When San Francisco voters passed the three phases of the Proposition A facilities upgrade bond in 2003, 2006, and 2011, they approved money to cover the design and construction of green schoolyards for at least 83 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) elementary, middle, and high schools. SFUSD is the first urban school district to embrace outdoor learning opportunities in this fashion. It is also one of the first large districts in the state to implement the Common Core State Standards, a new set of English language arts and mathematics standards focused on real-world college and career readiness.

Seizing on this opportunity, I met with Rosie Branson Gill last fall to discuss how our organizations (San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and 18 Reasons, respectively) could work together to provide more opportunities for San Francisco students to engage both in school gardens and with the craft of cooking. On February 17 of this year, 13 elementary classroom teachers, garden coordinators, and parents gathered for the launch of Cooking the Common Core: Bringing Educational Standards to Life in the School Garden, a new training series designed to do just that.

Cooking the Common Core offers teachers innovative, interdisciplinary lessons to help them teach the new standards. Rosie and I wanted to design a training that promoted cooking as a way to increase students’ access to and opportunities for learning in the outdoor classroom. We wanted teachers to feel empowered introducing students to the craft of cooking, to fresh ingredients, and to the full garden-to-table experience.

To that end, each lesson in Cooking the Common Core combines freshly harvested produce from the school garden, Common Core standards, and basic cooking skills, while leaving ample room for teachers to use the lessons to explore other classroom topics. Social studies, ecology, and respect for other cultures easily integrate into recipes such as fried rice, summer rolls, handmade pasta, or Brassica slaw.

Keeping in mind that public school educators are increasingly asked to do more with less, one of our priorities from the outset was to provide participating schools with outdoor cooking kits, in order to make the lessons as accessible as possible.  These kits include a Burton stove, fuel canisters, cutting boards, paring knives, mixing bowls, peelers, a box grater, tongs, serving utensils, a colander, and a dough scraper.  We have already heard back from participants in our first two trainings that the kits have allowed them to quickly and easily incorporate cooking into their teaching.

Rosie and I dream of writing lessons for every grade level linked to memorable meals from around the world. We are currently seeking sponsorship for the cooking kits so we can continue to offer the courses at a reduced fee for teachers and develop new lessons to meet the growing demand. When summer break rolls around in June, we will have provided cooking kits to and trained educators from 18 SFUSD schools, two nonprofits working with San Francisco youth populations, and one other school district in the East Bay.

Learn more about San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, 18 Reasons, and Cooking the Common Core.

Three of Berkeley Unified School District‘s elementary schools–Malcolm X,  Rosa Parks, and Washington—are in jeopardy of losing their entire cooking and gardening program funds beginning in October this year.

Under existing guidelines, the schools will no longer qualify for federal funding because they have fewer than 50 percent of their students enrolled in the free and reduced-lunch program, according to Leah Sokolofski, who supervises the program for the district.

Berkeley has an international reputation for its edible schoolyards, where public school children of all economic means learn what it takes to grow a radish and sauté some chard. Such funding cuts to the program, whose total budget is $1.94 million a year, would represent a significant setback in the city’s pioneering efforts to date.

School gardening and cooking champion Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse Foundation helped fund the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, expressed dismay at the potential budget cuts to programs. “It’s inevitable cuts will come—people think these programs are dispensable and the state of California is in a financial crisis—but it’s a tragedy,” she said.

Waters recently raised over $500,000 to launch the Edible Schoolyard Project (ESP), an online resource that shares curriculum and best practice principles for garden and cooking programs with schools around the country. ESP has affiliate programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York. “We have to continue to make the case for why an edible education is so important to the health of every child and the health of the whole country,” she said.

BUSD school garden and cooking programs are funded through September 2012 through Network for a Healthy California, a state program that distributes federal monies to local school districts through a three-year grant. The network seeks to improve the health of low-income Californians through increased fruit and vegetable consumption and daily activity.

