Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish – Teach Every Child About Food from David Bryfman on Vimeo.

David Bryfman, currently the Director of the New Center for Collaborative Leadership at the  Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York-SAJES, got inspired by Jamie Oliver’s passion for healthy eating.  He’s thinking about how to bring Jaime’s suggestions for education into the Jewish community:

About a month ago I received an assignment for my business writing course. We had to compose a letter as an angry parent and PTA member, protesting a hypothetical high school’s deal with a well-known soda manufacturer. The deal would require that the school stock only this brand’s soda and snack products in its vending machines (we assume no healthy alternatives), in return for sponsorship from this manufacturer. My letter went:

To Mr. Anonymous Soda-Junkie:

As a member of the PTA and a concerned parent, I urge you to vote against the contract that would install (brand name here) vending machines in our schools. With teenage obesity reaching epidemic levels, we must do all we can to discourage the consumption of the unhealthy, calorie-rich foods sold by such machines.

Then check out School Lunch Talk, a blog that focuses on news in school food from the United States and around the world. Written by Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Berkeley United School District, and Deborah Lehmann, a writer and scholar, School Lunch Talk covers everything from what’s being served in European and Japanese schools, to the continuous representation of fast food and processed items in our schools.

How do these bochers hold up in the kitchen?

A May 6th piece in the Jewish Week covers a delicious new elective being offered at the all-boys Modern Orthodox Torah Academy of Bergen County…Cooking!

An excerpt from the piece:

“The groundbreaking class is the brainchild of Alex Bailey, who instructs the course and is also TABC’s Advanced Placement psychology teacher. Curriculum coordinator Nancy Edelman was looking to add a skill-based course to the list of 15 electives offered at the school, and Bailey proposed one of his favorite hobbies, cooking. While other schools may offer cooking clubs or less-structured electives, TABC’s program is the only one in which students learn the skills and context of culinary arts four days every week.”

At Otto Petersen Elementary Schoolin Scappoose, Oregon, the fourth and sixth graders held a “Waste War” in February to see who could have the least amount of food waste.

1. Compost food scraps in a worm bin or compost bin.

2. Label garbage cans food to compost, paper and plastic to recycle, and garbage to throw out.

3. Think about what you buy and if you really need it.

4. Before you throw something away, think about ways to reuse it.

You can find the article here.

Umami is so hot right now. Barbara Kingsolver talked about it in her food movement tome “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, NPR covered it, it’s been scientifically proven, and now it’s basis of a new Kikkoman advertising campaign, one that tells folks they can add umami to any dish to make it dazzling.

So what is umami? It’s glutamate, a non-essential amino acid that breaks down proteins in food. It also has the effect of exciting the neurotransmitters in human brains. When it’s bound to other amino acids, as in whole foods like tomatoes, asparagus, cheeses and meats, it has no adverse effects and makes life better from the tongue on down. When it’s free-floating though, as it is when used as an additive in the form of Monosodium glutamate and it’s many incarnations, in any savory processed food, and, unfortunately, in some delicious by-products like brewer’s yeast, that old neurotransmitter stimulation gets out of control. In up to 25 percent of the population (depending on your source, of course), MSG can cause side effects from over-stimulation of neurotransmitters. The side effects include a range of neurological and cardiac responses from the mild and incident-specific to the life-inhibiting and permanent, depending on the person doing the eating and the amount that they consume. (This article has a list, though I can’t vouch for or against their sources)

If Anna Lappe (of the Small Planet Institute) had one minute in an elevator with Barack Obama she’d ask him to start a Food Corps, modeled after the Peace Corps to “support a generation of young people to dedicate a year or two of their lives to engage with ending needless hunger in a country of plenty and the squandering of fossil fuels, water, soil and other precious resources through chemical agriculture.”

The idea is apparently compelling to a lot of food movement luminaries. In Grist’s article,

Deciding what to eat for lunch can be a challenge – but deciding what hundreds (or thousands) of other people should eat for lunch is decidedly harder.  But such is the charge for the many hospitals, schools, and other institutions across the country that feed people, en masse, on a daily basis.

In the past few years, a growing handful of institutions (e.g. Yale University and Kaiser Permanente) have attempted to bring institutional food away from Lunch Lady Land – sourcing produce from local farms, offering less junk food in favor of more fruits & veggies, increasing the number of homemade meals (vs. “heat-n-serve” foods) etc.  The Jewish community has jumped on the institutional food reform bandwagon too as synagogues, day schools and JCCs across the country begin to question their dependence on Styrofoam coffee cups and greasy kosher pizza.

