Civil Eats

Through the end of today you can become a member of the organization Slow Food and pay whatever amount you wish.

The organization began in Italy as a political stance against the way fast food was changing the local eating culture, and has since grown to 100,000 members in 132 countries, all interested in building a food system that is good, clean and fair. There are groups, called conviviums, in cities across the US that meet to discuss and enjoy food together. Much of the focus of Slow Food has been on protecting biodiversity: their program Ark of Taste promotes plants and animal breeds that have been dying out as industrial agriculture spreads a handful of species through standardization. But now, they’re rolling back their sleeves and setting their sights on food justice. Read More

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.” Read More

At the most recent Kitchen Table Talks session on August 25, the challenges affecting school lunch programs, particularly in San Francisco, was on the menu. With the impending reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act and recent articles in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, it seems that now is the time to capitalize on the momentum and advocate for healthier school lunch food policies. Read More

In 1946, when President Truman signed the School Lunch Act, he said, “In the long view, no nation is healthier than its children, or more prosperous than its farmers.” If that was a statement of purpose rather than merely a rhetorical flourish, then the School Lunch Act has failed.

Today in America we have steadily rising rates of childhood obesity, and if you were born after 2000, you have a startling one-in-three chance of developing early-onset diabetes. Meanwhile America now has more prisoners than farmers, and among those few remaining farmers the average age is 57.1 and rising. The equation becomes quite simple to understand: No farmers equals no food. Read More