Changes to funding

Changes to the way school cooking and gardening programs are funded are coming down the track, however, following the passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which President Obama signed into law amid much fanfare in December 2010, with the goal of improving childhood nutrition.

“Until the new guidelines for eligibility are released we just don’t know what’s in store for our school programs,” said Sokolofski, who anticipates hearing later this month. “This is the biggest change in the funding for these programs in 11 years.”

Further complicating matters: The U.S. Farm Bill is up for reauthorization in 2012. Potential changes to funding priorities there may impact all the BUSD’s gardening and cooking programs as well. “The Farm Bill is yet another wild card because that’s the overall place where our funding comes from,” explained Sokolofski. “And any changes there could trump changes elsewhere. There are a lot of unknowns right now.”

While it’s possible that funding for these programs could remain intact, for now the immediate concern is the three schools who will likely not qualify for federal funds for the next school year, Sokolofski said.

Sokolofski has been sharing her concerns with school administrators, principals, parents, and teachers. A recent presentation at Malcolm X spurred dozens of parents to attend the March 7 BUSD board meeting, where they made a passionate case for protecting a program beloved of both students and adults.

Malcolm X parent and family doctor Shannon McCune, a Malcolm X alum herself, sees many young children in her practice and said she can immediately tell which of her patients have gardening at school. “They have a favorite vegetable and know why they’re good for you,” said McCune, whose daughter recently taught her mom how to make kale salad by massaging the leaves with oil, which eliminates the need for cooking the fibrous vegetable. “I would never have known how to do that if my daughter hadn’t shown me.”

Another physician-parent echoed McCune’s sentiment. Mickey Adams, a parent from Washington Elementary, talked about the challenges of working with adult patients who have obesity and other lifestyle diseases. “These people don’t know how to eat well and cook food—they’ve never been taught,” said Adams, whose children make recipes at home they’ve learned in school cooking classes. “These programs work and there will be so much damage done by cutting them and we’ll all pay on the other end.”

If kids grow and cook it they will eat their greens

As a school board member noted at the March 7 meeting, the value of such programs was measured in a recent UC Berkeley study, which found that young students routinely exposed to fruits and vegetables through cooking and gardening instruction ate 1.5 more servings of produce a day compared with kids with fewer opportunities to dig in the dirt and work the stove at school.

School gardening teacher Joy Moore doesn’t need data to know the benefits such programs can bring. This kind of instruction gives young people alternative and innovative ways to learn, along with “skills for life,” said the long-time school food advocate.

School board president John Selawsky promised parents that the board will “see what it can do,” while acknowledging the challenging fiscal constraints already impacting the school district.

For now, Berkeley schools are researching ways to sustain these threatened programs. “We’ve been looking at the possibility of grant funding, but most of the grants available are small and aimed at schools just starting a garden plot,” said Alexander Hunt, principal of Malcolm X. “We haven’t been able to find anything comparable to the $135,000 we stand to lose.”

Despite serving a growing group of children in need, Malcolm X’s free and reduced school lunch numbers stand at 46 percent of its student body. “Materials can’t replace the quality of programming currently being provided by our staff,” said Hunt. “It’s wonderful how these classes engage students in learning at the same time they impart the benefits of health and nutrition. They’re key to our students’ education.”

The Malcolm X PTA is also exploring whether a large corporation, local merchants, philanthropic individuals, or some other benefactor may step in to fill the void. It is also in the early stages of discussions with other PTAs about a collaborative effort to secure contributions. “The garden and cooking program at Malcolm X is beloved by the school community and the community at large,” added Hunt. “It’s sad to see that in the place where this school food movement started, we’re now going backwards trying to sustain these valuable programs.”

