While sleepily shaking your cereal flakes into a bowl, and absently pouring the milk over them, have you ever stopped to think, just before taking a big, slurpy bite, “How is this stuff made?”

If you went ahead and took the time to find out, you’d be surprised to learn that no matter how healthy and natural the advertising on the packages makes those crunchy bits of wheat, oats, and corn seem, they are actually a highly processed food whose nutrient value is questionable.

But that wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all.

First marketed as a health food in the late 1800′s, by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith, the original breakfast cereal consisted of unsweetened flakes made from wheat that had been baked, ground, and then mixed into a dough. The dough was then pressed between giant rollers and flaked off before being cooked again.

Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist who ran a church-affiliated sanitarium. His religion informed his rigid ideas about lifestyle and diet. He was an early advocate of vegetarianism, believing a high fiber, plant based diet was healthiest, and also that eating meat contributed to sexual desire—which was to be avoided at all costs. He’s well known for his cruel attempts to cure adolescents of their propensity to masturbate, and also for being an enthusiastic early advocate of enemas. But that’s another story.

Though early cereals didn’t contain the artificial colors, flavors, added vitamins, preservatives, sodium, and sugar of most of today’s cereals, the actual manufacturing process hasn’t changed that much. Cereals have always been highly processed. Maybe Dr. Kellogg’s ideas about health were as questionable as his ideas about sexuality.

From Field to Flake

Whole grains are crushed, ground, and put into a giant vat where they may or may not be mixed with flavorings and vitamins and then cooked for several hours over high heat. The resulting porridge can then take one of two journeys:

1. It may be dried slightly and then conveyed to giant rollers that flatten the grains into flakes that are then moved to a super-heated drum that sprays sugar, vitamins, and other additives onto the flakes and then dries them.

2. The slurry of cooked grains may be moved to a cooker-extruder where it is mixed with water, sugar, additives like food coloring, vitamins, minerals, preservatives, and salt, and cooked and agitated over high heat with a giant screw. It is then extruded out, and cut into any number of shapes, before being dried and packaged. For a narrated visual, check out this video showing how flakes are made.

Leaving aside the long list of added sugars and additives that appear in the ingredient list of your daily Froot Loop or Frosted Flakes, the actual process of making the cereal robs the grains of their inherent nutrients. With most of the outer layers of the grain removed during processing and with cooking temperatures as high as 250 to 300 degrees F, it’s hard to imagine that much nutrition remains in this food so many of us eat as “our most important meal of the day.”

What does the industry have to say?

In response to criticism that breakfast cereal is a highly processed food devoid of good nutrition, the Kellogg company produced this video to clear up “misunderstandings” about breakfast cereals. Chock full of meaningless statements like, “Consumption of sweetened cereal and other nutrient dense foods is positively associated with children’s and adolescent’s nutrient intake,” and “Sugar in ready to eat cereals is a small percentage of overall sugar consumption,” it’s a laughable piece of marketing. Speaking of marketing, to address criticisms that cereal companies irresponsibly market unhealthy foods to children, Kellogg assures us that the company is “an active participant in expanding and improving marketing self regulatory programs around the world.”

So what should you eat instead of breakfast cereal?

-Steel cut oats or whole grains cooked in a big batch overnight in the crock-pot and then portioned into individual, microwavable jars for the office. Stock your desk drawers with toppings of your choice.

-Spend 40 minutes on the weekend making a batch of your own granola and eat it throughout the week with unsweetened yogurt and honey.

-Hard-boil eggs the night before and eat with whole grain bread and avocado.

-Bake bran muffins ahead on the weekend and freeze individually to take on the go.

-Whole grain toast with nut butter and a side of seasonal fresh fruit.

