FoodCorps is growing—expanding the number of states we’ll be working in next year and expanding the number of service members who are creating community and creating change. We created FoodCorps with two goals in mind: Addressing a public health crisis and providing a training opportunity for all of growing interest in careers in food and agriculture. Becoming a FoodCorps service member is a way to launch your career in food and farming while helping kids get healthy.

Rachel is one of 50 future food systems leaders who started their terms of service this past August as the first ever class of FoodCorps service members. So far this year, these service members have reached over 20,000 children in 10 states. They are addressing the nation’s painful and costly childhood obesity epidemic using our three recipe ingredient for change: Hands-on nutrition education, growing and tending school gardens, and getting healthy local food onto school cafeteria trays.

Here is what Rachel had to say about her experience this year:

Being the new “garden lady” at a school in small town is cause enough for conversation. Add in the University of Georgia logos that emblazen the coffee thermos I take to school with me every day, and I stick out even more in the sea of Arkansas Razorback gear that comes standard for most of the students and teachers at my school. Serving for FoodCorps has brought me to the town of Marshall, Arkansas, where I spend my days gardening with students from Marshall middle and elementary schools.  The school is a part of the Delta Garden Study, a childhood obesity prevention research project based out of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

When teaching outside, it is important for me to begin by getting a grasp on what the day will hold. My morning starts with a garden walk-through and a meeting with my garden program specialist to plan what garden work we will tackle with our classes for the day. Rolling with the punches does not even start to describe the level of flexibility you need as a FoodCorps Service Member. Your greenhouse will flood, grasshoppers will eat your newly planted kale seedlings, and snow might cover your leaf lettuces in less than an hour. Overcoming these and other challenges have proven to be learning experiences for me and my students over the course of my service term.

If a tasting is on the agenda, I collect my cooking supplies and ingredients before the start of classes for the day. The sight of students gathered around a folding table helping to prepare braised greens, salad, pesto, or even corn and squash fritters is a common one in our classes. Hands-on nutrition education is just as important as the act of gardening.

After talking with my supervisor about the activities of the day, we head to our first class. When my school became a part of the Delta Garden Study, they agreed to adopt a garden-based science curriculum for their middle school science courses. Between sixth, seventh, and eight grades, I work with eleven classes of students. My supervisor and I work with our science teachers to strike the balance between in class science instruction and the outside garden and nutrition connections.

As the “garden lady,” I try to help my students think about learning in a different way, and I get to see firsthand the need to devote more time in our school day to discussing topics like healthy eating. Thanks to FoodCorps I have the opportunity to be a part of that dialogue on a daily basis. My service has given me the privilege of being a part of my students’ lives. Every time we work together in the garden, whether it is to plant, harvest, cook, or even winterize our greenhouse, we illustrate to students that food–where it comes from and how you cook it–is central to health.

Sitting in my organic chemistry class during undergrad, I never envisioned that I would soon become an expert in hosing off kids’ boots at the end of muddy garden work session, explaining the nutritional benefits of pesto over the din of my food processor, or reinforcing the concept of density by making balsamic vinaigrette. But at the end of every day, I am astounded at how lucky I am to experience alongside my students the wonderment that comes with growing and cooking food.

Recruitment for next year’s class begins this week. You can read more at our Web site: www.foodcorps.org or watch our video (produced by Ian Cheney, co-creator of King Corn) on YouTube here.

Smack in the middle of a half-dozen shipping containers and striding up a mound of gravel, Johanna Gilligan, 31, can’t contain her excitement. “This looks so awesome!” She nods her head at an alcove between two containers, painted the pale color of new celery, with dry sinks attached. “That’s going to be for processing.”

Gilligan, co-director of New Orleans’ Grow Dat Youth Farm, traipses up the mound, which terminates at a deck of sorts and more containers, crowded with architectural students from Tulane University and local urban farm experts. Beyond the deck sits a bayou, lined with trees weeping Spanish moss into the water; the I-610 freeway buzzes along in the background. “I can’t believe how much is done! My office is going to be in a treehouse!”

She has reason to be excited. At four acres, the buildings’ site is just a sliver of City Park, 1,300 acres of green space on New Orleans’ north side. But come February, the buildings will be done, the beds will be ready for planting, and the second class of Grow Dat farmers will commence their work. The goal: one acre planted, 10,000 pounds of food grown, 20 jobs for student workers.