Sense of urgency

Malcolm X parent Marian Mabel noted a sense of urgency to secure funding for next year, which must be identified by June 30, when the school district’s budget is finalized. In addition, Mabel pointed out that not all the city’s schools currently offer these programs—Berkeley Arts Magnet, Cragmont, Jefferson, and Oxford don’t receive any federal funds for such instruction. These schools rely on parent volunteers, PTA funds, and other sources to fund programs at their sites, if they have them at all.

“Short term, these three schools need to fill these funding gaps,” said Mabel, “but long term we want to find ways to make these programs available and sustainable to every public school student in Berkeley.”

As for Waters, another ESP program is in the planning stages for Sacramento, a strategic move, she said, so that she would be “under the noses” of state legislators. Waters, whose foundation has gifted about $10 million to BUSD, mostly to the Edible Schoolyard at King, also hopes that the governor will convene a taskforce for edible education soon to address the healthcare crisis among school children.

A parent-led meeting open to the community to update interested parties about the problem and brainstorm ideas about potential solutions is scheduled for today, Monday, March 26, at the Malcolm X library at 7 p.m. Malcolm X is at 1731 Prince Street. Parents will also prepare public comments for the school board meeting on Wednesday March 28, where they intend to keep this issue on the minds of school board members.

Watch “The Whole World in a Small Seed,” a Lunch Love Community video on the Malcolm X school garden program run by Rivka Mason.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photo: Middle, sharing the pleasures of an outdoor table at Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School. Below, Malcolm X’s school under the sky teaches more than just how to grow good food.

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

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.

Oliver found a way to work around the LAUSD and struck a deal with West Adams Prep, a school run in partnership with LAUSD and educational nonprofit MLA (or Mentor LA). MLA CEO Mike McGalliard brokered a very delicate arrangement through which Oliver could teach, and film, a small cooking class at the school.

Every episode was fraught with conflict over this arrangement, with permits and permission being revoked often at the last moment, much to Oliver’s growing frustration. Eventually he was shut out of even West Adams, though he did still manage to set up a kitchen classroom within walking distance to the school and arranged for Better Homes and Gardens to install a garden at the school–not on film, of course. Meanwhile, at a school board hearing, Ramon Cortines declared that he was the one behind all of Oliver’s setbacks, not the school board. Cortines claimed he wanted to shield his schools from ridicule and controversy; Oliver saw this as belligerent obstruction.

Finally, near the end of the season, Cortines’ term expired and a new Superintendent was elected, John Deasy. An LA Glasnost was ushered in as Deasy met with Jamie Oliver–on Food Revolution and on Jimmy Kimmel–and promised to propose to the board that LAUSD schools drop flavored milk. His proposal passed with only one dissenting vote and as of this month flavored milk is a thing of the past in LA. It helps that the milk contract was up for renewal this summer. Picking a well-timed campaign with an unambiguous goal proved to be a smart gamble–and a sharp strategy.

Alas, this story played out in real time ahead of the plot of Food Revolution as it was broadcast. After letting Food Revolution try the high-profile Tuesday night time slot, ABC put Food Revolution on hold for May Sweeps from April 19-May 24 and then moved the show to Friday nights, where it continued to lead. Meanwhile, the flavored milk victory came (around April 27) while the show was on hiatus, leaving supporters with no show to rally around in celebration.

However, food bloggers like Bettina Elias Siegel of The Lunch Tray began an earnest debate over whether banning flavored milk is really the right thing to do. What if kids stop drinking milk? Is this the best use of our energy? The national food movement fractured over the flavored milk ban, just as it fractured over the 2010 Child Nutrition Bill and the big organic/small organic debate. But for the fans and viewers of Food Revolution the milk victory wasn’t an just an endgame about flavored milk in LA; it was a key motivating win that has encouraged them to remain engaged in the fight with the hope of making similarly profound change happen in their own communities–and maybe someday on a national level.

