of bringing grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved urban and rural communities across America. The effort will also include providing grocery stores on wheels for less densely populated areas, said Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan during her “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” presentation at The New School Feb. 25.

The $400 million initiative, which will use a mix of federal tax credits, below-market rate loans, loan guarantees, and grants aimed to attract private sector capital, is being made possible through a partnership between the departments of Treasury, Agriculture and Health and Human Services.

Modeled after the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI), the HFFI will ideally not only provide access to healthy food, but will also invest in communities by removing financing obstacles and operating barriers, as well as by creating living wage jobs and qualified work forces.

More after the jump

Food Environment Atlas Shows Locations of Food Deserts

by intern Christine Binder

On February 9th, Michelle Obama unveiled Let’s Move, an initiative with the ambitious goal of solving the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation. As part of the initiative, the First Lady and her team also launched an interactive Food Environment Atlas. It is an important source of food environment statistics and a great way to visualize the ability of different communities to access healthy food, but it’s also a lot of fun to play with and explore.

You can look at 90 different characteristics of the food environment by state, region, or county. Who pays the most for milk? In which states do people eat the most fruits and veggies, or drink the most soda? Where are the greatest numbers of grocery stores or farmers’ markets located? How much money do Americans spend on fast food every year? Where are obesity levels the highest?

As you look at all of the different maps, you’ll probably notice that there are a lot of places in this country where healthy foods are not readily available – and even more places where unhealthy foods are. One of the four pillars of Let’s Move is Accessible and Affordable Healthy Food. This is important because 23.5 million Americans, 6.5 million of which are children, live in what are called “food deserts.”

A food desert is a neighborhood with little or no access to fresh, healthy foods, due to a lack of grocery stores or farmers markets’, often in combination with high food prices. Most food deserts are located in urban or rural areas. Even though they lack grocery stores, food deserts often contain plenty of fast food restaurants and convenience stores where cheap and unhealthy processed foods are sold. It’s not hard to see that eating healthfully in a food desert is extremely challenging.

More after the jump

Home-baked Prohibition

I look back on my school days in Syracuse, NY in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and think: “ we [my classmates] must have been the last of a dying generation.” There was no “No Child Left Behind” debacle, childhood obesity rates weren’t as high, we ate peanut butter sandwiches with abandon right across from allergic friends, and rarely “fast food” in school cafeterias.

And gosh darn it, we did walk to school in 6-foot snowdrifts and we brought in homemade cupcakes for birthdays and bake sales. Well, times have changed.

This week, by ruling of the Chancellor of NYC’s Department of Ed.’s Office of School Food & Nutrition, bringing in homemade baked goods for sale (or celebration) during the school day was effectively banned.

Surprisingly, this addendum was made not with concerns of food safety (allergies, food-borne illness, etc.), but of meeting nutrition standards.

Now Reg. A-812 further delineates that all such “competitive foods” be in single-serving packaging (none are larger than 1.75 oz.), and contain no more than 200 calories. per serving. Chips, cookies and krispie treats are still acceptable, but they must come from a list of pre-approved items provided by brand-name companies such as Frito-Lay.

Obviously, home-baked goodies aren’t shrink-wrapped, of uniform size, or sent to a lab to calculate caloric content. Safety would have been a better justification for me personally – not adherence to already debatable nutrition standards for occasional fundraisers.

I’m all for limiting the empty calories accessible to children in our schools, and increasing the nutritional value of school food. However, inherent in my thinking is a reduction in the presence of brand-name and prepared foods in schools, among other measures.

More after the jump

Opportunities for Students: Two Contests and a Conference about Healthy School Food

by intern Julia Landau

Right now, the National Farm to School Network is running two contests for grade school and college students, and has its fifth National Farm to Cafeteria Conference on its way. These are all great opportunities for Slow Food members who work with local schools, and for anyone and everyone interested in getting healthier food into schools and creating jobs in local farm economies.

The first contest asks K-12 and college students to record a video that shows what the phrase “real food” means to them. Farm to School poses three questions:

1 – What does real food mean to you?
2 - How does what we eat affect our culture, health, economy, or environment?
3 – Why should your cafeteria start or continue buying local food?

