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:
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.”
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.
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.
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?
At the time we thought nothing of it, school lunch was supposed to be terrible. Most kids just bought a honey-bun from the vending machine anyways, and maybe some fries. Hardly anyone ever went for the Full Monty unless they were serving the bbq rib sandwich-the mystery meat molded into a vaguely rib-like form was delicious if only because of the tangy sauce that was probably loaded with sugar. Looking back it all seems a little suspect though, why should childhood and adolescence, the time of your life when you need the most nutritious diet, be in fact the opportunity for federally sanctioned malnutrition? A recent article examines evidence that school lunch on average is probably of lower quality than pet food. How has this situation been allowed to continue for so long, and wherefore comes the odd cultural inertia that hews against the implementation of a sane exit strategy? Is there some sort of conspiracy at play here? Is the USDA being run by a cabal of intransigent space lizards with ties to the Illuminati ? The mind reels.
So apropos of the gathering storm around our school lunch cafeterias, and in the great tradition of documentarian Morgan Spurlock and his seminal Super Size Me, an anonymous blogger/school teacher known only as Mrs. Q, has pulled out a machete to sharpen the debate with the appropriately named blog: “Fed Up: School Lunch Project”. As of the time of posting, she is only 9 days into a year of eating nothing but school lunches, but already her blog is attracting some critical attention. It’s not hard to see why her tack is so deadly effective-the prospect of voluntarily consuming what our children have no other choice but to-only serves to highlight what we already know: that American school lunch is at large both completely unappetizing and severely lacking in basic nutritional value. Aside from the deadpan and oddly amusing daily commentary of Mrs. Q, the collected imagery of the wilting and oily food offerings crammed unceremoniously onto a small Styrofoam tray are perhaps the greatest testament to just how bad the situation has remained. Nothing like actually being presented with direct physical evidence. Checkmate Caitlin Flanagan.
image credit: "Fed Up: School Lunch Project"
So lets hope Mrs. Q survives the year without suffering some serious health repercussions. And furthermore, lets hope her project attracts some much needed attention to one of our most critical public-health issues. If we are going to leave the next generation with an enormous sovereign debt, depleted resource base, rising sea-levels, and the prospect of chronic under-employment, the least we can do is give them a school lunch that’s better than pet food. I mean come on. The Lateral Hippogriff approves !
One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced.
These days it seems the most popular person to be in the food system is the “local farmer.” Farmers markets are popping up everywhere, and their size and popularity grow all the time. Local food is trendy—even the First Family is in on it.
But as anyone who has ever raised grain or livestock can tell you, the farmer is not the only person in the chain of players from her farm to your fork. In addition to producers, your food chain includes processors, distributors or transporters, and retailers.
Three Things To Watch With The Social Innovation Fund
excerpt:
The New Year is bringing with it an accelerated buzz and excitement around the forthcoming Social Innovation Fund. A few weeks ago, the Corporation for National and Community Service released funding guidelines and asked for public comment. Sean has been curating that conversation on Tactical Philanthropy and an excellent guest post by nonprofit consultant Adin Miller prompted me to think about the three things I’m watching for with the Social Innovation Fund.
In fact, the 200 students at this parochial school know more than many city kids do about where the food on their plates comes from. Behind the four-story brick 1905 school building is St. Augustine’s own chicken coop, where 15 hens with black feathers and speckled breasts lay large brown eggs. In the community garden across the street, students this year grew beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and broccoli. If all goes as planned, by June tilapia will be swimming under a blanket of hydroponic herbs in a tank in a new greenhouse. And, yes, even live turkeys are a possibility for the future.
Michael Pollan has for a while now been pointing to a way out of the reform stalemate caused by the power of lobbies: that space for reform opens when powerful lobbies turn against one another. Pollan appeared last night on the Daily Show, promoting his new book Food Rules. He made a point he has made before: if even a modicum of health care reform passes, one that bars insurers from denying coverage to sick people or purging them when they get sick, than the interests of the mighty insurance industry will turn against those of the mighty agribusiness/processed-food industry. The insurance industry, forced at least on some level to deal with the chronic illnesses caused by the U.S. diet, will join the food-reform movement, Pollan predicts. Backed by a well-heeled industry lobby, the movement will be empowered to create real change.
Seed balls, simply put, are a method for distributing seeds by encasing them in a mixture of clay and compost. This protects the seeds by preventing them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or from blowing away.
I’ve read that some North American First Nations’ tribes used seed balls. More recently natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka has experimented with them. And, in New York City, seed bombs were used in 1973’s revitalization of the Bowery neighbourhood and the development of the city’s first community garden.
Over the weekend our friends at Buffalo ReUse gathered hundreds of volunteers to help deconstruct a home as part of ABC’s show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”. The house came down in 15-17 hours, depending on if you count the TV cheesing. Many of the materials that hundreds of volunteers salvaged from the home will go into other house rehab projects in the neighborhood and the remaining materials were brought back to The ReSource (their salvage retail outlet) for public consumption.
The basic premise is that the U.S. food system is broken. While the industrialization of agriculture has made more food available more cheaply than ever before, it has come at great cost — from widespread soil erosion to environmental calamities, food safety issues and the obesity crisis, especially among young people. To tackle this expansive topic, the team leveraged the concept of “regionality” to create a more sustainable food production and delivery system. The goal would be to aid and accelerate the shift from a global, abstract food system to a regional, real food system via a robust portfolio of activities — including a grand challenge and a series of youth-engagement programs.