“Who the hell does this guy think he is?” This is a sentiment I have heard about Oliver from organizers who have long had their noses to the grindstone. Grassroots-level progressives tend to be suspicious of the power of celebrity, of big budgets and corporate sponsorships, and of anything that hints of emotional manipulation. Oliver has been scolded for demanding change of people stuck in the middle, school nutritionists, cafeteria workers, small restaurant owners, instead of taking on Congress or Monsanto. He has been taken to task for glossing over important details, like the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of funding that backed up the glorious transformation of Santa Barbara school cafeterias featured in an episode.

But Oliver is relevant because he brings the big food fight to a national audience. 7.5 million people viewed the Emmy-winning first season of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution last year. This year’s six-episode season had nearly as many viewers at its peak. Over 700,000 people have signed his Food Revolution petition demanding “better food at school and better health prospects” to be delivered to the U.S. President. And Oliver persuaded 25,000 people to comment on the new USDA school food standards.

The truth is, Jamie Oliver is a showboat, but that’s a powerful asset. His show sometimes sacrificed absolute transparency for the sake of effective storytelling (bloggers and tweeters filled in those missing details anyway). But we need those compelling narratives, visuals, and experiences that dig into Americans’ hopes and fears, our hunger and disgust and pride. Oliver’s hugs and calling people, “my brother,” and constant appeals to emotion are, like it or not, apparently highly effective. We need charisma and connection. And yeah, a bit of celebrity magic doesn’t hurt, either.

Again and again Oliver starts with a cooking lesson, and somehow that lights a fire in an individual, and they begin to see how that food in the pan connects with a larger system that had previously obscured their path to healthy living. This is the mission of the Food Revolution: light a fire under our asses and get us to make change ourselves.

The next chapter in the Food Revolution saga is to deploy Oliver’s Big Rig Teaching Kitchen, a mobile classroom hatched from Oliver’s TED prize wish, where hopefully some 2500 kids throughout southern California will get life-changing cooking classes. Big Rig is operated in partnership with the California Endowment, (whose Building Healthy Communities initiative will provide support for the instructors) and will be working with community organizations throughout the Los Angeles area, starting with Challenger Boys and Girls Club.

Now it’s up to us to capitalize on the momentum and energy of the Food Revolution. How do we connect it with larger battles? How do we keep telling compelling stories? What novel methods can we use to connect with more people? As Jamie Oliver says in the season finale, “We’ve all got to start stirring the pot. And we’ve all got to start expecting more.” Those of us who have already been working in the food movement, on the other hand, already expect much–what we need to do is take a page from Oliver’s book and get more creative and daring in communicating our vision.

*Not actually sugar, but pale sand that resembled sugar.

Watch this year’s episodes of the Food Revolution in LA here.

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

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.

As a national audience watched the dramas unfold on Food Revolution I tuned into the Twitter stream where the show was trending. Two things were clear: The show was making a profound emotional impact on viewers and these energized viewers were now clamoring to know how to make change happen in their own communities.  “I want unflavored milk at my school, too!” said one tweet. And like the brilliant evangelist that he is, Jamie has a plain-milk campaign at the ready for his energized base to plug into. But Nourish California is poised to take some of the Food Revolution buzz and direct it toward deeper and broader systems change and they’re focusing their campaign on a key change agent: Youth.

Nourish California is a pilot educational initiative (led by nonprofit organization WorldLink) whose mission is to “increase food literacy and build healthier communities throughout California.” The multimedia program includes a 30-minute special, Nourish: Food + Community, broadcast on PBS (it was shown nationwide in the fall and is being rebroadcast in California through the spring) and available on DVD, 11 short videos, a curriculum guide for grades 6-8 aligned with California state standards, and a library of topic-focused videos for classroom use (there will eventually be 45). All of these materials are free and can be downloaded (or ordered) from the Web site. Nourish will also run workshops at teacher seminars and youth summits around the state.

