Civil Eats

On January 25, amid much fanfare, First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack released the new school lunch regulations [PDF] which have been over three years in the making. Early hopes that the original proposed rules, which were based on recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, would dramatically change school lunches from the pizza/chicken nugget/french fries model so commonly seen in school cafeterias, to something looking a little more like, well, food, were dashed when Big Food lobbyists were able to force changes in Congress allowing plenty of potatoes, and continuing the longstanding tradition of counting the sauce on pizza as a vegetable. Still, there will be some improvements. Read More

Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals. Read More

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. Read More

An effort to get American children to eat more fruits and vegetables should, even in hyper-polarized Washington, be a no-brainer.  Last week, Congress declared pizza sauce to be a vegetable in school lunches.  Now, major food manufacturers are escalating their attacks against healthy food calling proposed food marketing guidelines “job killers” that will devastate the American economy.   Read More

If we’re such a “family values”-friendly nation, why are we so willing to let our kids be abused for the sake of making money?

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. Read More

I was skeptical and sighing heavily when I pressed play to view Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead. I immediately thought, “With such a negative title, this documentary will be a) depressing and b) preachy.”

I’m an optimistic person though–hence my dislike for the title–so I tried to toss out the judgmental thoughts and, as it turns out, my initial impression was pleasantly proven wrong. Read More

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama told reporters that she would promote breast-feeding, particularly among African-American women, as part of her campaign to reduce childhood obesity. In response, the Internal Revenue Service announced that breast pumps would be eligible for tax breaks. Strangely enough, this simple notion to encourage breast-feeding—which has been shown in many studies to reduce the incidence of childhood obesity and could actually reduce government spending—is the latest idea to be attacked by conservatives. Read More

The USDA released a new set of dietary guidelines this week and the updated guidelines were enough to put nutritionist Marion Nestle in “shock”:

I never would have believed they could pull this off.  The new guidelines recognize that obesity is the number one public health nutrition problem in America and actually give good advice about what to do about it: eat less and eat better. For the first time, the guidelines make it clear that eating less is as priority.

She did criticize the guidelines for talking about “food” when it came to things you needed more of (such as vegetables) and “nutrients” when it was time to talk about cutting back (less saturated fat instead of less meat).

But to be honest, I don’t really want to talk about the dietary guidelines. Read More

First Lady Michelle Obama joined America’s largest grocery chain, Walmart, Thursday to announce that the Fortune 500 company has a five-year plan to increase healthy food offerings, reduce fresh produce prices, and improve access to affordable food, a move intended to complement Mrs. Obama’s campaign to combat childhood obesity. Read More

In what is the most comprehensive analysis of fast food nutrition and marketing to date, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity released a study Monday indicting fast food restaurants for aggressive marketing campaigns targeted to youth and other vulnerable groups, and a lack of readily available healthy options on their menus. Read More

A new study published last week in the journal Obesity, found that popular sodas and other beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contain on average 18 percent more fructose than was previously thought. Read More

Wonder why childhood obesity is such a pervasive problem? Take a look at newly released data showing that children ages two to 18 get 40 percent of their daily caloric intake from junk foods like soda, sugary fruit drinks, pizza, cakes, cookies, donuts, and ice cream and wonder no more. That’s nearly half of their daily calories, or 800 calories a day based on a 2000-calorie diet. Call this a triumph for the food industry—a business that has mastered the art of making people eat more and more nutritionally void food—and a tragedy for our nation’s children. Read More

A recent report by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) called “Real Food, Real Choice: Connecting SNAP Recipients with Farmers Markets,” gives detail to the economic, social and technological roadblocks that often prevent many Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants from buying fresh and healthy food at their  local, or not so local, farmers markets. Is the real issue access or affordability? Michel Nischan, CEO and President of Wholesome Wave, talks about how their innovative programs are helping to avert a national health care crisis. Read More

You’ve got to hand it to the food industry. They certainly know how to get the attention of the White House just when they need it most. As announced this week by Michelle Obama herself, the nation’s leading food companies have made yet another pledge, this one in the form of an agreement signed with the Partnership for a Healthier America, an off-shoot of the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign. Read More

Sixteen of the top U.S. food and beverage manufacturers announced yesterday they will work toward removing 1.5 trillion calories from the American diet annually by 2015, with a total of 1 trillion to be cut by 2012.

The pledge to cut major calories from food products is an agreement between the Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent, nonpartisan organization, and The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a coalition of 80 of the nation’s largest retailers, non-profits and food and beverage companies. Read More

When President Obama established a “Presidential task force on childhood obesity” in February, Grist’s Tom Laskawy wondered whether our nation’s first federal food policy council had quietly sprung into being. In a food policy council, the key stakeholders of a region’s food system come together to assess the current food situation and envision ways it might be improved. Food policy councils are a growing phenomenon at the state and municipal level, but such a thing had never existed before at the national level. Does it now?

Well, last week I had the honor of attending the new task force’s White House Childhood Obesity Summit,  and it certainly had the flavors of a food policy council: an array of food-policy players across agencies gathered to discuss a key symptom of a food system gone off the rails: childhood obesity. Read More

First Lady Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move: America’s Move to Raise a Healthier Generation of Kids last week with a little help from her friends.

