Civil Eats

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. Read More

This spring on national television, British celebrity chef, restaurateur, and food system revolutionary Jamie Oliver filled a school bus with sugar.* The white stuff poured over seats and out of windows, piling into three foot drifts outside the bus as a handful of school parents looked on, speechless. The sugar represented the total amount in Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) milk every week. “Yeah, I’m trying to make it dramatic!” Oliver shouted, “Because I want people to care!” Oliver was dismayed that more parents weren’t there to witness the stunt. “Maybe coming to LA was a big mistake,” he lamented.

Oliver’s crusade for better school food began in England, where he got £2 billion voted into the budget for cooked from-scratch meals in 2005. Last year he launched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution in the U.S., accompanied by an ABC television series filmed in small-town West Virginia that went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Reality TV Program. For this year’s season of Food Revolution Oliver had hoped to film inside cafeterias and a large food processing center in the LAUSD. But he was blocked by the school board, or more specifically, Superintendent Ramon Cortines.

To hear the media tell it Jamie Oliver has had a rough year. In addition, some food activists have been critical of Oliver’s show and methods. But to see 2011 as a failure for Oliver is to miss the point of his mission. It’s not to dominate American television ratings or even to directly influence food policy. Oliver’s mission is to ignite and expand an army of food revolutionaries in the U.S. who will drive change themselves. With the full force of his celebrity and national exposure he continues to be spectacularly effective in recruiting food activists. Read More

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. Read More

The big news out of California this past week was all about the premiere of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Season 2. This controversial show, which has plenty of detractors from within the food movement, is nonetheless the most successful effort to bring the food movement into larger public awareness that I’ve seen so far. But the same week a quieter food revolution was rolling along the West Coast: The launch of Nourish California. Read More

The successes—and shortcomings—of the Berkeley Unified School District’s revamped school food program received equal billing at yesterday’s premiere screening of short films collectively known as the Lunch Love Community Documentary Project. Read More

President Obama, recently speaking to students of his undergraduate alma mater, Columbia University, noted that, “Food at the cafeteria was notoriously bad. I didn’t have a lot of options. We used to joke about what was for lunch that day, and there would be a bunch of nondescript stuff that wasn’t particularly edible.” The next time POTUS is in town, I hope he stops by The Market Café at the University of San Francisco (USF) since cafeteria food has changed a whole lot since back in the day. And it’s not just for students: The Market Café is open to the public. Read More

We are preparing for the most thoroughly planned meal in America, and it’s not Thanksgiving dinner. It’s school lunch.

Once every five years school meals are put on the Congressional kitchen’s front burner through reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. In the process of cooking up this legislation, school meals have been researched, reviewed, rallied for and railed against. And while the resulting stuffed turkey that is the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids’ Act, is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good.

Congress must stick a fork in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session, get it done and finally serve the kids. Read More

A new compelling documentary tells the complicated story of the federal school lunch program, its origins, challenges, and opportunities, teasing out nuances without leaving viewers in the weeds. Lunch Line, a film by Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, resists taking sides on this divisive topic even while it deals with vampires and wolves. Read More

School gardens are as old as schools themselves. As Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Pringle see it, however, their return might just be the key to a modern education. Bucklin-Sporer and Pringle are the executive director and programs manager (respectively) of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (SFGSA) and authors of the new book How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers. I spoke with them recently about the book, their network, and what it will take to change education—one green schoolyard at a time. Read More

An ex-Washington Post reporter, who now blogs about school food, recently spent a week embedded in the central kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Northern California.

Ed Bruske’s mission: To find out how one school community manages to cook food from scratch for its students. Read More

Remember when Fox pundit Michelle Malkin accused Rachael Ray of being a terrorist sympathizer because she wore a Middle Eastern-ish scarf in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad? I’m not sure what was more absurd about that episode: Malkin’s unhinged hysteria, or Dunkin’ Donuts’ profile in cowardice (they yanked the ad.)

But Malkin got one thing right: Rachael Ray is far more radical than I even dared hope. She took Capitol Hill by storm yesterday, armed with some very sharp talking points, and fired them directly at the lawmakers who actually have the power to improve the lousy school lunches we’re dis-serving our kids: Read More

With one in three children (and one in two children of color) overweight or obese in this country, the health of America’s kids is under the microscope and, for the first time in our history, children born now will not live as long as their parents. Michelle Obama has launched her Let’s Move campaign, and chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution brought the school cafeteria to television. But as Oliver’s program showed, one of the biggest barriers to changing kids’ health outcomes is a lack of dedicated labor and expertise.