The goal of Nourish is to open up a conversation about sustainability with teachers and students, as well as administrators, food service workers, school garden coordinators, and health professionals. While there is a clear emphasis on nutrition education, “We’re definitely in the systems side of thinking,” says Nourish Communications Manager Brie Mazurek. And while nutritional education is a critical starting point, the program acknowledges that having the right choices available is also important–which is why a large component of the program focuses on how the entire food system works, from the soil to around the world, and how everything is interrelated.

From this foundation, says Kirk Bergstrom, Executive Director of WorldLink, “Our vision is to build a network of food-literate teachers and students who can directly contribute to the health of their schools and communities.” By teaching students a common language of food literacy (how many teens out there even know what “food system” means?) and an awareness of the different schools of thought within the food movement the program hopes to give youth a stronger voice. And California is just the beginning; as Bergstrom’s team fine-tunes Nourish in California and secures adequate funding they are expanding the program across the nation. “I think the real legacy of [Nourish] is this network that’s forming across the country,” Bergstrom says.

Obviously in a state as diverse as California a program like Nourish would have to find ways to connect with people across different ethnic communities and socioeconomic levels in order to build a strong, inclusive network. It helps that Nourish translated the student handouts into Spanish and that its materials address social justice issues. The program is also partnering with over 50 local organizations and the videos feature a diverse group of experts, including writer Anna Lappé, eco-chef Bryant Terry, and pediatrician Dr. Nadine Burke.

Dr. Burke was recently profiled in the New Yorker for her groundbreaking work with the Bayview Child Health Center. She is on the Nourish advisory board and shows the 30-minute video in her clinic waiting rooms as a conversation starter to get her patients talking about nutrition and where their food comes from. She has also been promoting the program in schools within the Bayview community and has even been working on connecting Nourish with the HMO that she works with.

Will the program have an impact in the severely challenged Bayview community? Will an activated base of youth in the area find the support they need to push meaningful food system change? I suspect it depends partly on how organized and loud those teens become. In the meantime, the Nourish program is providing some structure for youth-led efforts. The curriculum includes a concluding section called “action projects,” which shows students how to organize food projects, and encourages students to report on these projects. This reporting, in turn, can be used to inspire yet more youth while also providing Nourish with mini-case studies so the authors of the program can see how people are using it in their communities.

Bergstrom and his team are hoping this investment in youth, influencing people while they’re still young, will have an exponential, long-term payoff for both individuals and for the country. With an effective program teens internalize lessons and then pass them on to their families as well, creating a ripple effect. “Youth are a great catalyst for social change,” Bergstrom says. “Young people with their passion for issues and their ability to work on these projects can be a powerful means for transformation.”

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.

On the big screen the audience at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley were greeted with cinematic images of children contentedly nibbling on fruit, tucking into salad, and choosing produce at a school’s farmers’ market.  But after the viewing, some adults provided a counterpoint to the rosy pictures showcasing Berkeley’s much-lauded School Lunch Initiative.

John Muir 5th grade teacher Stephen Rutherford was hands down the most critical. He talked about long, slow lines for lunch at his elementary school, the challenges for little fingers using swipe cards, the untended salad bar, the rush to eat, the vast amounts of waste, and a tense cafeteria environment.

Some of his concerns echo those raised by parents commenting on a recent Berkeleyside story on Lunch Love Community. “The day-to-day reality of feeding kids doesn’t resemble what you see on this screen,” said Rutherford. “We all had a vision of what school lunch could be and at my school it’s still very sad.”

Joy Moore, a cooking and gardening instructor at Berkeley Technology Academy, a small, alternative to Berkeley High School, said her students often get overlooked on the lunch front.

And a long-simmering resentment—that King Middle School, which houses Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard, the new Dining Commons, and the district’s central kitchen, unfairly receives more resources than other schools—boiled to the surface.

This discontent with the reality of Berkeley’s program reveals just how many obstacles school districts face in trying to improve school nutrition for all its students.

Still, amid the sniping and genuine frustration there was, well, a lot of love for a program that has garnered global high fives for its efforts to improve school food.

BUSD’s executive chef Bonnie Christensen good-naturedly responded to criticisms. She strives, she said, to make school food even and equitable across the district. A career culinary professional who comes from a fine-dining background, Christensen unapologetically admitted that she and her staff face enormous obstacles, including a shoestring budget, to turn out wholesome, tasty food every day. But, she argued, most of the time they do just that.

B-Tech has gotten short shift, she conceded, and she and her staff are working on ways to improve food service there. One real challenge: Equipment brought into the school to enhance meal service has been stolen in the past.

Christensen also acknowledged difficulties in John Muir’s cafeteria, noting that she spent an entire week at the school earlier this year trying to iron out problems. At King, the staff are able to serve lunch in just seven minutes, she said, and added that for a school lunch program to succeed at a site it requires the commitment and cooperation of staff from the top down.

Here’s what everyone seemed to agree on: The program is a vast improvement, if an imperfect one, on what former BUSD nutrition services director Ann Cooper inherited. At the time the lunch menu consisted of chicken nuggets, corn dogs, pizza pockets, and other highly processed fare.

Christensen, herself a BUSD parent, described a program which began with pioneering parents seeking a healthier eating environment for their childrenas a work in progress.

Moore drew knowing laughs from the crowd when she acknowledged that the success of the program came down to relationship building that grew out of years of interminable meetings. (Moore’s advice to others trying to bring about change in school food: serve something to eat at such events and you’ll have taken a first step towards building alliances and creating community.)

Four of the mini films in a series by local filmmakers Sophie Constantinou and Helen De Michiel were shown, including a new segment Feeding the Body Politic, in which former Berkeley School Superintendent Michelle Lawrence, who had dismissed a school food policy as unimplementable nonsense, describes her a-ha moment.

Early in her tenure, a student from Longfellow Middle School died during the summer break from complications related to adult-onset (formerly known as Type II) diabetes, a disease that can often be prevented or controlled through diet and physical activity.

That’s the kind of wake-up call playing itself out in American communities across the country which has helped sparked the current school food revolution. And it’s what motivates someone like Bonnie Christensen, whose work day starts at 4:30 a.m, to get out of bed every morning.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photos: Above, Sophie Constantinou. Below, Courtesy Berkeley Unified School District

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.

The  café, according to Resident District Manager Holly Winslow, underwent “an extreme makeover” over the summer break and has been transformed into a light- and wood-filled space (recycled wood from cypress trees in the Presidio), showcasing the bounty of Bay Area farm fresh produce. Known for their well-deserved leadership and vision in promoting socially responsible practices, the café is run by The Bon Appétit Management Company (Bamco), an onsite restaurant company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities, and specialty venues. Bamco serves over 400 locations in 29 states (corporate clients include eBay, Oracle, Target, and Yahoo!); USF is one of two dozen universities they work with nationwide.

Serving 8,000 meals a day to hungry college students and faculty, Executive Chef Jon Hall (who cooked previously at Gordon Biersch, Boudin, and MacArthur Park) leads a team of 250 people and overseas a café packed with fresh local, organic food that would make any parent happy to send their kid off to college (if for the good food alone). “Many of these kids grew up eating sustainable food and they have an educated palate,” Winslow said. “They eat with their eyes so we prepare the freshest, most delicious food imaginable.”

The Market Café boasts 12 “stations” with prepared food made from scratch and the weekly menu offers up many healthy, fresh choices, some as lean as 500 calories per meal. The students line up at the classic grill and order dim sum from “Global,” sit at the full-blown “sustainable” sushi bar (which follows Seafood Watch’s principles) and order crepes from the much-loved crepe master, Tito Painsay.