Pitched as the natural progression of programs like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard (New Orleans is home to the first Edible Schoolyard affiliate outside of the Bay Area, and its founding director, Donna Cavato, sits on Grow Dat’s board), Grow Dat will welcome its second round of student workers in February. The project was founded in 2010 with the Tulane City Center, a community design and architecture initiative, and the Urban Innovator Challenge Fellowship, also at Tulane. The backing let Gilligan, a founding staffer for the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and a driving force behind Rethink‘s New Orleans School Food Report Card, bring in a small staff to work out kinks for the program’s first year. In its inaugural year, Grow Dat employed 13 student workers who grew a total of 2,200 pounds of food, donating nearly two-thirds of it to food banks, and selling the rest at a farmers market.

The effort, says Denise Richter, who coordinates gardens at five elementary and middle schools for Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (ESY-NOLA), solves a riddle that’s confounded ESY-NOLA since it was founded: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.

“There was always this moment where it was like, ‘Great, we’ve been able to establish a culture and an understanding of how important it is to know where your food comes from and cook it,’” says Richter, who says ESY-NOLA works with more than 500 students each year. “And there’s always this regret, because what do they do [after ESY]? Go to a place where their cafeteria food looks like it did five years ago, eating slop. Grow Dat is such an asset, because our students can apply their skills and go even further.”

With an older–if much smaller–pool of students, Grow Dat is aiming to expand teenagers’ food knowledge while teaching even broader lessons about work and collaboration. “A key concept of Grow Dat is that you cannot do social change only in one neighborhood,” says Gilligan. She sees the program’s site at City Park as neutral ground for students, who this year will come from a mix of public and private schools, to learn “to communicate across race and class lines.”

That’s a heady goal, but if Aston Shields, 17, is any indication, Grow Dat may have some luck in meeting it. One of last year’s students–he’s angling to return as a crew leader this year–Shields didn’t start out interested in food. “I was just reading posters on the wall, and stumbled onto [the job listing],” says Shields in an urban drawl, adding that he mostly applied because it was a paid job. For a modest stipend, he learned how to plan and maintain food gardens, wash and prepare vegetables for market and track their sales, and even attended a handful of lectures on food systems at Tulane. “I came here and I was like, ‘Wow, I never even really thought about how people produced our food,’” says Shields. “It was just a whole new world.”

But in addition to being paid for his work, Shields was able to take home fruits and vegetables from plots he was helping tend at the Hollygrove Market and Farm–a special boon to a family living in the Hollygrove neighborhood where, says Shields, the closest thing to a supermarket is a Walgreen’s. “Once Grow Dat gave me fruits and vegetables, [my family] embraced it,” says Shields–even if the end results weren’t exactly what most slow food acolytes might have had in mind. “We had some shiitake mushrooms,” says Shields. “And my momma made sloppy joes with it.”

Photo: Top, Johanna Gilligan packs fava beans with a student from the Grow Dat program in New Orleans, by David Schalliol. Bottom, A young Grow Dat participant, by Andy Cook.

Originally published on Grist

According to the allegations in the Penn State scandal, a pedophile was allowed to brutally assault/molest numerous young boys because no one dared to upset the very lucrative apple cart that is college sports.

And now comes word that Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have torpedoed the USDA’s attempts to reduce the amount of pizza, french fries, and salt that our kids consume at school. Why? Because the frozen pizza companies, the salt industry, and potato growers asked them to. Really. It’s that simple.

The USDA wasn’t looking to ban any of these foods, but rather to increase the ratio of non-starchy vegetables and whole grains. This would be a step in the right direction, instead of using our resources to make our kids sicker and fatter. But such a shift would also make a dent in some very lucrative government contracts. So, no go.

There’s more going on here than simple greed, though. Because the politicians who do the food industry’s bidding are showing as much contempt for the expert opinion of nutritionists as they do towards the science of climate change. As Tom Philpott notes over at Mother Jones, the evidence that we need to feed our kids less of this stuff is solid: “Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It.”

But who needs experts, anyway? Not the GOP. Their ideal nominee should evidently be a blowhard ignoramus with a moral compass that’s shiftier than the San Andreas fault line, and at least as deeply cracked.

Take Herman Cain. When the pizza mogul/motivational speaker/alleged serial groper was asked if he could define a man by the kind of pizza he prefers, he declared that “A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.”

And so goes the ongoing conservative war against vegetables, served up with a side of machismo. We can’t let the First Lady instill a love of broccoli in our kids! And isn’t Obamacare just a sneaky plot to open the door for legislation that would crucify Americans who reject cruciferous vegetables?

I guess those retired war generals over at Mission Readiness didn’t get the memo about the sissifying powers of vegetables. Why are these military experts up in arms over the USDA’s caving in to Big Food? Maybe because “Obesity is the leading medical disqualifier for military service, and children get up to 40 percent of their daily calories during the school day?”

As Amy Dawson Taggart, Mission Readiness’s director, noted “This new effort to undermine school nutrition regulations raises national security concerns.”