Photos: Sanbeiji,  the impulsive buy

Originally published on ecosalon

Are patrons supposed to enjoy their Whopper value meal and then attempt to undo the damage with some vitamins and powders from the King’s neighbor? This Burger King and that GNC represent two aspects of military food culture constantly at odds with each other: The need for culinary comfort in a stressful job environment and the attitude that treats the soldier’s body as a high-performance machine that requires precisely the right fuel. It’s hard to find a middle ground, at least here in the PX. But what about elsewhere on post? The commissary should offer the healthy-eating options lacking at a Burger King or a Taco Bell.

The commissary system provides a valuable service to soldiers, catering to large families, a number of different tastes and diets, and even a wide variety of ethnic foods. Although the commissaries offer military personnel food that is often cheaper than that sold by their civilian counterparts, we normally get the bulk of our groceries elsewhere. One reason for our avoidance of the commissary is that I have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder which causes a variety of symptoms when I digest gluten, a protein that is found in wheat, barley, and rye and is present in many of the processed foods filling the commissary. Absent is the organic or “natural” section which has sprouted up in many mainstream supermarket chains on which I normally depend for gluten-free products.

On my first trip to the commissary, I didn’t expect an abundance of gluten-free options–after all, celiac disease disqualifies applicants from serving. However, I was surprised at what I did find: Sodium-filled, processed food, and lots of it.

Taken separately, a few family value packs of Hot Pockets and a few (dozen) varieties of frozen pizza are merely another snapshot of American life. What major city is without a set of golden arches? Taken together, however, the food options offered on military bases throughout the United States and across the globe paint a rather stark picture of how we truly treat our men and women in uniform.

Part of the problem facing the military food system is the problem facing the world as a whole: How to feed more people than ever before. An Army Times article quotes Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) spokesman Judd Anstey as saying, “The exchange [PX] works with market leaders that have the capabilities to provide services on a global level,” and that, “Unfortunately, some chains are unable to support an operations tempo that may call for a restaurant at Fort Bragg today, Korea tomorrow, or even Afghanistan next week. With that said, the exchange works aggressively with brand partners of all sizes to bring their products to these diverse locations and provide a taste of home to troops.”

It’s undoubtedly true. Soldiers spend about $313 million annually on fast food, so military contracts equal success for these captains of food industry. If any food were to successfully survive a trip across the Atlantic to far-off battlefields, it would certainly be the supernaturally resilient Hot Pocket.

The intersection between the United States Army and food policy has spent some time in the spotlight in recent years, particularly by way of the Mission: Readiness Report which states that 75 percent of people aged 17 to 24 are too overweight to enlist. The report has done valuable work by increasing focus on the connections between national health and national security, as well as on the unhealthy school lunches that are part of the problem.  And those who are already serving? As true representatives of the citizens they defend, these soldiers eat the same food that is fattening the rest of America.

Another set of changes in Army food policy has come from the Soldier Fueling Initiative, a program implemented in the past year, which treats soldiers as athletes requiring the proper balance of nutrients. This program, which made significant changes to menus and vending machines, is “limited to basic and advance training sites—installations where Army brass has the most control over its soldiers’ behavior,” according to an article in the Army Times. Limited in its scope, the program is also coded in the only nutritional language the army is fluent in (that of fueling and performance), a language that promotes a utilitarian and often simplified view of the properties of food.

So perhaps, in looking for a solution to these issues, we should not look forward to more “initiatives,” but backward instead. In the 1780s, George Washington’s Army Surgeon General, Dr. Benjamin Rush, noted, “[A] greater proportion of men have perished with sickness in our armies than have fallen by the sword… The diet of soldiers should consist chiefly of vegetables. The nature of their duty as well as their former habits of life, require it.”

It seems that a return to Dr. Rush’s prescription would, in many ways, do more to honor these men and women’s service than a wave of the American flag and a “Thank you for your service.” As with the society it defends, the American military deserves fresh, whole foods and, perhaps more importantly, the educational programs to healthily feed themselves and their families.

The surprise darling of the Community Food Security Coalition conference last May was a little-known city councilman from Cleveland. He spoke fervently about his city, a city of flourishing community gardens, backyard bee hives, and chicken coops, a city where all farmers’ markets accept food stamps, where schools get discounts for sourcing local food, and where both trans-fats and smoking on playgrounds are banned. His name? Joe Cimperman.

A 4th term Democratic city councilman whose parents hail from Slovenia, Cimperman is a vocal advocate of community gardens, which create community and self-sufficiency. He told of coming together with community leaders, public health officials, doctors, and foundations to pass the Healthy Cleveland Initiative — a series of audacious policy goals that will improve the health of Clevelanders for years to come. (That is, if Ohio’s Republican-majority legislature doesn’t pre-emptively squash them.) He ended with this rallying cry: “Why are we in food policy? Because we want our friends to live longer!”

What are Cleveland’s secrets for becoming a food justice utopia? I recently interviewed Cimperman to find out.

How did you get involved in food justice issues?
It was Marge Misak at the Community Land Trust, Kristen Trolio, who is a community organizer and a farmers’ market pioneer, and Morgan Taggart from OSU land extension. In about 2002, they came to me about the garden on west 45^th Street, St. Paul’s Patch, asking me how we could preserve both the garden and the housing next door. The developer was working behind everyone’s backs and told the community gardeners that it was city-owned land and zoned residential. He wanted to turn the garden into a parking lot and evict the family next door.

I had barely been on the council for a term — I had no clue about anything. They said, “The only way you’re going to change anything is if you change the zoning code.” I thought, well this sounds like a great idea, and these are people who I admire and trust. I’m learning from them. So we did it.

So all of a sudden people in the community started saying, “Hey, what about this? And what the hell are you doing about this?”  It was the education of a Councilman. They started to pull me under their wings and say, “You don’t have to think about this now, but this is something you’re going to have to think about in five years.” We’re servants so we have to fix these things.

So, Cleveland really was the first city to pass an urban farm zoning law?

Well, we passed it in 2007. The only way to create justice in this situation was to create a permanent garden there — change the zoning of the community garden. So we start calling around — Portland, Boston, Seattle. No other cities of any size had such a law. That’s when we wrote the legislation ourselves. It ensures that no one can rip out the community’s investment overnight. After that, community gardens would come forward and say, “We’d like to zone our garden this way, too.” People think twice now about threatening gardeners because it’s there.

What other efforts is Cleveland taking to ensure that all residents have access to affordable healthy food?

A funny thing happened on the way to the community garden. There are so many people out there doing urban gardening and agriculture that it’s changed the tenor of the city. So much so that the City of Cleveland has said, “This is important enough for us to change laws. Now the city gives out $3,000 forgivable loans to market gardeners — more and more people are keeping their own chickens and bees. There are 250 community gardens that we know of and we think that there are an additional 75 that operate with some support from the city.

There’s also a strong agricultural ring around Cleveland and that has yielded a great farmers’ market situation. Amanda Dempsey, who is now managing Cleveland’s West Side Market, is the reason we’re having an international Public Markets Conference in Cleveland. I’m really proud of what Cleveland is doing.

All of Cleveland’s farmers’ markets now accept food stamps (aka SNAP benefits), right? That’s impressive. How did that come about?

John Mitterholzer at the Gund Foundation has a real passion for social agricultural justice. He came to me and said, “I’d like to fund a program to give people on food stamps an incentive to shop at farmers’ markets.”  We meet, come up with an idea on four specific farmers’ markets which were willing to accept both EBT (the debit card for food stamps), and a $5 matching program. In some cases, the number of food stamp shoppers doubled. Then we did a study with John, on the zip codes around the farmers’ markets and showed the amount of money available if everybody with food stamps and WIC used the farmers’ market.

Farmers were like, “You mean, I get to go home with an empty truck? And I get to sell to people who really need this food?”