In answering these questions, the film can be anywhere from thirty seconds to three minutes, and directed in any style (documentary, fiction, live action – even animated). The grand prize? Appropriately, $1,000 toward the winners’ school lunch project. To check out last year’s stars, click here.

More after the jump

Let 2010 Be the Year of the Heirloom Apple

by Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan

While the Chinese will be celebrating 2010 as the Year of the Tiger, we in America have historically had no tigers except those in zoos and circuses. But what we once have had many of—heirloom apples—are now in danger of becoming as rare as tigers are in Asia. Of some 15,000 to 16,000 apple varieties that have been named, grown and eaten on the North American continent, only about 3,000 remain widely accessible. Roughly nine out of ten apples varieties historically grown in the U.S. are at risk of falling out of cultivation, and falling off our tables.

One apple variety, Red Delicious, comprises 41% of the entire American apple crop, and eleven varieties produce 90% of all apples sold in chain grocery stores.  Much of the apple juice, puree and sauce consumed in the United States is now produced in other countries. And as the overall number of apple trees in cultivation declined to a forth of what it was a century ago, the number of apple varieties considered threatened or endangered has now peaked at 94 percent. These are not just abstract statistics, for they affect not only our health, but also the health of our landscapes.

One driver of the decline in available apple diversity has been the loss of roughly 600 independently owned nurseries over the last fifteen years. They have had their business usurped by the garden-and-lawn departments (“pseudo nurseries”) of big-box stores, which offer far fewer apples. Perhaps just as problematic is that over the last half century, there has been a dramatic loss of traditional knowledge about apple cultivation and varietal usage.

But the worst may be yet to come. Climate change may be one of several natural and man-made factors reducing the number of chill hours being received in apple growing areas, leading to predictions that within four decades, apple production may be lost from orchard-rich regions like the Central Valley of California and from southern Pennsylvania.

There are signs of hope, however. Despite the economic downturn, heirloom and antique apple varieties are being successfully marketed at many of the 5,000 farmers markets and 2,500 Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects in the U.S. In fact, some CSAs, like the one begun by Bill Moretz in North Carolina, specialize in introducing customers to heirloom apple diversity. Consumption of hard cider is also on the rise in America, offering a means to use many heirloom varieties not well-suited for eating fresh. Future market prospects for heirloom apples look good, both among chefs and cider makers.

More after the jump

Secretary Vilsack speaks to the people

by intern Julia Landau

Yesterday afternoon, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack hosted a conference call for ordinary citizens where he explained the Administration’s priorities for the Child Nutrition Act. There were 1,000 people on the call, which is incredible – and which demonstrates the momentum behind making real improvements to child nutrition programs.

What was the number one thing Vilsack recommended we do to improve the food in our country’s schools? SPEAK UP. While Vilsack noted the immense interest in this issue and clear public support for getting healthier food into schools, he also stressed that this issue isn’t appearing in the national media and the only way to get the message through to Congress is grassroots advocacy. What does this mean? Our Secretary of Agriculture is calling on us to contact our Senators and Representatives as they move on this bill – and to get media coverage as we do it. You can find a great jumping-off point right here at Slow Food USA’s Time for Lunch Campaign.

Vilsack also stressed community involvement in small-scale agriculture through the USDA’s program Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food. Check it out for resources and grants to support local food in your community.

The people on the call today were 1,000 small farmers, food service providers, PTA members, teachers, doctors, and dieticians. In answering their questions, Vilsack outlined some key focus areas for the Administration: increasing the nutritional value of school food; strengthening farm-to-school programs; providing training and equipment in school kitchens; providing healthy food during non-school days; expanding enrollment in reduced and free lunch programs; and supporting the new 60 minutes of play a day initiative. In general, he voiced his support for the First Lady’s new childhood obesity effort, Let’s Move.

So you heard it, folks. We know how important Child Nutrition Reauthorization is - now, it’s time to make Congress and the media understand as well.