Thanks to Rebecca Bloomfield for this guest post. Rebecca is an alumni of the Adamah program and a garden teacher at The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation and founded by Alice Waters.

The highlight of my week this week involved watching two of my students fight. Dodging the carefully-cultivated garden beds, one student ran after another. I hurdled over the strawberry patch to intercept the pursuer and was met by a stern pout that melted into a grin with the words, “she stole my snow peas.” I heard giggling and crunching behind me as the winded friend approached us both, handing us the peas. We snacked and returned to harvesting.

The Edible Schoolyard, in Berkeley, CA, is a force of healing and transformation for middle school students. As children turn soil, plant seeds, harvest produce, and build compost piles, they deepen their connection to food. As the garden transforms, so do the students. It is a space for things to change from that which is to that which can be: seed to sprout, compost to fertile soil, flower to fruit. Like the Mishkan that the Jews were commanded to build during the Exodus, the garden is a sacred space where a divine presence dwells. School gardens the nation over provide space for children to learn that they have choices when it comes to their food, their bodies, and their environment: things do not have to be the way they currently are.

Singer-songwriter (and The Jew & The Carrot contributor) Jay Mankita recently teamed up with The NY Coalition for Healthy School Food to create Eat Like a Rainbow – a “rocking, funky, danceable collection of quirky kids songs about healthy food and sustainable living.”

Sounds great, but would kids actually listen to a CD about eating fruits and vegetables? Last weekend, I tested it out on the experts, my three daughters.

The Boston Herald announced that Fenway Park is installing a kosher hot dog vending machine:

The home of the Fenway Frank, which claims to sell more hot dogs than any other ballpark in the country, is adding a new option for Jewish fans who adhere to strict kosher dietary laws. A new automated “Hot Nosh” vending machine, to be located in the big concourse under the bleachers, will cook and dispense all-beef, glatt kosher hot dogs in under a minute.

That’s cool at the ballpark, but how about in a Jewish day school?

This will be a great conference with lots of workshops, networking opportunities, and entertainment! I’ll be showcasing songs from my new CD ‘Eat Like A Rainbow’ (more about that in my next post). Lots of luminaries will be there, including some of our own readers! The 2008 program will focus on strengthening the resolve of children to eat nutritious, fresh foods by:

* connecting holistic food and nutrition messaging in our classrooms, cafeterias, after-school programs, homes, and neighborhoods;

* fostering relationships among school children and their communities that focus on food, cooking, and gardening;

* exploring the nuts and bolts of cross sector (i.e. health, education, foodservice, and agriculture) public and private collaborations; and

* promoting federal, state and local policies that strengthen economic and cultural bonds between local farms and schools, support the development of school gardens, and provide adequate funding for healthy, delicious school lunches for all students.

Last summer, the British rock band Radiohead made waves by selling their new album, In Rainbows, on a pay what you can basis.

Now, a vegetarian restauranteur is taking this model to the food world, selling meat-free, globally-inspired cuisine to customers – for whatever they think is “fair” – at his non-profit eatery, Lentil as Anything, and a local college cafe.

Some customers are completely thrown by the concept, and continue to ask for prices at the counter, but others see it as a chance to give back to their community. Owner Shanaka Fernando said the most a customer ever paid for a lentil burger was $50. “There must have been something in it that I didn’t see,” he said.

Following the lead of such projects as Yale Sustainable Food Project and inspired in no small measure by the popularity of such books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sustainable food has become an increasingly hot topic at college campuses around the country. Over this past summer and semester I have been involved in a collaborative project with two biology professors, Betsey Dyer and Deborah Cato, and over 30 First Year Seminar students to educate ourselves and the broader Wheaton College community about food and sustainability.

We concluded our semester earlier this month with a sustainable banquet using food which we ourselves harvested, got from local farmers’ markets, supplemented with Wise kosher organic chickens, and cooked – inspired by the “perfect meal” at the end of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was the required summer reading for all first year Wheaton students. The students from my seminar, “The Rituals of Dinner,” having studied dinner rituals ranging from Plato’s Symposium to the Passover Seder, the meals in Genesis, Leviticus, and the Gospel of Luke to Babette’s Feast and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, designed the ceremony for our sustainable harvest banquet. For me personally, it was a way in which my Jewish foodie and environmentalist commitments moved me into increasingly broader circles of connection with other people and with nature. The whole project was an intensely Jewish experience for me, even though I was doing it primarily in a non-Jewish context. The project itself was featured in the Winter 2008 edition of our alumnae/i magazine, the Wheaton Quarterly and you can read the full text of the article after the jump here: