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.

Read more »

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?

Feder first eyed Kosher Vending Industries because his children’s Jewish day school, the Maimonides School in Brookline, lacked a hot lunch program. After Passover, the school will roll out another Hot Nosh machine that cooks and dispenses kosher pizza, mozzarella sticks, vegetable cutlets, onion rings and potato knishes.

Um, are there any Jewish foods - vendable! - which aren’t fried and unhealthy? And since when did mozzarella sticks and onion rings make it into the “Jewish” cultural food category?

Plus, there’s more Jewish weiners (and thus a few more Weiners) in the ballpark pews these days.

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.

Read more »

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.

What do you think - is this an inspired idea, or totally nuts? I’m not sure yet, but I do already have a name in mind for the potential kosher, vegetarian spinoff: Abraham’s Tent.

Read the full article about the restaurant and school eatery here.

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: Read more »

(cross-posted on US Food Policy blog)

Yesterday, the NYTimes reported on the difficult and rewarding nature of trying to get local foods into schools, by overcoming tangible barriers and bureaucratic obstacles in Local Carrots with a Side of Red Tape.

The article illustrates the large example of the NYC School System which has tried to use its tremendous purchasing power to help many of the struggling fruit and vegetable farmers of New York state. This video features a smaller scale example in MA.

The article makes brief mention of the policies which currently make it difficult for the 10,874 [and counting] schools across the country that are part of the Farm to School movement to source school food locally, which brings us back to…drumroll, please: THE FARM BILL.

In case readers of this blog don’t have enough other reasons to care about the Farm Bill–which is scheduled to be debated by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee next Tuesday, October 23–with farm and conservation payments, organic research, food stamps and the myriad other items up for negotiation, the ability for schools to request local foods for school meals is a small item of great import to be included in the draft of the Farm Bill due out any day now.

Specifically, all schools that receive federal dollars for school meal (lunch, breakfast, after-school, summer, etc.) purchases must follow a federal bidding process, also called procurement, Read more »

Thanks to The Jew & The Carrot friend, Robbie Friedman, for this guest post.

Rectangular pizza, sloppy joes and canned corn — classic components of a school lunch. Many of our schools still spoon out such unwholesome foods, yet a growing number of them are turning the greasy corner.

Since New England born physicist Benjamin Thompson founded the Poor People’s Institute in Munich, Germany in the late 1700’s, providing daily staples such as potato soup, barley and peas to children during the course of their studies, our social institutions have constantly “sought to develop meals which would provide the best nutrition at the lowest possible cost.”

This approach has undoubtedly fed countless mouths, but it has also led to the deterioration of food quality. Today the struggle to nourish our children persists, due in part to school systems’ ailing budgets, parents pressed for time and our own lack of nutritional knowledge. However, a failure to deliver a wholesome source of vitamins, minerals, proteins and healthy fats to our children’s plates is a detriment to their development. People, including Jews, are beginning to take the matter into their own soiled hands.

Read more »

The New York Times reported today that school cafeterias across the country are going on a diet:

As students return to school this week, some are finding unusual entries on the list of class rules: fewer fried foods, smaller servings and no cupcakes. School districts across the country have been taking steps to make food in schools healthier because of new federal guidelines and awareness that a growing number of children are overweight.

In California, deep fryers have been banned, so chicken nuggets and fries are now baked. Sweet tea is off the menu in one Alabama school. In New Jersey, 20-ounce sports drinks have been cut back to 12 ounces.

Overall, schools report that the changes are being met with fanfare from health officials and shrugs (but not disgust) from students. Some of the changes, however, have parents up in arms:

Read more »

Local food is on the “back to school” shopping list for many colleges and universities across the country. Yale, Brown, Middlebury, and University of California Davis are just a handful of the institutions of higher education that have started sourcing some dining hall fare from regional farmers and even supplementing their menus with produce from student-run organic farms.

But Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA has moved one step beyond the sustainable food trend. Starting this fall, F&M will partner with food services behemoth Sodexho to offer kosher, organic food to all students on their meal plan. According to a press release from the school’s Office of College Communications:

“The program, featuring a Kosher, international, vegan/vegetarian, organic (KIVO) menu, will be offered to the entire College community in the Benjamin Franklin Dining Hall…In addition, the KIVO plan will be Star Kosher certified - all products that are served will meet Kosher dietary law, and the program will be subject to strict rabbinical supervision and employ a full-time, on-site manager that is trained and certified in Kosher dietary practices.”