That is where FoodCorps comes in, an AmeriCorps program that would put service members to work building school gardens and establishing farm-to-school relationships in towns across the United States, specifically in places lacking regular access to fresh produce. A collaboration between the National Farm to School Network, Slow Food USA and other groups, the FoodCorps team has raised more than $215,000 from the Kellogg Foundation and AmeriCorps to develop the program, which could begin as early as 2011. Read More

Last week, U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, unveiled the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which provides $4.5 billion in new child nutrition program funding over ten years. It says on Lincoln’s website: “This legislation will also mark the first time since the inception of the National School Lunch Program that Congress has dedicated this level of resources to increasing the program’s reimbursement rate.”

Currently, the National School Lunch Program feeds nearly 31 million students every day for $9.3 billion per year. At the end of February, President Barack Obama proposed a $1 billion a year increase ($10 billion over ten years) in funding for U.S. child nutrition programs including school lunches. Sounds like a lot. But $1 billion, it turns out, really only boils down to an extra twenty cents per school meal. Right now, the reimbursement rate per meal is $2.68, and less than a dollar of that goes towards actual food. The rest is spent on infrastructure. Many school food advocates believe that serving wholesome, nutritious meals for under $3 is just not possible and there has been a rallying cry for more – up to a $1 more per child’s meal.

Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, once told me if the USDA did nothing else than change the food served in schools, then he would be happy because “to change the school lunch program, USDA Secretary Vilsack will have to change the infrastructure that delivers the food to our schools and that will change the food system because it will provide many new opportunities for farmers to get food they produce to consumers, and I think that will encourage more of our young want-to-bes to begin farming.”

That statement seems fairly profound – that by changing our school food we could actually change this nation’s agricultural system by empowering local farms with local school dollars. So how exactly would an increase, if it actually happened, in the National School Lunch Program change or impact local farm production? Would biodiversity increase? Would commodity crops disappear to make room for more fruit and vegetables? How would the relationship between the schools and the farmers change?

Here are a few answers to those questions from leaders in the school food movement: Read More

CBS Evening News’ Katie Couric spoke with former FDA Commissioner and author of The End of Overeating, Dr. David Kessler, and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser for her online discussion this week, called @KatieCouric. The topics ranged from portion sizes to school food, the push back from industry on Couric’s segment last week on non-therapeutic antibiotic use in agriculture, and to other issues of food policy and food safety. The discussion is nearly fifty minutes long, and well worth watching. Here are a few highlights: 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

When was the last time you went to a conference that followed dinner with a rock, paper, scissors tournament among 150 participants?  At times the 2nd annual Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit (SYFAS) felt more like summer camp than a conference (in a good way).  Don’t be mistaken though; we got down to business.

SYFAS is the first of six Real Food Summits that will be happening over the next two months across the country as part of the Real Food Challenge, a student movement to increase the procurement of real (sustainably grown, fair, humane and local) food on college and university campuses, with the national goal of 20% real food by 2020. Read More

Care to sample a strawberry or scoop up salad greens for supper when you pick up your child from school? Since school went back last September you can do just that every Tuesday at Glenview Elementary School in Oakland, California.

Led by garden coordinator and parent Delana Toler, a small core of volunteers — some without kids at the school — work a PTA-initiated produce stand for two hours after classes are dismissed in the front yard of this public school, which serves a diverse group of families in the foothills east of Lake Merritt. Read More

School gardens are an excellent way for children to get to know fresh fruits and vegetables, supplement classroom instruction, and just plain spend more time outdoors. Alice Waters created the model for the Edible Schoolyard over a decade ago and dozens of school gardens have followed suit. With a recent critical article in The Atlantic getting people talking about the value of school gardens again, it seemed an opportune time to take a peek into eight programs that are teaching kids a love of gardening and cooking and then share some resources for starting program to your own school. 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

The pizza Jamie Smith and his staff are making for students on every Santa Cruz City Schools campus is so popular he has designated Friday the one day of the week when students can order it. He calls it Fun Friday. Read More

One morning I came out of our house just as Jorge, a young man I knew, shuffled by in baggy pants. He was pouring a bag of Skittles into his mouth.

“Jorge!” I said. “Is that your breakfast?”

He nodded sheepishly. I lived on a busy street where from time to time I ran into Jorge, who had attended elementary school with my daughter, Carly, down the block. That campus housed a number of smaller schools, including Costanoa, a district-run program for students who had fallen behind at the bigger high schools. The morning of his Skittle breakfast, Jorge was a sophomore at Costanoa.

Some months later I ran into his mom. She lived with her family in the apartments down the hill from our house, and over the years I had talked with her often as she walked by with Jorge’s younger siblings.

“How’s Jorge?” I asked.