It should also raise questions about what kind of culture turns a blind eye to kids being brutalized and turns our children into vessels for commodity crop crap because it protects the revenues of some high powered institutions and politicians. What warped brand of capitalism have we created that permits our kids to be treated as collateral damage?

Given all the media attention, you may think that Alice Waters is the only person in Berkeley doing anything to fix school food–and that her Edible Schoolyard Project is the only organization tackling this topic across the country.

But that perception would be wrong. Founded in 1995, the Center for Ecoliteracy has also long championed school food reform and channeled funding in the millions to garden programs, cooking classes, and nutrition-based curriculum in Berkeley public schools.

Along with the Chez Panisse Foundation and Berkeley Unified School District, the Center for Ecoliteracy also implemented the School Lunch Initiative, which kickstarted local, seasonal, and sustainable food for students here and connected the classroom and the cafeteria.

Currently, its Rethinking School Lunch program offers a planning strategy for revamping food service beyond Berkeley to rural and urban areas around the state struggling to improve the eating habits of school children, many of whom are hungry, nutritionally depleted, or hampered by diet-related illnesses such as obesity and diabetes.

Last week, the center introduced school nutrition personnel from around the country to its new cookbook-guide, Cooking with California Foods in K-12 Schools, which played a starring role in a hands-on workshop on creative school lunch menu planning, as part of the national Community Food Security Coalition‘s 15th Annual Conference in downtown Oakland.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon a stuffy, windowless Marriott hotel conference space was packed with about 60 school food folk from both coasts and the country’s center and south, all eagerly drinking the Kool-Aid—sorry, make that freshly squeezed lemon juice with a hint of mint—dispensed by renowned cookbook author, culinary teacher, and food policy consultant Georgeann Brennan and her colleague Ann M. Evans, former Davis mayor, co-founder of that city’s food co-op and farmers’ market, and a long-time advocate of sustainable food systems.

Participants, who left with renewed enthusiasm and ideas to try back at their own schools—along with a free guide and a nifty apron—formed small groups to turn out such salads as zucchini and feta; broccoli, raisin and walnut; tabbouleh; and Asian cabbage and orange with ginger. They also connected with kindred spirits in the school food world while they grated, chopped, and stirred.

Also on hand to talk transforming school food: award-winning Oakland Unified School District Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre—along with four of that city’s Lunch Ladies who shared stories about the pressing need and formidable barriers to bettering school food, as only those in the frontlines every day can do—and Zenobia Barlow, the Center for Ecoliteracy’s executive director and co-founder.

Barlow isn’t a celebrity chef and she doesn’t own a famous restaurant. Rather, she hails from an anthropology-sustainability-think tank-policy wonk pedigree. And her commitment to improving what children eat at school every day is clear and consistent. “The Center has quietly and steadily worked on improving school food and providing professional development and training to school food personnel for about 15 years,” said Barlow post conference from her office at the David Brower Center. “We helped bring about the changes in school food in Berkeley and we’ve moved on to other schools and districts to facilitate change there too.”

The cookbook is part of this plan. It is based on a simple yet clever 6-5-4 formula that consists of six dishes (salads, soups, pastas, rice bowls, wraps, and pizza toppings), five flavor profiles (African, Asian, European/Mediterranean, Latin American, and Middle Eastern/Indian) and the fresh produce available during the four seasons. The approach was developed in the Davis, Oakland, and Winters school districts over three years.

Funded by TomKat Charitable Trust, the guide’s goal is to help school food service staff find ways to add more fresh, local, healthy foods to school meals (though the downloadable document offers recipes suitable for home cooking too). Some 8,000 guides have been downloaded since August, more than 1,000 have been shipped to school nutrition staff and all 40 copies got snapped up at last week’s workshop, according to Barlow.

Each presenter stressed the importance of integrating California specialty crops—such as walnuts, lettuce, olive oil, strawberries, apricots, figs, citrus and more — into meal programs. “How can we expect our children to understand what food is grown in their area and how it tastes if it’s not on their plate?” asked Evans to a receptive crowd, who also noted California’s long growing season and diverse range of produce not available in most parts of the country.

Attendees from states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Montana raised the challenges they face in sourcing affordable fresh produce at certain times of the year. “California is blessed with great soil and climate and has the capacity to grow for a population far larger than itself,” said Evans. “To share that bounty is great for California farmers and for consumers around the nation. This doesn’t have to supplant local produce in other states, but can compliment it.”

She also noted that schools in as diverse California locations as Davis, Riverside, Ventura, Winters, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and Clovis are all early adopters of the 6-5-4 approach to school menus, which allows for substitutions based on availability.