Read more »

In the recent Hazon e-newsletter from earlier this week, Nigel Savage refers to Isaiah’s prophecy read in the Haftarah this coming Shabbat:

Every head is ailing
Every heart is sick…
Your land is a waste,
Your cities burnt down…
The yield of your soil is consumed by strangers…

For me all of this hits home as a prophecy for modern times, but the final verse in that section is particularly useful, as I spend my days working on increasing access to local food for the most vulnerable communities through Farm Bill legislation.

Fortunately, a very important amendment to allow school food service directors to use Geographic Preference in their bidding in order to request local foods, was unanimously accepted by the Agriculture committee at 12:15 AM last night!

However, we are still working to secure mandatory (meaning it doesn’t need to be fought for each year in an appropriations bill) funding for the Community Food Projects competitive grant program, an important incubator for projects linking small, sustainable farms with communities that need improved access to healthy, affordable local foods.

• The House Agriculture Committee has been debating and adding amendments to its draft Farm Bill since Tuesday and will be continuing throughout the day and maybe tomorrow. You can view the Committee’s (surprisingly interesting) debate and voting on the Farm Bill at: http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/audio.html
• Please contact your Member of Congress and let them know that their support for the Farm Bill should be contingent on it being a bill that promotes healthy food and communities.

Read more »

As the mark-up of the 2007 Farm Bill begins–the first two of six House sub-committees completed their mark-up of the Bill last week– I will be posting a series of updates about the Farm Bill, as I spend the summer in the thick of things interning for a national coalition working to create a Farm Bill that promotes healthy and local foods.

But first, a shameless plug: as part of the Community Food Security Coalition’s work, I am helping to organize a sign-on letter in support of these Healthy Priorities, which will be submitted to the leadership of the Senate Agriculture Committee this week as part of a Dear Colleague letter from Senators Feingold and Brown.

If you are involved with an organization that is related to food, agriculture, youth, communities, farms, public health, or really any area that understands the importance of what we put into our bodies and how our tax money is used, please support of the inclusion of initiatives to ensure access to fresh, healthy and local foods for all communities in the 2007 Farm Bill by signing your organization on to the letter to the leadership of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

PLEASE email me to sign on to the letter. For more information about the issues and efforts, visit CFSC’s Farm Bill policy page. Read more »

Any doubts that humane, healthy, organic and local are the dominant food trends? Witness today’s NYTimes dining:

• Prince Charles: Farmer, Cookie Maker, Ecologist and Yes, the Future King
• Foie Gras Makers struggle to Please Critics and Chefs
• When the Wine is Green: an exploration of biodynamic, natural and organic viticulture
• Locavores: Preserving Fossil Fuels and Nearby Farmland by Eating Locally
  
• Wonder Bread backlash: Alex Witchel’s voice of benign and boring dissent
• A New Alliance in the Fight Against Childhood Obesity: Rachel Ray and Bill Clinton (!)

Assuming the dining section is one step behind the curve, reporting peaking trends rather than coming ones, what do you think will be next? Where will sustainability take our plates tomorrow?

[NYTimes]

I just got back from presenting at 4 area conferences for the NY State School Nutrition Association. This is a professional organization that helps support and educate cafeteria workers. This year’s theme was Farm to School Programs. Getting more local fruits, grains, and vegetables into the schools makes sense for children’s health, local economies, school budgets, and the preservation of farmlands. Other presenters included local farmers, and folks from the NYS Farm Bureau. Promoting local agriculture and economies was something that everyone there agreed with, and there was a lot of useful information presented by some very passionate and well-informed people. I felt welcomed, even with my more ‘radical’ viewpoints, and was given a good forum to present my ideas, as well as my songs - I really enjoyed myself.

On the other hand, I am constantly surprised to be reminded that most of the attendees, which included cafeteria managers as well as staff, had little knowledge of nutrition beyond the basic USDA requirements.

Read more »

Fed up with school food? This just in from a great site called ‘Two Angry Moms’

“Amy was stewing for years, packing her kids lunches from home and trying to get her community to pay attention to what kids are eating in school. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Amy decided to take the fight to film. She spent 18 months searching for another mom willing to take on this mission.

Read more »