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:

His presentation on healthy eating is something that every educator, parent, grandparent and anyone else who feeds our children, should watch (and it wouldn’t hurt the younger generation to watch it either). It got me thinking about the obligatory Jewish cooking classes that many Jewish supplementary high school programs offer – and why not? They’re popular, relatively simple to plan, and you slip in the Jewish content piece without the kids even realize that they’re learning.

You can read David’s post and share your own healthy, traditionally Jewish recipes at his blog. Click here to read more.

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.

Statistics show that teenage obesity can have long-term effects and lead to asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, and depression. As parents, we are supposed to protect our children from these dangers, not encourage them. We cannot pretend to want the best for our children if we surround them with foods which are so detrimental to their health.

The school board claims that this deal will fund our sports programs and after-school activities, but I believe the cost will ultimately outweigh any gain. Kids who want to pursue sports will do so whether or not our gym is updated. Further, there are other ways to raise money for extracurriculars: performances, fund-raisers, etc. These would also encourage teamwork among teens and help build a community environment.

Please remember that we are preparing our children for life. I trust that you will choose what is best for them.

Sincerely, etc.

My professor told us to assume high school kids weren’t mature enough to make decisions about what was good for them. There was no possibility in our minds that the hypothetical students just wouldn’t buy these sugar-laden, caramel-color-infused products. The likelihood was that we had consumed these treats back in our high school days (guilty). But were we that much wiser now?

It barely merits mentioning that most of my classmates had Snickers bars and bags of Lays stashed under their desks as we held this very discussion. My mind drifted to a recent experience I’d had with campus food.

Our college cafeteria has about a dozen different food concessions, but only one Kosher stand for a student body that is roughly 30% Jewish. This particular Café is infamous for offering two options: pizza and pasta. The other possibility for us Jews is the ever-present vending machine. We, like the high school in the letter, have no healthy food available to us. So imagine my delight when I read on a well-displayed campus ad screen that “Vegan option, Farmer’s Market now open in the cafeteria!”

Finally! No more would I have to stare at the cafeteria’s greasy entrees. I hurried over, spotting several more flyers announcing this mythical, healthful, long-awaited option along the way.

I found a foot’s worth of counter space between the napkin baskets and (you guessed it) potato chips. It was contained three baskets of produce. One was apples, one was pears. The third was onions. An index card-sized marker before it indicated Farmer’s Market.  I looked up at the cashier.

“Where’s the farmer’s market?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“This is the one on all the signs?”

“Yup. Dunno who would want an onion.”

I could just pack a lunch. I know this. Sometimes I do. Other times I wake up late, or I forget. On those days I’ll wait until I get home to eat. Sometimes I’ve given in and gotten the pizza. I spoke to the college food director’s secretary (ah, bureaucracy). Several of my friends sent in complaints. I’ve been told so many students complained about the lack of healthy food that the Kosher Café started serving wrapped turkey sandwiches. But in the meantime, most of the student body, even non-kosher-ites who have the healthy (treif) vegetarian stand and other options, still crunch on their sour-cream and onion chips and down their Cola by the quart. Have we really learnt anything since high school?

I’ve been told to stop complaining and just bring my own friggin’ food. But I can’t help mourning this hold the ever-present vending machine has over us. Just this morning I left my winter class, stomach growling so loud I couldn’t concentrate. Of course the cafeteria was closed, and that left only the vending machine. I could feel it laugh as I slipped in quarters for an overpriced chocolate bar. Should I refocus my homework letter to the college? I know what they’ll say. That we should be old enough and smart enough by now to know NOT to center our diet on cans of cola and candy bars. And they’re right, but what about those who live on campus, who have no other options? Those are the ones who eat pizza every day, whether they like to or not. It’s the easy option.

I know I’m in no position to complain, but the thought of the eating habits they’re promoting by not caring makes me thank G-d I live at home. I look at the vending machine with vengeful eyes. Next time, I think, I’ll get the better of you. Next time, I’ll bring hummus and celery sticks, and then we’ll see who’s laughing.  

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.”