Barlow, who is currently working closely with the Oakland Unified School District, also pointed out the OUSD’s novel approaches to enhancing the edible experience at different sites—like the “Grab and Go” breakfast bags offered at high schools, the grant-sponsored fruit and vegetable snacks for elementary schools, the new supper program recently implemented at some schools, or the more than 20 afterschool farm stands on school grounds in that city, where many children live in food deserts.

“It’s been important to take what we learned in Berkeley and apply it on a larger scale in districts in more urban settings like Oakland, which benefits 40,000 children a year, more than 70 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch,” Barlow said.

“For some children who are fed five times a day at school, it’s the only place they eat. So we’re applying the best of Berkeley’s school food practices and sharing them with the rest of the state and even the country. This guide is part of the solution to the challenge of reinventing school food.”

Photo courtesy Zenobia Barlow

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Halloween is a time for ghosts, goblins and the latest cartoon or sci-fi characters. And oh the candy! This year is the fifth annual Reverse Trick-or-Treating, an initiative of Global Exchange’s Sweet Smarts network, with leadership from Equal Exchange. Trick-or-treaters around the country will be handing out fair trade chocolate to over 100,000 adults who normally would be handing goodies to them.

This national giveback event focuses awareness on child slave labor, trafficking, poverty and hazardous environmental conditions rampant within the cocoa industry. (See Civil Eats coverage of this issue here and here.)

In 2003, the U.S. State Department issued a report stating that “approximately 109,000 child laborers working in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast,” a country where “the law does not prohibit trafficking in people.”

There’s documented forced child labor in the Ivory Coast, a large source of the chocolate sold in the U.S., said Kelsie Evans, worker/co-owner of Equal Exchange, a chocolate fair trade organization that supports farming cooperatives around the world who provide sustainable farming methods.

The average cocoa farmer may earn up to $100 a year—nowhere near what it takes to take care of a family. To maximize cocoa yields, wildlife habitat gets destroyed and increased pesticide use is encouraged. All this for the gooey chocolate treats you hand out every year.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol—an agreement by this country’s largest chocolate companies to put an end to forced child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa by 2005. While some of the chocolatiers have made strides to correct these abuses, Hershey’s has done little, activists say.

Global Exchange, Green America and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) issued a joint report targeting Hershey named “Time to Raise the Bar, Hershey!” It details how hundreds of thousands of children are still being forced to work under abusive conditions for long hours on cocoa farms in West Africa, while others are victims of trafficking and forced labor. The documentary, “The Dark Side of Chocolate,” also profiles this sobering subject.

But change is happening. Five years ago, Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based, international humanitarian organization, partnered with Equal Exchange to create the first Reverse Trick-or-Treating event.

It’s a hard topic to talk about, says Evans. “Chocolate is seen as a source of joy in the world,” she said. But, she added, “Children grasp some of these concepts about fairness.”

Reverse Trick-or-Treating happens Halloween night, according to Kylie Nealis, the coordinator of the campaign.

“It’s kids taking action on a problem that affects other children,” she said.

“It’s a great teaching moment,” said Rodney North, The Answer Man and co-owner of Equal Exchange. “There’s a surprise factor of the child down the street is bringing the lesson to me—and you get to eat the solution.”

Originally published on Global Exchange

I’ve got a problem with the food system conversation in the U.S.  It neglects to include what I call the “first food”—breast milk—and emphasize the critical importance of breastfeeding. No conversation about equitable food systems can truly exist without including the first food and understanding how the racial and social inequities around breastfeeding adversely affect vulnerable populations.

If access to healthy food is a basic human right then doesn’t that right start at birth? Shouldn’t our smallest and most vulnerable citizens have fair and just access to the healthiest food for them?

Consider the facts: For the past 30 years, breastfeeding rates among black women, particularly those in underserved, food desert communities, have been significantly lower than all other ethnicities. In the U.S., African American infants are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday than other infants. In some cities, the stats are even more sobering: Memphis, Tennessee ranks at the top of the list for infant deaths in American cities—where a baby dies every 43 hours.

A recent study [NS1] concluded that increasing breastfeeding rates alone could help close this racial gap across the board.  The many health benefits of breastfeeding, including an improved immune system and fewer ear and respiratory infections would address some of the leading causes of infant death in low-income communities.

In addition, several studies, including one by researchers at the University of Copenhagen show that breastfed infants are more likely to try new foods later in life. Because breast milk contains flavors from foods eaten by mothers, breastfed infants are exposed to a variety of tastes early in life. In contrast, artificial baby milk (formula) always tastes the same. These nuances are simple yet powerful steps that can lead to a greater likelihood for more varied and healthier food choices as an older child.

Given these sobering facts, it is hard to argue against the fact that by removing the barriers to access to the first food we can have a tremendous impact on infant nutrition and maternal health. And it is equally hard to understand why the food movement isn’t talking more about breastfeeding.

