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.
Here’s the second audio installment of my still unfinished CD, ‘Eat Like A Rainbow’.
Click here to hear a rough version of ‘Strong Bones’ (click the player below). This song promotes healthy foods, exercise, cutting down on salt and junk food, and the radical idea that milk is not the only source of calcium. It also talks about bones being flexible as well as strong. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that bones have piezoelectric and other crystalline properties, and enjoy talking with kids about making friends with their skeletons… I’d love to hear comments on the song!
This month I head off to five regional conferences of the NY State School Nutrition Association where I’ll be a presenter, and where I’ll meet with farmers, school food managers, and teachers, to promote these songs, the upcoming album, and my assembly concerts. (More on those and other concerts, and more songs to listen to here on my website, http://jaymankita.com)
I spent this past weekend on the campus of the Claremont Colleges, a group of five schools located about an hour outside of Los Angeles, visiting and eating with my old friend Hal. Food was, literally, everywhere: salad bars, burger bars, omelet stations, deli meats, pizzas, lasagna, beans and rice, vegan options, vegetarian options, and of course, the dessert bar. As I wandered around the cafeteria on the campus of Pomona College I found myself stopping for a slice of pizza and eating it on my way over to the salad bar. On the way to the salad bar, maybe the French fries caught my eyes, or the garlic bread, inducing me to pull over to load up my tray a bit more.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of the experience. On the one hand, I’m slightly ashamed of the way in which I overate. Being presented with mountains of free, delicious, and varied food led me (at least for the first few meals) to put anything that looked good and was labeled vegetarian on my plate. As a Post-Modern-Orthodox Jew (we can talk about what that means later), I’m liberal enough with my observance of Kashrut that I’ll eat vegetarian food in the dining hall or restaurants, even though they serve non-kosher meat. As I forced myself to finish my meals rather than throw out my unfinished food, Hal laughed mirthfully and explained that it took a couple of weeks to get used to all the options and plan your meal accordingly. Read more »
These words, from Pirkei Avot - Wisdom of the Fathers - and remind me of an article about school lunches published last week by Grist. ”Renegade Lunch Lady,” Ann Cooper, is working to change the face of school lunch in American public schools, starting with the 9,000 students eating at the 16 schools in the Berkeley Unified School System.
They also reminded me of a related and less-heartening article I read a few years back in Mother Jones, called Unhappy Meals, which painted a very bleak picture of the average school lunch.
Georgetown’s Eat Local Challenge — and the temporary disappearance of Taco Tuesday — was the brainchild of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bon Appétit Management Co. With a national staff of 10,000 and annual revenues of $400 million, BAMCO runs 300 cafes in colleges like Georgetown Law, at the corporate campuses of Oracle and Yahoo, and at other posh locations including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif. Yes, that’s cafes, not cafeterias, as BAMCO’s director of communications, Maisie Ganzler, is quick to stress. “Cafeteria” conjures up images of can openers, frozen veggies and great quantities of mystery meat. But BAMCO believes even lowly college mess halls can be brought into the culinary vanguard.
BAMCO is not alone. In the past year, the “local” ethos has overtaken even organics as the gourmet cause célèbre — And eat-local challenges have begun sprouting up all over the place…
Aptly named NYU nutritionist, Marion Nestle, declares 2006 to be the “year everyone discovered that food is about politics and people can do something about it.”
Food safety and E. coli highlighted an industrialized food system in crisis.
Nutrition in schools was a political issue, with Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger joining hands to keep sugar sodas and junk food out of the cafeteria.
Family & Kids, Food Safety, Health, Neat Projects, On The Web, Participate!, Personal Story, School Food
Fed up with school food? This just in from a great site called ‘Two Angry Moms’
Here’s the second audio installment of my still unfinished CD, ‘Eat Like A Rainbow’.
These words, from Pirkei Avot - Wisdom of the Fathers - and remind me of an article about school lunches published last week by 
Salon has a story about the local dining movement popping up on college campuse