Beyond offering a tangible skills-set to students who may not exactly fit into the standard “yeshivah track”, this new cooking course offers a radical spin on the classic “women in the kitchen, men in the beit midrash” gender paradigm that exists (albeit with an enormous amount of variation!) in the religious world.  My feminist sensibilities can’t help but get excited when picturing these young rabbis-to-be sauteeing garlic and onions after a long day of pouring over talmudic texts.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, engaging with food hands-on is a profound and valuable experience, even more so if you’ve been studying dietary laws from books all day!  My hope is that these young bochers take their newly aquired cooking skills outside of the school’s kitchen- helping their parents prepare for shabbat, cooking for their future families, and appreciating those meals that have been prepared for them; with gender roles not a main ingredient.

]]> http://jcarrot.org/gender-bending-yeshivah-home-ec/feed 1 http://jcarrot.org/reduce-reuse-recycle-reducing-comes-first http://jcarrot.org/reduce-reuse-recycle-reducing-comes-first#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:47:44 +0000 Lisa F. http://jcarrot.org/?p=4106

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)

The FDA classifies MSG as “generally recognized as safe” or “GRAS”, like baking soda, salt, vinegar, and GMOs, while pointing out that too much MSG is proven without a doubt to adversely effect some people, particularly those with bad asthma. Even the FDA admits that MSG has an image problem, and manufacturer’s response to that is to try and hide the stuff, by calling it anything other than MSG.

At the Hazon conference, Dr. Shetreat-Klein showed us a handout with a few of the common monikers, including glutemate, monopotassium glutimate, yeast extract, hydrolyzed protein, glutamic acid, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, yeast food, hydrolyzed corn gluten, gelatin, textured protein, yeast nutrient, autolyzed yeast and natrium glutimate, among many more. Dr. Shetreat-Klein, a neurologist practicing in The Bronx, is writing a book on the six majorly bad, extremely common additives in food, and at the conference she spent most of her time telling the audience about MSG. According to her, a large load causes receptors in the brain to fire incessantly until their cells die, triggering headaches and tics and contributing to the conditions that produce seizures.

I spent a year in China, where kitchen essentials included two separate bags of the two most common types of MSG (in my lousy Chinese, these were “white” and “brown” salt, though I’m sure they had more complicated names). I got to really love the taste of the stuff, which makes sense, since it’s basically artificial delicious. Luckily, my partner refuses to eat the bag of MSG I brought home from Shanghai, despite my remonstrations, and has kept me, mostly, from doing my receptors harm with fake amino acids.

Though my partner keeps me from coating our garden crop in MSG, it’s no small feat to keep the stuff out of your diet. MSG in it’s multifarious forms is in almost every savory processed food, including most organic ones. Annie’s Mac n’ Cheese is one unexpected source, and doctor Shetreat-Klein told us to look out for anything with a “flavor packet”. That would include all those lovely just-add-water soups that I consumed in such quantities in college and on long train rides in China. It also rules out a lot of easy from-the-box dinners like flavored rices or pastas.

In some ways, the anti-MSG argument just amounts to another point in favor of slow-food. If you get your umami from the meats, cheeses, veggies and seaweeds where its naturally found, you don’t have to worry about harm done to your neurotransmitters and you still get the great taste. On the other hand, the free-floating glutamate in brewer’s yeast, a favorite flavoring of vegans and back-to-the-landers alike, came as a surprise to me. Brewer’s yeast does contain a lot of B vitamins, which may block the negative effects of MSG, so it’s possible that it’s not so bad for us (I’d need Dr. Shetreat-Klein to back me up on that one, though). But it’s another reminder to all of us not to get fooled by our own marketing within the good food movement.

The idea is apparently compelling to a lot of food movement luminaries. In Grist’s article, linked above, where experts in the field (ahem) are asked to give their ideal one-minute speech to the president-elect, four others mentioned a government organized youth movement in agriculture.

Bonnie Azab Powell of Ethicurean.com and Edible San Fransisco wants to start a “Farm for America job corps program, like Teach for America” that would farm unused Federal Land. She tells Grist that the program would support “people who want to learn how to farm, with apprenticeship match-ups, salary support, and low-interest loans” with produce going to school cafeterias and food banks.