Instead, far too many babies are born into “first food” deserts, communities with limited breastfeeding resources and support.  The reasons why more African American women aren’t relying on the first food for their newborns are a multifaceted mosaic—ripe with politically nuances, deep racial undertones, social taboos, and complex cultural subtleties—similar to many other areas of the food systems work.

Some of the barriers may be related to historical trauma. During slavery, slave owners used and purchased black women as wet nurses for their own children, often forcing these mothers to stop nursing their own infants to care for others.

“On the one hand, wet nursing claimed the benefits of breastfeeding for the offspring of white masters while denying or limiting those health advantages to slave infants. On the other hand, wet nursing required slave mothers to transfer to white offspring the nurturing and affection they should have been able to allocate to their own children,” writes historian Wilma A. Dunaway, in the book The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation.  And since breastfeeding reduces fertility, slave owners forced black women to stop breastfeeding early so that they could continue breeding, often to the health detriment of their own infants, Dunaway writes.

Although African American women had a stunted and complex breastfeeding experience at the hands of slave owners hundreds of years ago, that may still linger culturally today. Perhaps an unconscious legacy of thinking that breastfeeding is something we did for others and not for ourselves.

Then there’s something I call the National Geographic factor—that is, most of the images we see of black women breastfeeding are semi-naked women in Africa whose lives seem so far away from our modern, African American lifestyle and experience.

A lack of culturally competent breastfeeding resources in our communities also play a part.

Whatever the root causes, the correlative impact is clear: A woman is more likely to eat nutritious food when breastfeeding. Conversely, when a woman lives in a food desert and knows her diet is not and cannot easily be healthy, nutritious and affordable, she is less likely to breastfeed.

Our destinies are inextricably linked.

By breaking downs the racial and social barriers to the first food, we can give more infants a healthier and more equitable start in life; make the first food, fair food and improve the health of their mothers, too.

That would be true justice for all.

Food corporations enjoy carte blanche on what they can say about their foods, how and to whom they advertise, and even (to a large degree) the ingredients they choose to put in their foods. But when the Obama administration recently proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] for the types of food advertised to children, industry giants decided to preempt these guidelines and create their own.

Since the government released its new guidelines, two powerful industry groups have reared up. One is the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, headed by former Obama press secretary Anita Dunn, and led by PepsiCo, Viacom, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Time Warner, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. This group was quickly created in response to the government’s new guidelines and its sole purpose is to prevent them from going into effect.

The second industry group making noise is the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), led by ConAgra, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Kellogg’s. The members of CFBAI sell thousands of food and beverage products around the world and thus share joint interests when it comes to advertising policies.

The government’s guidelines evolved as part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and are intended to protect children from the onslaught of advertising for highly processed, nutritionally void foods. The guidelines propose that by 2016, all food products most heavily marketed to children and adolescents ages two to 17 must meet the following two nutrition principles, “provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet,” and “should minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health or weight.”

This translates as quite modest caps on added fat, sugar, and sodium: One gram or less of saturated fat, zero grams trans-fat, no more than 13 grams of added sugars, and no more than 210 grams of sodium per serving. The trouble is, many processed foods already meet this criteria: Trix cereal, which is heavily marketed to children across various social media platforms as well on TV and in print, contains 10 grams of sugar per serving, zero grams saturated fat and trans fat, and 180 mg of sodium, which puts it right up there with some of the worst foods our nation’s children are eating. Trix is chock full of sugar, additives, food dyes, and preservatives that have been to shown to have a myriad of ill effects.

The food industry members of the CFBAI called the voluntary guidelines, “unworkable and unrealistic” and then proposed their own guidelines—guidelines that would require no modifications to two-thirds of their food products. Meanwhile, the CFBAI is trying to paint this as groundbreaking progress and even the chairman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agrees. “The industry’s uniform standards are a significant advance and exactly the type of initiative the commission had in mind when we started pushing for self-regulation more than five years ago,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC said in a statement about the advertising initiative.

It’s unclear how creating regulations that allow for two-thirds of the processed food products to remain unchanged is “significant progress.” What is clear is that the industrial food giants want no part in creating healthier foods for children. They claim the modest guidelines will cause job loss in an already troubled economy, appealing to the conservative base that scoffs at any government regulation, and crying “nanny-state,” when the government attempts to intervene in our health crisis.

And while the right wing makes claims of socialism and ridicules Michelle Obama for trying to regulate food corporations on grounds that the few should not control the many—the truth is, the few are indeed controlling the many. Large food conglomerates like General Mills, Kellogg’s, Con-Agra, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola are the epitome of this scenario. These corporations effectively control what most middle-income and low-income people eat in this country. If you are born into a poor family, with relative food insecurity, then it makes economic sense to eat the most calorically rich (usually nutrient-void) foods for the least amount of money. Not coincidentally, this is what the large food corporations excel at producing.