The event was emceed by former NFL superstar and current sportscaster Tiki Barber. Others who came to the podium to help with the kickoff included an accomplished doctor, a Republican mayor, a Democratic mayor, and even an award-winning urban farmer. All were eloquent and insightful, but the real star of the show was a 12 year old named Tammy Nguyen, who introduced the First Lady. Read More

This week, Jamie Oliver received a prize of $100,000 from TED, a non-profit about spreading ideas, for his efforts in bringing attention to the obesity crisis. He also gave a talk at the TED conference, which is famous for their twenty-minute videos. His talk focused on obesity in America, specifically on what kids are eating in schools. After he demonstrated how much sugar a child will consume from drinking milk alone during the elementary school years–using a wheelbarrow–he gave his ideas on improving our food system, saying “We need to re-boot.” Here are Oliver’s points of entry for change, followed by the talk: Read More

One of the advantages we enjoy here in Iowa is that we get to see our presidential candidates and their families up close and personal during our caucus process.  While I had seen then-Senator Obama give that stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, it was really a speech here in Iowa by his wife Michelle that made me a fan of his.  I figured if a lady this smart and classy married him he must be worth a look.

Many of us foodie-activist types were excited when Barack Obama was elected because we believed that maybe finally something could be accomplished for our agenda of “Good, Clean, and Fair” food for everyone.  Sure enough, that first spring there was the First Lady out there planting an organic garden on the White House grounds.  Say what you will about their former opponents, no one could imagine Cindy McCain doing anything even remotely similar. Read More

“The less we spend on food, the more we spend on health care,” said Michael Pollan last week on Oprah.

Today, Americans spend almost 20 cents of every dollar managing disease–diabetes, allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity–and only 10 cents of every dollar on food.

The jury is still out on what exactly may be causing all of these epidemics, but genetics don’t change that quickly, the environment does. And increasing evidence points to the role that diet is playing in the onset of disease. Read More

Knowing that the obesity epidemic in the United States has some scientists predicting that for the first time in history American children will live shorter lives than their parents, my wish for the next decade is to see First Lady Michelle Obama, President Barack Obama and his administration succeed in their mission to ensure that every American child has access to healthy and affordable food. A recent gathering of Obama Administration officials invited to discuss their efforts to improve America’s food system left me hopeful that my wish will come true. Read More

Michael Pollan coined the term “vegetable-industrial complex” to describe our corporate-driven food system decades after President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.” For much of that time, one served the other. President Truman created the National School Lunch Program in 1946 to ensure that young men were healthy enough for military service and as a subsidy to agribusiness. Feeding hungry children was not reason enough to justify the creation of the program.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty says, “That so many young men had such substandard diets that they were unfit for military service [during World War II] was a matter of national chagrin and a threat to national security. This was the impetus for the creation of the national meal program to feed malnourished children and thus to ensure the nation’s future soldiers were fit to fight its battles.”

America has come a long way since then. Nowadays, diet-related diseases are due to eating too much food, not too little. As such, the vegetable-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex have collided head on. Read More

For many twenty-somethings like myself, issues like school lunch can be murky and distant. I’m not eating school lunch; nor do I have children who are eating school lunch (nor will I in the foreseeable future). When I think of school lunch, I mostly envision a Wonder Years-style cafeteria line, complete with mystery meat (or is it called Salisbury steak?) and a scoop of mashed potatoes. Not so bad, not so good, but unchanging and unchangeable. Right? Wrong. Read More

On June 12, 1957, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney stated that “evidence pointed to a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer,” thereby changing the official position of the United States Public Health Service. This small but significant move opened the door to regulation of Big Tobacco, beginning a battle that came to a head last week with the FDA being granted the most power over the industry to date.

Now, more than a half a century after that first declaration, that same date brought the movie Food, Inc. to theaters, a film that reveals the dysfunction of our food system. With obesity rates at the highest point in history, contaminated food regularly sickening thousands, and government estimating we will continue to spend 6.2% more on healthcare annually (this year, an additional $200 billion, more than our annual economic growth of 4.1%), it is clear that we have a problem as big as smoking: an addiction to cheap, unhealthy food perpetuated by an industry intent on maximizing profits at the expense of our health and our land. It is time to regulate Big Food by changing the culture in Washington that allowed it to proliferate. Read More

According to the USDA, if Americans ate healthier, at least $71 billion per year could be saved in medical costs, lost productivity and lost lives. In fact, the food we eat is affecting our nation’s health to a surprising degree in the form of diet-related disease. Today, the typical American diet – high in saturated fats, sugars and sodium – is a contributor to four of the six leading causes of death and a risk factor for what has now become a nationwide epidemic – obesity. Read More

To many of us in the food and wellness communities, having a food supply based on local, sustainably-raised and organic foods should be nothing less than mandatory – it should be our right. But for many Americans, these terms remain elusive and even far-flung. Read More

Hank Cardello knows a great deal about the food industry; for more than three decades, he helped some of the world’s largest companies sell their products to you.  In his book, Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s {Really} Making America Fat, Cardello shares his vast knowledge about the industry in a readable, organized and highly accessible fashion — and attempts to make up for his past sins with a critique on the system he no longer works for.  Read More