Here’s a link to the USDA News Release about the Child Nutrition Act and what’s been added to it. The list looks promising. It includes: Improve nutrition standards. Establishing improved nutrition standards for school meals based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and taking additional steps to ensure compliance with these standards; Increase access to meal programs. Providing tools to increase participation in the school nutrition programs, streamline applications, and eliminate gap periods; Increase education about healthy eating. Providing parents and students better information about school nutrition and meal quality; Establish standards for competitive foods sold in schools. Creating national…
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Hi folks — working on a really exciting redesign, so expect to see the maintenance mode page again over the next week or so. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about school food. The Billings Gazette had a piece about an elementary school that was about to start offering breakfast to all students. Which sounds like a great idea, except that I read about it right on the heels of Ed Bruske’s series, Tales from a DC School Kitchen in which he spent a week in his daughter’s school, and discovered fun facts like the breakfast offered contained…
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Seems we’re all still reacting to the Flanagan piece slamming school gardens. Here’s a piece from Civil Eats that quotes Booker T. Washington on the value of physical work. The contempt shown by so much of the middle and upper-middle classes for people who work with their hands is, I’m convinced, partly responsible for the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs here in America. When you believe that work is only something other people do, and when you believe that those others, because they work with their hands and bodies must necessarily be inferior to you in your nice clean office,…
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While in some ways I hate to give Caitlin Flanagan any more web traffic for her flameball of an article about school gardens, the response has been very heartening. Here’s a link roundup: Red Herrings Are Not Dinner Food, or why Caitlin Flanagan is WRONG about school gardens | Oakland Local Mag writer: Alice Waters and school gardens are evil An Edible Schoolyard in Durham: How Kids Grow (Video) Samuel Fromartz: Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan Blames Arugula for California’s Failing Schools Chef Kurt Michael Friese’s response was probably my favorite, in part because I find the contempt for manual labor among…
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Caitlin Flannagan’s latest article at the Atlantic has folks up in arms. We all know I’m not Alice Water’s biggest fan, but I am a big fan of interactive education. Here’s a good rebuttal to Flannagan: REAL Gardens: Why school gardeners reap more than they sow : Super Eco.