It comes as no surprise then, that the most recent research examining obesity found that poor, African American women make up the largest population of obese Americans, with Latino women following close behind. In fact, poor women of all races were the most likely to be obese and the research shows troubling links between poverty, government assistance and health problems in the United States.

Findings from a Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study released last November indicate a similar trend. The study found that the industry specifically targets teens and minority youth more often and with less healthy items. African American youth saw at least 50 percent more fast food ads on TV in 2009 than their white peers.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center said this is particularly alarming since these are the populations most at-risk for obesity and diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of obesity for African Americans is 51 percent higher than for white Americans, and the prevalence of obesity amongst the nation’s Hispanic American population is 21 percent higher than their white peers.

The Obama administration is on the right track by creating guidelines to regulate a food system that functions completely unchecked but it shouldn’t cower to industry pressure by allowing food corporations to regulate themselves—isn’t that exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 60 years?

Photo: via rocker_time3 on Flickr

A little over a year ago, our family made a bold move by pledging to follow strict “real food” rules for 100 long days. A few of these rules included no white flour, no sugar, and nothing out of a package with more than five ingredients. And there were no exceptions whether we were traveling, out to eat, at a birthday party or with friends. We started this little experiment of ours simply to draw attention to how dependent Americans have become on highly processed food.

Just a few months prior, we ourselves had been relying on the very same factory-made junk and the scary part was we didn’t even realize we were doing anything wrong. So, after our little wake up call, thanks to Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., we didn’t think it was good enough to just make the appropriate changes within our own family. We felt compelled to share the shocking news we’d learned with others and “blow the whistle,” so to speak, on what Americans were really eating.

Once our fairly typical family in the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C. took on this extreme and sudden “real food” pledge, it led to quite a few interesting and surprising experiences. Here are some highlights:

Redefining the way we shopped for food

During the first several weeks of our real food pledge, I felt completely lost when it came to food shopping. What used to be an incredibly simple process became complex and confusing because I suddenly didn’t know where to go or what to buy. Before our real food wake up call, I’d never read the ingredients on a food label, never shopped at a farmers’ market, and never bought anything that was organic–at least not on purpose.

I used to barely even step foot in the grocery store because I did all of my shopping online. In one easy transaction I would order our food for the week then drive up to the store and wait for the personal shopper to load everything up in my car. There is no question that was easy, but I slowly had to stop going to our mainstream grocery store and instead drive all around town in what felt like a web to the farmers’ market, multiple health food supermarkets, a bakery, and a local farm for our CSA box. What was once simple, predictable, and painless was suddenly taking four times as long. But, with lots of practice and patience, I eventually become more efficient, although I of course had to start getting out of the car.

Convincing our children to embrace this new way of life

What started out as a little rough, with a severe melt down over a forbidden deep-fried donut, somehow turned into a surprising and amazing learning experience for our three- and five-year-old children. During the first month or so I constantly questioned myself over involving and restricting my children’s diets for this little experiment of ours. Here I was spending hours preparing and packing up “approved real food” just so I could take my daughters down the street to a birthday party. We suddenly became the minority and could rarely find “acceptable” food outside of our home.

But, as I saw our young daughters blossom and start to make better choices all on their own—like asking for a banana from a concession stand full of the worst junk food I could imagine–I realized I was actually doing no harm whatsoever. In fact, I was doing a lot of good by teaching my children at a young age how to make the best food choices and why. And while we’ve said time and time again, it isn’t necessarily the best approach to follow strict rules 100 percent of the time, it certainly helped us gain a new perspective so we could learn how to make the right long term changes for our family.

Accepting the response (both positive and negative) from family and friends

Our “real food” pledge” suddenly made us the minority. Here in North Carolina people are not quite as up-to-speed on the emerging real food movement as they are in other locations such as New York or California. This was the beginning of a long road in our attempt to explain what we were doing and why. Friends slowly got used to us bringing our own meals along, although I wouldn’t say they exactly embraced the idea. The jokes may have been lighthearted, but they certainly didn’t go unnoticed.

Then there were our extended family members. They may have said they were supportive, but words only go so far. When you are visiting family members from out of state and eating what they have cooked issues can and unfortunately do arise. We had been bending over backwards to abide by our strict rules for many weeks then we suddenly had to decide if we should eat the rule-breaking food or keep the peace with family. It was definitely one of the biggest challenges we faced during our pledge.

