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 !
The desire to combine social and commercial in the pursuit of an outcome has led to creative ways to structure an enterprise—often known as a hybrid model or dual structure, because it combines a nonprofit arm with a for-profit arm. The for-profit allows an enterprise to facilitate investment, while the nonprofit can facilitate grant capital and provide non profit-making services to a community.
While hybrid structures are innovative, they are, in essence, stopgap measures to get around the fact that in most countries, there is no legal label that meets the needs of an entity that exists to provide social good and yet makes a profit.
The Social Innovation Fund, designed to identify proven solutions to some of the country’s greatest challenges partners government with philanthropy and the best non profits in the field in a groundbreaking way. Rather than continue to attempt to solve community problems from Washington down by frequently sustaining programs that have been failing to solve society’s problems for decades, the Social Innovation Fund will find programs working throughout the country that can actually show measurable results in their given field. The vision for this bold new idea is to rewrite the social contract in America by saying in effect that government will change its way of doing business (no more blank checks for broken initiatives) if community leaders and innovators step forward with their best ideas and commitment to service. The breakthrough idea here is to move government into the role of catalyst and out of the business of provider, offering real hope for the expansion of solutions-based programs. That’s change we can believe in.
Many schools aren’t making the grade when it comes to receiving the mandatory inspections of their lunch programs, according to a recent USA Today article — part of a series investigating school lunch safety in the U.S.
The investigation uncovered that more than 8,500 schools failed to have their kitchens inspected at all last year, and another 18,000 fell short of a requirement in the Child Nutrition Act that calls for cafeteria inspections at least twice a year.
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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