Ann Cooper, author and director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District and Kate Adamick,  director of The s’Cool Food Initiative second Michael Pollan in their suggestion for how to staff those school cafeterias: give student loan assistance to culinary students who follow graduation with two years in the trenches.

The idea is certainly not unprecedented. Apart from current programs like Peace Corps, Teach for America, we can think back to the WPA, or Works Progress Administration during Roosevelt’s New Deal. During the New Deal, Civilian Conservation Corps members mapped out the national soil survey, an enormously useful tool for farmers and landowners. In 1918, at the end of world war one, the New York Times published this article on an army of 1,500,000 schoolchildren tilling 60,000 acres of”unproductive home and vacant land”. The Tims called them the “United States School Garden Army,” and while we might not be so into the military rhetoric any longer, the idea of a million and a half school kids turning lawns into gardens sounds like victory to me.

So what do you think, JCarrot readers? How about a Farm Corps? What would it look like, what would it’s purpose be? What kinds of incentives would young people need to join up, and how would a Farm Corps translate into food security for the nation’s hungry?

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.

As a Jewish organization committed to health and sustainability, Hazon is currently in the process of creating our own Organizational Food Purchasing Guidelines.  But we want to hear from you!  Let us know:

1. What “green food practices” does your synagogue, JCC, day school, Hillel (etc.) currently practice?  Anything is fair game, from swapping the Styrofoam for glass mugs, to ripping up a corner of the parking lot to plant an organic garden.

2. On the contrary, in what ways could your Jewish institution do a better job at bringing health and sustainability into your corner of the Jewish community?

Share your ideas below – we’ll compile them (along with others) – into a resource guide that can be shared with the larger Jewish community.  Here’s to eating better, together, in 5769.

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.

The large-scale implications of a one-acre school garden are not so apparent to the students. They have learned to look far enough into the future to anticipate the harvest of a ripe fruit, but not to the harvest of healthier communities and localized food systems. For now, their lessons are small: Tomatoes aren’t only red: some are green, purple, yellow and orange, too. Cauliflower can be purple, and one kind grows in spirals. Corn leaves make beautiful music when the wind blows through them. Winter squash grows in the summer.

It is this delicate balance between what is and what can be that fuels me every day. The potential in every seed and student has brought and kept my heart into this work. The garden comes to life with the students; it is the breath of a world to come.

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.

On Friday after school, I left two of my daughters (6 and 4) in the minivan with their babysitter while I picked up their older sister (who is 8). I casually suggested they try listening to the new CD until we returned. When my oldest daughter and I got back, the tunes were cranking and there was a bonafide dance party in the car.

6 year old: “This is the best ever!”

Mankita’s music is heavy on rhythm with some great electric guitar riffs. The songs range in style from calypso to rock and have catchy, kid-friendly titles like: “New Food Attitude,” “Everybody Likes Vegetables,” and “Junk Food Man.” The last song, Sun, Wind, Soil and Rain is a beautiful lullaby about seasonal cycles. My 8-year old critic, after hearing only the beginning of the first cut, said, “I like the music, but I don’t like the words.” Then she proceeded to listen to the entire CD and changed her mind.

Fast forward to late Sunday afternoon, back in the car for the drive home to New York City from our summer home in Fire Island. My 8-year old immediately asked, “Can we put the Jay Mankita CD on?” I had to apologize – it was packed it in my luggage and irretrievable.

My husband rooted around in the glove compartment and found an older Jay Mankita CD we’d bought at the first Hazon Food Conference. We toured through every song, but the kids were disappointed – they preferred Eat Like a Rainbow’s R&B and rock to this CD’s spoken word feel. Now that we’re back home, however, and their beloved new CD has been unearthed from my suitcase, my girls are ready to turn up the volume and dance. Yes, even to songs about vegetables.

Win a copy of Eat Like a Rainbow for your kids – or yourself!  Tell us which vegetable you loved most – and hated most! – when you were a kid.

Listen to samples and purchase Eat Like Rainbow here.
Check out The New York Coalition for Healthy School Food here.