Dealing with restaurants and travel

Before starting our pledge, I got rid of every single processed food we owned. This simple act made following our “real food” pledge almost painless—when we were at home of course. Leaving our house was a completely different story. We could hardly go anywhere without plenty of preplanning including time spent packing up all sorts of “approved” food. When preparing for long-distance trips we often packed an entire suitcase dedicated to food–that I would spend days making–as well as logged many hours on restaurant and other advance research. Thanks to all of this painstaking preparation my oldest daughter and I even managed to stay in a hotel in New York City with friends–who were not on a real food diet–while somehow not breaking any of our rules! I am still amazed we did it.

At times trying to eat out at restaurants was almost a joke. It was no longer about what menu items sounded appetizing or might be in our price range, but instead it was about narrowing things down to the one or two items we actually could eat. And ordering off the kids’ menu was no longer even an option. So after multiple inquiries about what’s in this soup and what’s in that sauce we would finally make a decision and only hope that our high maintenance order didn’t entice any restaurant employees to tamper with our food.

Surprising health benefits

We initially felt compelled to cut out processed food because we thought it was the right thing to do. What we didn’t expect were the plethora of positive changes we experienced to our health during the process including:

• Our youngest daughter’s digestive issues completely disappeared.
• This same daughter went from five episodes of wheezing in 2009 to only one in 2010 and 2011.
• Neither of our children missed a single day of school from being sick during the 2010–2011 school year.
• My HDL (AKA good cholesterol) went up by 50 percent!
• The overall feeling like I have more energy and need less sleep.
• My husband and I both lost a few pounds without even trying.
• A change in our palate resulting in less desire for sweet, salty, and processed foods.

All in all, we are pleased we completed this project not only for our own personal eye-opening and educational experience, but also to help draw others’ attention to this important topic. Since the initial launch of our “100 Days of Real Food” pledge a little over a year ago our blog has had almost one million pageviews from over 160 different countries, which means our reach is far more than we could have ever imagined. To think that we are surpassing our goal of spreading the word to a few hundred friends makes every moment of this experience, good or bad, well worth it.

On May 30, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted to cripple the nation’s budding effort to do something about the woeful quality of school food and make America’s kids healthier.

Ignoring the recent bi-partisan mandate to develop new science-based, healthy food standards under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, the committee’s bill directs the US Department of Agriculture to ensure that its proposed school food standards will not increase costs to schools.

That would effectively squash the drive to make school food better.

The pending USDA rule to update 15-year old standards, which has generated more than 100,000 supportive public comments, would require schools to cut sodium and fat, provide more whole grains and double the amount fruits and vegetables in the meals they feed to more than 32 million kids every day. Many Republicans say we just can’t afford it—and want to roll back a long-overdue process.

The “increased costs of complying with the proposed rule will be overly burdensome and difficult to manage,” Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) wrote recently to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging that USDA’s pending standards be rewritten. Kline is chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee.

There is no escaping the fact that serving healthier foods will cost money–at least in the short run–especially for the majority of schools that don’t have the necessary infrastructure, purchasing systems and staffing in place.

But Kline is wrong.

What we can’t afford is the ever-mounting cost of continuing to feed our children the same unhealthy, fattening and disease-causing food. School meals – often high in fat, sodium and refined sugars and skimpy on fresh fruits and vegetables–are contributing to soaring childhood diabetes and obesity rates, impeding kids’ ability to learn and costing the nation billions of dollars in current and future health care costs.

A report last year by the Produce for Better Health Foundation, based mostly on federal data, calculated that the diet-related medical costs of just four serious illnesses–diabetes, cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke–amount to $38 billion a year. Obesity pushes the figure close to the $150 billion mark.

There is substantial other evidence that people whose diets are rich in fruits and vegetables are far less likely to suffer from these health problems, yet less than 1 percent of adolescents get their recommended servings of these healthy foods. With many children consuming as much as half their daily calories at school, strengthening school nutritional standards is the surest way to reduce future health care costs.

This is not “nanny state overreach.” Besides the health benefits, better school food results in better student learning and behavior and greater fitness. A 2007 Department of Defense report found that 25 percent of the applicants rejected for military service were turned down because they were too fat. Twenty-five percent!

In the current ideologically driven budget-cutting mania, however, there seems to be no room  for rational debate about what programs are worth cutting, protecting or even increasing, based on hard data, future benefits and return on investment.

Healthy food investments will pay off

Yes, implementing new school food standards will come at a cost, but some schools are showing they can serve healthier food on limited budgets – and in some cases even reporting higher profits as a result of increased demand for better tasting food.

USDA projects that implementing its proposed draft standards would cost nearly $7 billion. To cover just a small portion of that cost, the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act authorized spending an additional six cents per meal.