Everyone agreed it was a good idea but it had been kicked around for a decade. With the Gund Foundation and people in policy and politics like me backing it, it was hard for farmers’ markets to say no.

[Today, 14 of Cleveland’s 15 farmers’ markets accept food stamps and 13 are part of the EBT Incentive Program.]

You gave a rousing talk in May at the CFSC food policy conference in Portland, Oregon. Portland is often cited as a model for farm-to-school and urban agriculture. What can Cleveland take from Portland’s example?

I was out on Sauvie Island to visit Sauvie Island Organics and the Food Works youth gardening program. I saw four school buses pull up while I was there. If you want to educate kids in every way, that’s how you do it. I want to figure out how to do that in Cleveland. The conference was great — we got so many ideas and talked to so many people. There are many programs on the horizon in Portland — beautiful new public housing projects like New Columbia, which has a community garden called Seeds of Harmony. They’re opening up corner stores with affordable, healthy food like Village Market.

There’s a debate about whether or not it’s necessary to bring full-service grocery stores to food deserts. Some in the food justice world think you can you just bypass the big box grocery stores in favor of community gardens and family-run bodegas (that are stocked with lots of fresh produce). What are your thoughts on this?

In the 90’s, there were areas of Cleveland where there were 100 blocks where you couldn’t get fresh produce. The Department of Economic Development is working on changing that — they’re giving huge subsidies to local grocery store chains such as Dave’s (a family-owned chain with great labor relations).

Now we’re doing the bottoms-up approach. We have a pharmacy, Sheliga Drug, that’s started carrying a line of produce. They’re supported by the Ohio State extension. There’s a hardware store in a Latino community that has bins of apples, bananas, everything else. We’re definitely not where we need to be — but my opinion is that if we start from the grassroots, do the community gardens, family-owned shops and so on, somewhere heaven and earth will meet.

Tell me about the Healthy Cleveland Resolution.  What part of it are you most excited about?  What’s going to be the most controversial aspect?

We are going to have Dr. Anthony Iton, the doctor from Place Matters, come back to Cleveland, and we’re going to do a day-long session for thought leaders: politicians, foundation people, corporate folks.

What I’m really excited about is that our school system has shown itself to be very interested in food justice. They want to help us achieve a garden per five blocks, by reinstating this program that came from the Victory Garden movement. Cleveland was the leader in school gardens nationally back then. There’s a new book about it called Cleveland School Gardens by Joel Mader.

We’re also working with cafeterias, which are continuing their progression of sourcing healthier food.

The chief purchaser for the Cleveland Public School District was nominated for something called the Walnut Award. His name is Regis Balaban. He has figured out how to get sugared cereal out of the schools by getting wholesome cereal with skim milk and fresh fruit. He said to me, “Please don’t stop passing legislation.” I said, “It’s kind of funny you’re saying that to me, because you’re exempt from the stuff I’ve been pushing through.” But then he said, “I can use what you’re doing to force my providers to provide us with better food.” For me in terms of food justice, that’s kind of the big.

At the CFSC Conference, you said that the life expectancy discrepancy between an African American community in Cleveland and the white community was 24 years. Fully half of those years were attributable to smoking and diet.

In neighborhoods with community gardens there is less crime. There are more people attending school. We have a high-rise in downtown Cleveland that’s 22 floors. There are about 24 seniors who live there — mostly African American. They’re petitioning me to purchase containers because they want a container garden on the rooftop. They left their homes, they like walking to the theatre without the burden of a mortgage.

It’s not specific to one community, though. The fact of the matter is that the neighborhood that has the 24 year disparity, Hough, is almost 100 percent African American. There are a lot of other issues, of course: violence, the ability to access health care.

As you and I speak, the Ohio state senate has introduced legislation into the budget banning the city of Cleveland from banning trans-fats. Let us die early! Let our children be morbidly obese! They admitted that their restaurant industry wrote the legislation.  So now the battle for food justice has begun.