But it might be the 15-foot vegan vegetarian salad bar—featuring organic greens, local produce and fruits, chef-prepared salads and house-baked breads—that takes the cake. Freshmen Taylor Cruz “attacks the salad bar” even though she’s not vegan and loves the healthy alternatives. (Although she admitted to sharing an occasional cookie with fellow freshman Kharina Castillo, who happens to be a big fan of the crepes.) Between hiking the hills in San Francisco near campus and eating well, they’re both mindful of avoiding the freshman fifteen.

“This is their living room and kitchen,” said Winslow, gesturing to the dozens of students eating together. “This is where they break bread, listen to music, relax. And where they get their nourishment to keep studying.” The students are also getting an education in the importance of supporting local farmers and where their food comes from an on-site farmers’ market and events such as the day-long Eat Local Challenge and Low Carbon Diet day.

Students eat well and local farmers benefit from Bamco’s Farm to Fork program, a company-wide initiative to purchase seasonal and regional produce from local farmers within a 150-mile radius. The company now spends tens of millions of dollars each year supporting small local farms. Chef Hall appreciates the freedom to be creative and the access to incredibly flavorful food. He never worries about ordering too much food; the students fly through 10 cases of fresh fruit a day. If the kids want fries or a candy bar, there are some of those, too. Winslow recently brought in The Taco Guys food truck to campus, which was a big hit, and is thinking of bringing in a top-notch frozen yogurt vendor.

Bamco spent a little more than $2.5 million to renovate the café, which brings in roughly $10 million in top line sales per year. To those who might grumble that only private school kids have access to such good food, company Vice President Maisie Greenawalt said, “Everyone should have access to great tasting, nutritious food. Making that a reality requires a food system based on ethics, not simply economics. If the primary goal of food service is to pay as little as possible to feed as many students as possible, we will continue to be stuck in this place where students are fed processed foods that are low priced because they are based on subsidized crops like corn. Institutional leaders need to recognize that food plays a larger role on campus than simply sustenance. Dining halls are gathering places where community is built. And, our society needs to be willing to pay a little more for that.”

The Market Café is located at 2130 Fulton Street at University Center; San Francisco, California 94118

Originally Published on the InsideScoopSF.

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.

For the last two years, advocates, lobbyists, politicians, and celebrities from Rachael Ray to Michelle Obama have worked to craft a bill that will daily affect the lives of the 31 million children who clamor to the nation’s school cafeterias to quell their grumbling bellies. For this bill to pass, over the next few days we the people must prove to our elected officials that the Child Nutrition Act is a national priority.

This past September marked our country’s first National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. Yet while one in three U.S. children are obese or overweight, one in four struggle with hunger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) reported last week that more than 50 million Americans, including more than 17 million children, are food insecure–meaning they lack consistent access to a nutritious, well-balanced diet.

Simultaneous hunger and obesity may seem like a paradox, but the root cause is the same: lack of access to healthy food. Give children nourishing food in the cafeteria, nutrition education in the classroom, and hands-on learning through school gardens, and a lifetime of healthy eating can take root.

We need to show our support for House passage of the $4.5 billion child nutrition bill that passed the Senate earlier this year. If the bill isn’t on the president’s desk soon, supporters will have to start over in the new Congress. It’s like dropping the turkey in front of all the seated family and friends.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act offers a real chance to improve nutrition for all children. By improving opportunities for healthy meals in and out of school, the bill would take an important step towards addressing both child hunger and obesity.

Unanimously passed by the Senate and supported by more than 1,300 national, state and local organizations, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (S. 3307) will:

• Improve school meals;
• Support farmers through Farm to School programs;
• Address skyrocketing obesity rates; and
• Feed more hungry children.

The bill would help reduce hunger and increase children’s access to healthy meals by expanding the after-school supper program nationwide, better connecting eligible children with free school meals, and streamlining the certification process for the Women, Infants, Children (WIC) program.

The bill would strengthen nutrition standards for all foods sold in schools, provide schools with increased resources and training to improve meal quality, and support Farm to School programs and school gardens.