But even if it’s possible to meet the new standards at lower cost, which some say is the case, the broader questions are:

• Despite the difficult fiscal times we’re in, do we really want to rule out spending any new money on healthier food for kids, knowing that it will deliver financial and health dividends in the future?
• Are we willing to have a national conversation about the merits of investing our future? And if we do make an investment, what programs – or “offsets”–should be cut to pay for it?

As the budget process moves to the Senate, lawmakers must do two things:

1. Reaffirm the Act’s forward-thinking school food policies and strongly back USDA’s attempts to write science-based school food standards.
2. Negotiate common sense agreements to slash spending on wasteful programs that yield few public benefits while protecting and even increasing spending that delivers myriad societal benefits and future cost savings.

In an earlier post, we showed how just 2 percent of the cotton subsidies spent in California ($75 million) could pay for doubling the quantity of fruits and vegetables in California schools, with great benefit for kids’ health and farmers’ bottom lines. These upland cotton subsidies, which totaled $200 million in 2009, generated a return of only $85 million in cotton sales for the state. That’s a loss to taxpayers of nearly 60 cents for each dollar spent. In contrast, an Oregon study found that every dollar spent on buying local food for school meals generated $1.87 in new economic activity.

As these examples make clear, there are indeed sensible offsets to pay for better school food–if reason and common sense can trump the influence and money that dictates decision-making in Washington. Simple request, right?

As the Senate works to resolve big-picture deficit reduction issues and considers changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill, it must not just slash and burn valuable programs. Senators must rethink policy priorities so that our investments are better aligned with the country’s long-term needs, especially in the nutritional guidelines that will pay off in better health for America’s kids for years to come.

Shifting policies and funding priorities

It won’t solve all the nation’s food-related health problems, but we can boost access to and affordability of healthy foods at school and at home simply by shifting a portion of the public investment in the 2012 Food and Farm Bill away from supporting the raw commodities that yield cheap processed foods (think: corn, soy) and into growing fruits, nuts and vegetables and building the local infrastructure to process and distribute them.

With the slash-and-burn approach to balancing the budget gaining momentum, it is crystal clear that it will take concerted action by of millions of concerned citizens to push members of Congress to craft a smarter, forward-thinking food system. Unless your voice is heard, how will your representative know what policies you believe in?

You can take the first step right now and let Congress know that investing in smarter food and farm policies that promote a cleaner environment and healthier diets for kids is a priority for you, because it offers better health and lower costs over the long term.

Originally published on AgMag

Assembly Bill 1319, the Toxin-Free Infants and Toddlers Act, would ban the use of BPA in baby bottles, sippy cups, infant formula, and baby food. The bill, authored by Assembly Member Betsy Butler (D-Marina Del Ray), which was passed by both the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee and the Health Committee, is headed for a vote by the full Assembly today.

BPA is used in the manufacture of the lining of canned foods as well as cash register receipts, but this bill is limited to banning BPA in food contact products for young children. Despite this, the $6 billion chemical and formula industries reportedly spent $5 million to defeat last year’s BPA bill, which failed narrowly when two ill legislators, both of whom had voted for the bill previously, were absent for the crucial final vote. And the chemical industry is once again fiercely lobbying California lawmakers with the claim that BPA is safe and that safer alternatives are not available.

Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, has long warned of the dangers BPA in food containers, particularly for fetuses, infants, and small children. Our precautionary advice to consumers is based on more than 200 scientific studies that show clear links between BPA exposure and increased risk of cancer, diabetes, reproductive, neurological, and developmental disorders. We also recently refuted the misinformation put out by industry about the alleged safety and lack of alternatives to BPA.

Studies show that BPA is in the bloodstreams of more than 90 percent of the population at levels that have shown harm in animal studies. And food appears to be a primary source of exposure. Children may metabolize BPA more slowly than adults and may therefore be particularly vulnerable to BPA, which has also been linked to early puberty, breast cancer, childhood obesity, autism, and hyperactivity.

Because of the existing and growing body of scientific knowledge about the health risks of BPA to consumers, BPA in children’s products has been banned in nine states, the European Union and Canada. Most recently, China announced that it, too, would move to ban BPA. BPA-ban legislation is currently pending in 12 states.

There’s also a growing consumer and industry movement against this chemical. Many of the largest manufacturers of baby bottles are no longer selling bottles made with BPA. In addition, major retailers are in the process of phasing out selling baby bottles with BPA, or have already done so. Moreover, chemical giant Sunoco, acknowledging the safety concerns about BPA, announced they would restrict the sales of the controversial chemical in baby bottles and food containers for children under three. Just last week, grocery giant Kroger, having made sure that BPA is gone from the baby products it sells, announced that it is ridding the chemical from cans it uses in its store brands and the paper on which its receipts are printed.

California’s children are at a risk from BPA exposure. Big chemical and formula company money shouldn’t trump the health of babies and toddlers.