If the state senate does this, it’ll strike down Cleveland’s law. [Last month, that's exactly what the Ohio state senate did, tucking the provision into a 5,000-page budget law. Cimperman has said he'll challenge it in the courts.]

It’s ridiculous! The trans-fat ban came from doctors and public health professionals. The four major health systems in the state  — Cleveland Clinic, St. Vincent’s, MetroHealth, and University Hospitals — have all signed on to the Healthy Cleveland Resolution. The hospital systems are the number one job provider in Ohio. How do you say to these hospitals, “You don’t know what you’re talking about”?

I may not understand trans-fats, but why the hell is the government telling locals what we can and cannot do?  They haven’t found a way to ban community gardens.

Here’s my gut feeling. What’s going to happen when those 300 gardens that we have in Cleveland double? When in 2020 the city of Cleveland will have a community garden within five blocks of every resident? All of a sudden, local grocery stores are working with local farms. What’s going to happen when the hoop houses start to provide food three seasons a year? What happens with canning? What happens when agribusiness starts to see this? We have a multinational food production company here in Cleveland. I was at a meeting a couple months ago and some folks from this company started asking me about local food. I think we’re starting to get people’s interest. We’re not a threat yet, but what happens when we become a threat?

What can other cities learn from Cleveland when it comes to food justice?

We let the policy be informed by the practice. We have a lot of people who have been doing this for generations. There’s recognition of that: the importance of learning from our elders. Also, we all really like each other. We enjoy each others’ company. Entire weddings are filled with friends and guests who they meet from within the food justice world. Regardless of your political background or racial background or your proficiency in English, there’s something about the gardens that brings people together!

Community gardens just make us a nicer city. They make us share more, pay more attention to each others’ kids, understand each others’ cultures more. There are just so many ancillary benefits to community gardens — we can’t imagine.

The business community is also excited about the hope of urban agriculture and food justice. It means so many things in terms of employment and in terms of people having a purpose and getting out and getting to know your neighbors. I think if we can keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to be in a really good spot.

Originally published on The Faster Times

It’s a big day for the farm to school movement. At the 2011 School Nutrition Association national convention in Nashville today, Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced a comprehensive, groundbreaking report on the current state of farm to school efforts around the country. Download the full report here.

The data in the report was complied by the USDA Farm to School Team (comprised of both Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) and Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) staff), which made visits to 15 school districts (over what time frame) in a wide range of states. Merrigan spoke with Civil Eats earlier today about the findings and how it might shape the farm to school landscape of the future.

What inspires you about this report?

It’s pretty exciting when students are getting really fresh food. It’s a time when the USDA has released a new dietary guideline and a new food icon and we’re really promoting the idea that half of the plate be filled with fruits and vegetables.

It’s also good for farmers’ bottom lines, economically. Particularly for that struggling mid-size commercial farmer, who could really use a local institutional buyer. We’ve seen it make a difference in their viability in a number of states where farm to school has taken off.

Lastly, I think it’s really important for kids to get reconnected to agriculture. It’s one of my themes; I talk about it all the time. Too many Americans are far removed from how their food is produced, and by whom, and they have a lot of questions. Farm to school is in a suite of strategies that USDA is employing to reconnect consumers to where their food comes from.

Farm to school has taken off regardless of what the USDA does, because there’s real enthusiasm around the country for it. Do we know how many schools are implementing these programs and how much produce they’re actually getting on students’ plates? The Farm to School Network Web site has more stats, but as of 2010, there were around 2,000 farm to school programs.

We would like to know more about these programs, so today at the School Nutrition Association convention (where 4,500 school district people are gathering), I’m announcing a national survey to gather baseline data on farm to school. And I’m going to be asking for 100 percent participation in the survey.

What do you hope the take home message is for folks in school districts from this report?