Last week, the House designated October as National Farm to School Month. Now they have a chance to walk the walk, in addition to talking the talk, by passing a bill that will increase access to quality food for school children, foster local farm job growth and generate local economic development. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act establishes a competitive grant and technical assistance program in the Department of Agriculture to increase the use of local foods from small- and medium-sized farms in schools, with $40 million in mandatory funding.

The competitive grant program would help create more Farm to School programs benefiting kids and communities alike. A recent study from the University of Minnesota found the potential economic benefit of Farm to School to the region ranged from about $20,000 if each school served one locally grown meal a month to up to $430,000 if they bought large amounts from farmers.

Now consider that the fast-food industry spent more than $4.2 billion on marketing & advertising in 2009 alone, according to the Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. And our elected officials can’t pass child nutrition legislation that provides almost an equivalent amount in $4.5 billion over 10 years to reduce hunger and provide access to healthy food.

What have you done to help reach the goals of ending child hunger by 2015 and solving childhood obesity in a generation?

Before you pass the turkey, consider helping to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session. You and your family can deliver a strong message to Congress to vote yes on this urgently needed legislation, by sending your photo as part of a nationwide photo petition. Go here for details.

A healthy school lunch for our children is something to be truly thankful for this holiday season.

Originally published on Huffington Post

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.

Vampires and wolves? Early in the film we meet five Tilden Academy students, black teenagers from a Chicago school where 99.8% of the students qualify for free school lunch. The Tilden crew are traveling to Washington DC, where they will compete in the Cooking Up Change contest and create a winning meal that costs $1.00 per serving, meets USDA nutritional standards, and tastes great. When one of the Tilden teens delivers a breathless analysis of the wolves vs. vampires conflict in the Twilight book and movie series, the filmmakers grab this motif and use it to tell the history of the federal school food program.

Wolves are cast as the social reform-minded liberals while vampires play the agriculture-protecting conservatives in a comic book-style illustrated retelling of school food’s origins. In one of the great bi-partisan compromises of American history, “wolf” Senator Jerry Voorhis meets “vampire” Senator Richard Russell to hammer out the 1946 School Lunch Act. The condition of Dixiecrat Russell’s support was that the program be administered by the USDA, an alliance that has proven both detrimental and advantageous. The national school food program is famous among reformers  for suffering a glut of starchy, processed USDA surplus commodities; yet its alliance with the powerful USDA has given the school food program the political clout needed to survive numerous attacks over six decades.

But what to do about the outdated nutritional standards and the program’s role in the obesity epidemic? Is the USDA just dumping subsidies into the school food program? As current and former USDA officials, school food activists, and others debate, the questions become increasingly complex. Meanwhile, we see the non-profit Organic School Project work miracles, bringing fresh organic foods that meet nutritional standards into Chicago public school cafeterias, only to see the program fold for lack of adequate funding.

Lunch Line reaches a climax at this crisis point: there is simply not enough money going into school food to make significant change. But just as some Chicago schools lose the Organic School Project the city responds to demand and transitions more whole foods-based menus. We learn about the national Farm to School program, a healthful collaboration between agriculture and schools. And as the film reaches a conclusion a familiar theme emerges: we achieve victory, or at least something vaguely approximating it, through unlikely alliances and compromise.

The primary focus of Lunch Line is telling the story of American school food. But if the implicit mission of this film is to spur viewers to action, it’s ambiguous as to where those entry points are. We see mostly government officials, bureaucrats, and activists as the main agents of change; more parent activists–especially parents of color–in the film would have made the film more compelling to the people who have the greatest stake in the school food system. Fortunately, the filmmakers are partnering with food organizations for its national screenings, and those alliances, plus a clever worksheet the filmmakers created, could help parents find those points for engagement.

To request a screening of Lunch Line email lunchlinescreening@gmail.com or send a note through the Lunch Line Facebook page. Watch the trailer at http://www.ujifilms.com/lunchline/