“He’s doing well,” she said in Spanish. “He’s working in the ROP garden at school, and he loves it so much he wants to apply to the horticulture program at Cabrillo [College].” When Costanoa moved to our campus, they had expanded the Life Lab garden halfway across the playing field. Students on campus labored in the garden and cooked from the bounty. Read More

It is disappointing to see members of the media spread misinformation due to their own ignorance, gullibility, or, worse, disinterest in digging for the truth — especially when it has to do with the health of children. Case in point, a reporter from a South Dakota talk radio show apparently believes that Baltimore City Public Schools’ Meatless Monday meals are lacking in protein. Read More

The autumn sunshine was very bright, the weather unseasonably warm, and there was a party atmosphere at the White House for Wednesday’s Healthy Kids Fair, when First Lady Michelle Obama kicked off her shoes and hula hooped, Double Dutch jump roped, and sprinted through an obstacle course on the South Lawn, accompanied by dozens of visiting school children. This bit of unexpected fun is what got reported about the event in the mainstream media. Adding to the party atmosphere: The White House Chefs, accompanied by high-profile guest chefs, were demonstrating recipes in a series of outdoor kitchen stations. (Top: Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack watches Mrs. Obama make remarks at the opening of the Fair)

But the Healthy Kids Fair couldn’t have been more serious, because it’s part of an ongoing Obama campaign to encourage kids, parents and families to make changes in their behavior—or face a grim future. Read More

It was lunchtime at Harbor High School, and the cars were backed up three stories down to the parking lot at the bottom of campus. The thump of the bass resonated from jacked-up trucks and Toyota Forerunners as students tried to break out for a burrito or at Joe’s sub before their afternoon classes started. At the top of the hill on the other side of campus, a throng of teenagers waited to cross over to the gas station that sells slurpies and Hot Cheetos. These students, including my daughter Carly, hadn’t heard that chef Jamie Smith was at that very moment serving noodle bowls with the veggies he’d stir-fried in the Harbor High kitchen.

Jamie is not just flipping broccoli; he’s trying to “make it cool to eat at school.” He knows it is healthier on multiple levels for high school students –not just at Harbor but all across the country– to stay on campus during lunch. Read More

Kitchen Table Talks announced its fourth installment of its new conversation series about the American food system, School Food: The Nitty Gritty Details, will be held on Tuesday, August 25 at 6 p.m. at Hotel Vitale in San Francisco.

The topic of school food is challenging and complex. Every day, nearly 30 million children benefit from the National School Lunch Program. However, these meals usually consist of unhealthy processed foods and low grade industrial meat. The Child Nutrition Act which governs the National School Lunch program is up for reauthorization this year, so there is still time to have our voices heard and ensure our children have access to healthy, quality food. Join us as we discuss current policies and programs, challenges and what you can do to get real food in our public schools. Guests speakers include, but are not limited to: Colleen Kavanaugh, Executive Director, Campaign for Better Nutrition and Lena Brook, grassroots parent advocate.

Kitchen Table Talks organizers request a $10 donation to go towards administrative costs. However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable, local refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market. Space is limited; to reserve your seat, please email ktt@civileats.com or leave a message at 925.785.0713. Please note, this month’s KTT will be held at Hotel Vitale, 8 Mission Street, on the Embarcadero and across from the Ferry Building.

With the Child Nutrition Act (CNA) set for renewal this year, Food & Water Watch (F&WW) last month launched a School Milk Campaign asking Congress to give schools nationwide the opportunity to buy milk that is free of artificial growth hormones. Their online petition has already generated 8,000 signatures. Read More

Newly minted US Senator and member of the Senate Agriculture Committee Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and New York State Senator (and retired dairy farmer) Darrel Aubertine wrote Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack a letter on February 26th asking that the USDA re-evaluate what is considered “processed” for the food in the national school Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Program (FFVP).  No, these two senators are not lobbying for the Corn Refiners Association — they are pushing for local food. Read More

As Tom Vilsack and Tom Daschle assume their cabinet positions in the Obama administration as Secretaries of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, respectively, they inherit mammoth challenges. Working together will be key to their success, because their work has a common denominator – food. Read More

Last week, while the market experienced a kind of volatility that had nearly everyone drawing parallels with the Great Depression, I had the privilege of participating in the Western Regional Assembly on Farm-to-School, which was sponsored by Ecotrust.  A large group gathered in Portland to share information, develop strategies and network around the issues of good food for schools, institutions and communities. Read More

A recent New York Times dining section piece told the story of a 17-year old on his spring college shopping tour. Apparently the young fellow’s selection criteria was not limited to a school’s academic strengths but also included the quality of its dining service. On the day the young man visited Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, he was transfixed by the dining hall’s sumptuous repast that included vegetable ragout over polenta, spicy orange beef, Dijon-crusted chicken, vegetarian pho and spinach sautéed with garlic and olive oil. Precocious palate or not, the would-be collegian readily admitted to “something subliminal from the food…that influences your decision [about the college].” Read More