We’ve heard that people are enthusiastic about farm to school–that there are a lot of wins for farmers and students. But we’ve also heard consensus about the challenges: Around funding, around how to procure locally grown food, around how to ensure food safety standards are met, and how to incorporate better salad bars in schools in a way that counts for reimbursable meals. There are a lot of barriers, but none of them are insurmountable. What this shows me is that there really is a pathway forward to expand farm to school in a big way. None of the barriers in this report are deal breakers.

I noticed in the report when people identified barriers, there was often the implication that the farm to school effort was something they had to do in addition of their day-to-day operations, rather than instead of some day-to-day operations.

I have two thoughts about that. First of all, farm to school can’t be an isolated exercise; it needs to be supplemented. That’s why the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative is so important, because we’re investing in things like food hubs. Giving farmers access to light processing and value-added facilities makes it so that it doesn’t all fall on school personnel. Later today, for instance, I’ll be visiting an incubator kitchen in Nashville for value-added products that the USDA has invested with one of our big grants.

We also have the Let’s Move initiative. This report says people lack training, so the First Lady is pairing chefs with schools and a lot of that’s around culinary training in cafeterias, because some of it is just getting more familiarity with how to use knives.

Some of the most creative discussions I participate in focus on how to make the lunch room not just a place to consume the meal, but also an educational component in the school day. Jose Andreas, for instance, one of the chefs in Washington, is talking about trying to make the school meal a science experiment and considering it part of the curriculum. How do we rethink school meals so it’s not just time off from school, but really an inherent part of school?

The report mentioned two laws–the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act in 2002 and the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004. Both were to have supported farm to school efforts, but neither was actually funded in the appropriations process. Given the current budget constraints, what is the likelihood we’ll see these latest efforts get funded?

There is a grant program for farm to school in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that passed last fall and that funding would become available next year. But you’re right, we can’t bet the ranch on it because we are in difficult budget times. I’m anticipating we’ll have that new money, because it seems to be a priority for everyone, including Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (the chairperson of the Senate Agriculture committee) who sponsored the original bill.

That said there’s a lot we can do without new money, by better aligning the bureaucracy. We need to be better on our own federal procurement policies. Today we’re announcing a new pilot program focused on purchasing locally grown fruits and vegetables in both Florida and Michigan. We want to allow school districts to put in their contracts with their distributors that they want local purchasing. We’re trying to really re-examine our own bureaucracy and see how we can make it easier for people to engage in farm to school effort.

If a school is bringing in a little spinach or broccoli–a few items at a time–it’s one thing. But if this were to really grow, do you anticipate any backlash from the few large companies that currently supply most of the food that ends up in school lunches?

Time will tell. Right now the school nutrition community and all the vendors in the school meals programs are facing challenges from a variety of quarters. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act is requiring a serious upgrade in nutrition standards. People are trying to figure out how do they meet these lower sodium and lower fat guidelines, and increase the quantity of fruits and vegetables? We are really in a transformative moment here in school meals; this is the first serious upgrade in nutrition standards in over 15 years, and the first real increase in the reimbursement rate for a very long time.

There are a lot of moving parts right now and everyone recognizes our dual problems of childhood hunger and obesity. Everyone recognizes from all the conversations that I have from every political perspective and every industry perspective that we have to change. It’s a national imperative. People are trying to figure out how to retrofit their businesses. I mean you even have Wal-Mart trying to retrofit their distribution system to move to a local distribution model. To some extent, corporate America will follow what people want and the customers are speaking pretty loudly on the need to reform school meals.

Who will be getting this report and what will happen now?

The report is on the Farm to School Web site as of today. We’re announcing the survey and the procurement pilot in Michigan and Florida and we’re releasing an annotated bibliography on farm to school today that the National Agriculture library has been working on.

I think that suite of efforts,  and the fact that I’m at the School Nutrition Association gathering speaking to 4500 people, says it’s a real coming of age and a seal of approval from USDA. Farm to school is here to stay.

The above photo is from the USDA Farm to School website. 

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