Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn Center from Fourth Sector on Vimeo.
Check out this short video that Fourth Sector recently produced to promote the idea of urban agriculture in Brooklyn Center.
Via Civil Eats:
On Wednesday, Michael Pollan appeared on Oprah to discuss the food system and the film Food, Inc. At the beginning of the program, entitled “Before You Grocery Shop Again: Food 101,” Oprah said that she saw Food, Inc., and it inspired her to host this discussion. “We all have to start paying more attention to what we’re putting in our bodies,” she said. “Do you know where you food really comes from? What’s been added, what’s been taken out? What goes down before they put a label on it?” Interspersed throughout the show were clips of the film, including the film’s introduction on the disconnect between our idea of food production and its reality; chicken production, featuring a farmer speaking out against the industry; and a family that can’t afford to eat real food and is forced to choose fast food.
Here’s a longer clip:
First Lady Michelle Obama kicks off a campaign to confront the problem of childhood obesity at a YMCA in Alexandria, VA. She is joined by Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Dr. Judith Palfrey, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Astute observers would have noticed last week that School Lunch and the debate associated around it has seemed to reach a critical mass. Lets hope that policy makers follow what has now become a growing consensus among our citizens: the time for reform has come.
Did Jamie Oliver meet his match in ‘America’s Fattest City’?
When last we saw British superstar chef-turned-food-system-reformer Jamie Oliver, he was in the midst of teaching “the fattest city in America” how to cook. How did it go? Well, thanks to the miracle that is reality television, we’ll find out one episode at a time. The series—Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution—doesn’t premiere until the end of March. But ABC has provided us a sneak peak. Key takeaway? The recalcitrant residents of Huntington, West Virginia have driven poor Jamie to tears. Tom says check it out:
Michelle Obama’s Anti-Obesity Movement
photo wikimedia commons
and there is no shortage of links to one of the biggest stories of the week:
“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved in one year, or even one administration,” said Michelle. But make no mistake about it, this problem can be solved. We don’t need to wait for some new invention of discovery to make this happen. This doesn’t require fancy tools or technologies. We have everything we need right now– we have the information, we have the ideas, and we have the desire to start solving America’s childhood obesity problem. The only question is whether we have the will.”
full article here via examiner.com
also see The Washington Post, abc news
and on to the relationship between the two above news items:
From Sesame Street to Iron Chef
Students marvel over a potato at the White House garden last fall. (Photo: ZUMA Press)
During the first lady’s recent visit to Sesame Street to help Elmo and some kids plant vegetable seeds, Big Bird asked if he had heard correctly that she eats seeds. Not exactly, she replied, but “I do eat what grows from these seeds.” She encourages the kids to eat all their vegetables, telling them that if they do, they’ll “grow up to be big and strong just like me.”
The garden also inspired a culinary showdown on an episode of Iron Chef America. Filmed partly at the White House, the contest paired White House chef Cristeta Comerford and Bobby Flay against the duo of Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse.
full article here via mother nature network
School Lunches: We Can Do Better Than $1 Per Meal
photo by SpecialKRB via flickr
Yet lack of funding isn’t the only problem. Many argue that the U.S.D.A. has a looming conflict of interest since one part of the agency is responsible with providing school children nutritious food and another helps agricultural companies sell surplus meat. One USA Today article reported that schools have received millions of pounds of meat from the government that wouldn’t even meet quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants. And a followup article reveals that the chicken sent to schools by the USDA are otherwise used in pet food and compost.
full article here via Huffington post
Mrs. Q and Fed Up: School Lunch Project Snowballs
photo by back_garage via flickr
Even after only a few weeks of posts, Fed Up paints a devastating picture of how the school lunch program is failing kids. Mystery meat, still-frozen fruit cups, “pizza” with cheese that separates into fat layers. Everything is individually wrapped and, if it’s hot, it’s been microwaved. Weird pairings are rampant: Pizza and pretzels? A hot dog, cookie, and Tater Tots? The pictures are disgusting enough, but the descriptions are even worse: “I guess the green beans had some kind of butter sauce. I didn’t taste a sauce but there was a little buttery residue on the bottom of the paper package.” Is this food supposed to be fueling the next generation?
link to story (mentions Ann Cooper)
Is there an elephant in the room when at work someone talks about making decisions?
Think about the leadership you have experienced. Do you have a boss? A spouse? A parent? A child (ha!)? How do you perceive the way you lead? Are you an observer or a participant? Do you contribute to a process or wait for a declarative outcome? Are you on the dance-floor or on the balcony (looking down)? These are questions that separate a mechanical view of leadership from one that is adaptive.
In nature, we see adaptive change all around us. When winter’s chill creeps in, the leaves turn colors, fall, enrich the earth, which feeds new growth from the roots up during the re-birth that comes with spring. On a day with predicted wind chill of minus 30 it’s hard to imagine new life, but even in the darkest winter, in the grip of brutal sere, life persists…by adapting to the given conditions.
Largely we have grown up in a century (the twentieth, that is), that defined the world mechanistically-human beings were modular units that fit neatly into a larger whole. But today who you “are” may be different depending on your Twitter name, your role at home and your social life. Today’s virtuality is a hall of mirrors in which one’s identity depends on a selection of avatars that cannot be reduced to linear and immutable modalities. Leadership has in the past been hallmarked by swift sweeping decisions: this or that, cut division XYZ, outsource to India, trade that player, yes or no, win or lose. Now our world is more complex, and people can’t be subjected to decisions that treat them as merely one-dimensional units of a larger machine. Instead we must see organizations like organisms, connected by a human ecology in which single point-instance thinking is subsumed by the resonance of a larger chain of causality.
We don’t need machines anymore. We are not only “in the cloud,” we’re in those taproots that provide the vital nutrients that enable a tree to grow a big canopy of branches and leaves: as above, so below. It’s an incredible time to be alive; especially if you like change. At Fourth Sector, with the Lateral Hippogriff, we celebrate change. We adapt. We also abide, but that’s for another post, Dude.
*Leonard Cohen “Hallelujah” (1984).