Since the beginning of December, riding your bike to work in New York City got a little easier, but riding through Brooklyn just got a little harder. On Monday, the NYC Department of Transportation and Department of Building announced that together, they would work to implement the Bicycle Access to Office Building Law, which will help cyclists secure parking at their office buildings and thereby encourage more people to bike to work. Strangely though, earlier this month, the NYC DOT sandblasted away a bike lane on Bedford Avenue, between Flushing Avenue and Division Street, forcing many Brooklynites to leave their bikes at home. There is certainly a large dose of irony here – why get cyclists to bike to work while at the same time eliminating a thoroughfare that, as several comments to a Streetsblog post proved, many need to gain access to Manhattan?
The general consensus among the respected enviro experts seems to be that the negotiations in Copenhagen won’t actually save us from climate disaster — but that there’s reason to be hopeful post-Copenhagen.
This Thanksgiving, when you dashed into your local convenience store Thursday morning to buy the inevitable forgotten ingredient in your annual feast, you probably wondered how you ever missed them before. The Great Wall of Doritos. The Leaning Tower of Snickers. The Mountain of Dew. My favorite is the Hostess Blockade, a hulking mass of Twinkies that stands at a 45-degree angle to the entrance of the convenience store on my corner, making my walk to anything else inside the store less than convenient. Sure, I live in a corner of Los Angeles with an artisanal cheese shop and there’s farmers’ market nearby once a week. But most of the stores—and many of the restaurants—in my neighborhood suffer from a severe lack of nutritional value. It’s called a food desert.
Mockbee is a late great genius concerned with the dignity of rural architecture and rural people. He made ultra modern green buildings for clients in the deep south, and took his practice to the logical conclusion by building practically for free. As we work to envision a modern agrarian aethetic for the and a vernacular of retrofit– we would do well to observe and study his genius.
With the fast-growing local foods movement, diets are becoming more locally shaped and more seasonal. In a typical supermarket in an industrial country today it is often difficult to tell what season it is because the store tries to make everything available on a year-round basis. As oil prices rise, this will become less common. In essence, a reduction in the use of oil to transport food over long distances–whether by plane, truck, or ship–will also localize the food economy.
Connections are important. Not the kind that land you plumb jobs in shiny skyscrapers, but the kind that reveal to us causal relationships that are often taken for granted. Often times we shuffle through or daily lives with only the most abstract and rudimentary understanding of the vast machinations and support structures that allow the enormous wheels and cogs of industrial civilization to function without interruption. Most of the food we eat, for example, is grown, processed and packaged thousands of miles away from where it might be consumed. Most of our clothes and consumer goods are similarly produced in far off locations by faceless, nameless people that we likely will never meet. It’s kind of weird when you stop to think about it.
Oh to live in a time where you knew the man who made your shoes, the woman who baked your bread, the carpenter who built your house….one can rhapsodize eternal about the misty and hazy pastoral origins of our (post)modern industrial world. It seems like we always want to be somewhere that we are not-the melancholy hangs thick in the air like the scent of a sweet absinthe gone bad.
So when Heifer International’s holiday catalog self-titled as “The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World” arrived in our mailbox the other day, I was primed and ready to melt into their hands, reduced to a blubbering mess by the photographs that accompany the donation offers. Contributions help Heifer arrange for the purchase of an animal that will be donated to a farmer in a less industrial part of the world. The strategy is one of empowerment rather than dependence, as the animals can contribute to the small local economy that the farmer is a part of. It is a worthy and scrupulously reasoned endeavor all around. Very Fourth Sector.
I’m most struck, however, by what the photographs say on a basic level about the relationship we have to our food, and how this conversation might be re-imagined. The connection that we often miss is the realization that all human activity exists within a finite world of resources, and that we cannot transcend the ecological limits of our biosphere. In this sense, all human activity is both local and universal, it’s just that this intimate inter-connectedness is often obscured by cultural blind-spots that have grown larger over time. We can learn a great deal from the peoples in these supposedly “less-advanced” worlds, mostly that animals are loveable, and that the way in which we raise them is a direct expression of the love that we have for ourselves.
The Lateral Hippogriff approves.
WE ARE…
Hybridized, non-linear, and adaptive models of thought and praxis. Organic epistemes. Non-polar radical centrism. The Third Way. The Fourth Sector. Social Democracy. Generalism. Human Ecology. The Salon Communal. Civic engagement. Sustainability. Localism. Dissensus. Ecotechnics.
The Lateral Hippogriff is a Fourth Sector adjacent blog created to feature innovative ideas, businesses, social enterprises, and other assorted human activity that seems to fall outside the grasp of the false dichotomies and polarizing logic that forms roadblocks to social adaptation and innovation. As the world enters into a new reality paradigm, cultural values become the key mitigating agent in which concrete real-world problems can be grappled with collectively. It is our intention to see beyond the status quo by proposing and imagining alternatives that represent the best response to our changing planetary and human ecology. By incubating and celebrating a wide variety of adaptive models, we can create new systems of thought and practice in which a macroscopic, holistic picture of our built environments moves into consciousness.
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