Kids can change the food system

I’ve written about FoodShare here many times before. But when it comes to kids and food in Canada, they are true leaders, getting out in front of the issue of school meals and, especially in the last two years, food literacy. As executive director Debbie Field says in this new short video about their work, social change happens when kids get engaged by an idea. Changing children’s eating habits and attitudes will help change the food system.

I couldn’t agree more. My favourite part of writing What’s for Lunch? was talking to and reading about kids who’d taken action around their school food. (Read more stories about kids taking charge here, here and here.)  FoodShare imagines a time when not only will we have a universal school nutrition program, no Canadian child will graduate from high school without having had food education as part of the curriculum.

The Great Big Crunch, FoodShare’s annual apple love-in to promote healthy, local eating is coming up March 8th. Schools and teachers can sign up and access great resource material here.

Selling treats to children

Another great infographic from the folks at teach.com.

(Thanks to Jeannie Marshall for the link. Her book, Outside the Box: Why Our Children Need Real Food Not Food Products, comes out in April.)

food+paint=art

For a long time, I didn’t buy or make Valentine’s cards for our kids to give out to their class. My eldest son didn’t care or ask for such things until he was older (and could do it on his own), and I always thought it was a bit silly. Why would a 5 year old send a love note to anyone but his family? And at our kids’ school, if you’re going to send a Valentine you have to send them to everyone in the class. I understand the premise (no one gets left out), but it’s always seemed like a bit of a landfill issue to me. What do you do with all those slips of paper covered in  Spiderman and Iron Man?

Our littler son, however, has been on me to do Valentine’s from his first year in kindergarten. He wants to send them and he wants to make them (bless his sweet, loving little heart). So I figure if they are going to go in the recycling bin, he may as well get a little fun out of it.  This year, we revived the lost art of the potato print. It’s not as easy as I recall to get a good print—could have been the washable paint we used—but it was fun to try. Made me think about all the good things that can come from playing with food. More on food art soon.

Finding the words

I’m working on finishing up the first draft of another book about food right now. I’m cowriting this one aimed at adults (more about it another day!), but one of the things we talk about a lot when we’re working together is language.

There’s the jargon we are trying to eliminate from the book (not always easy). There’s avoiding any suggestion of paternalism (as in “you should do it because we say so”  —not a great way to convince anyone of anything IMHO as a writer, parent and wife).

But, most importantly, in this book about food justice and equity, there is finding the right language and telling the right stories that will resonate for people of all political and social/cultural stripes. Finding a way to convincingly express what we both feel so passionately: that food must be reimagined as not simply a commodity but a public good, and that everyone should have access to it.

Of course, creating language and narratives that tap into the zeitgeist are important for all of us interested in transforming the current food system into one that’s more sustainable and equitable.

Cost-cutting politicians in Canada (and elsewhere) have been quite masterful at creating a collective narrative with such stories as  “Stop the Gravy Train” (suggesting Toronto’s municipal government was overspending when the average person was having to tighten their belt); or that familiar phrase from the 1990s, “The Common Sense Revolution”—another slash-and-burn tale that ended up devastating the province of Ontario, leaving our most vulnerable citizens out in the cold and all of us shivering and afraid.

But those of us attempting to foster an alternative to this approach have been less successful at capturing hearts and minds. That’s why I was pretty excited to hear about the Lexicon of Sustainability project.

Created by husband and wife duo Douglas Gayeton and Laura-Howard Gayeton, the project is based on the idea that people can’t be expected to live more sustainable  lives if they don’t know the most basic terms and principles behind sustainability.

So they crisscrossed the USA, photographing and talking to farmers and sustainable food pioneers like Will Allen, Alice Waters, and Joel Salatin. From those conversations and images, they created 175  gorgeous and informative photo collages and a series of short films.

With study guides, a book, web site and a travelling show of the images, the Lexicon is spreading out across the country. Beautiful and compelling, it’s a tribute to the power of words. That’s a story I want to hear.

What’s for lunch in France?

Whenever anyone sees the proofs of What’s for Lunch?, my upcoming book on how schoolchildren eat around the world (not a huge focus group, I admit, since the book hasn’t been published yet, but significant enough), they always say they wish they lived in France.

The French school lunch in the book is, indeed, delicious looking.

From What's for Lunch? Photograph copyright Yvonne Duivenvoorden

Maybe it’s the presentation: real cutlery, real plates. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a four-course balanced meal. Maybe it’s the cheese.

But the kids in France definitely have it made with school lunch. (The Italians don’t do too badly, either.)

A big part of the fact that French schoolchildren have such a well-conceived meal at school is the emphasis on food as culture in French society. Where else is “taste” such a celebrated sense?

Karen Le Billon knows this intimately. A Canadian author and teacher now based in Vancouver, her book, French Kids Eat Everything, is coming out this spring.

When she and her family moved to France (to her husband’s hometown) a couple of years ago,  she was forced, she writes, to “question some of her most basic assumptions about food and parenting. Gradually, she [began] to see the wisdom in a simple set of rules that govern French food education.”

Note the combination of food and education. Not words we see in such close proximity very much here at home.

In advance of the book’s publication, Le Billon is blogging regularly about French school lunches in various towns around the country. Seems last week in Nice, in the south of France (a town I, incidentally, consider the birthplace of my own love of food), the children were eating as well as ever. Here’s the menu according to Le Billon:

“Monday…

Celery salad with vinaigrette dressing
Fresh salmon filet, with ciboulette sauce
Organic rice
Cheese: Coulommiers
Dessert: Vanilla ice-cream.”

With meals like that I guess it’s no surprise that French children have some of the lowest rates of obesity in Europe. I’ll take the salmon filet, s’il vous plaît.

The protein question

I’ve written before about my 12-year-old son who decided he’d become a vegetarian when he was 8. You have to hand it to the kid: he’s never wavered. Not for a pepperoni pizza, not for fresh smallmouth bass caught by his dad, not for gummy bears or marshmallows made with gelatin.

Luckily, he’s willing to try new things and genuinely likes beans and most vegetables. He’s even becoming interested in cooking—thanks, in large part, to the fact that his middle school has mandatory classes in cooking and baking, a rarity these days.

Lunch in a bowl: vegetarian soup for all reasons

And his decision has definitely had a huge impact on our family’s eating habits. The rest of us now eat meat only occasionally (maybe once a week), and rarely cook it at home. For the record, I don’t think everyone has to go veg, though, as most people have heard, there is growing evidence showing a plant-based diet is better for your health—not to mention the environment.

But all this growing awareness about eating less meat doesn’t stop everyone (and I mean everyone) from asking us worriedly how we get our growing (and athletic) child to eat enough protein. From now on, I will offer my standard “did you know broccoli is a great protein source?” and send them directly to Michele Simon’s scathing article: Protein propaganda: it’s what’s for dinner in Grist.

Simon points to the powerful meat lobby and its stranglehold on our collective food conscience. She argues: “One way to distract attention away from heart attacks and colon cancer is to conflate the idea of meat with a nutrient that we do in fact need: protein.”

Grist is doing an entire series called Protein Angst trying to break down the rhetoric about this incredibly controversial subject. I’ll definitely be watching it.

Winter thyme

We had our biggest snowfall of the season last night.

Frankly, that’s not saying much since winter in these generally wintery parts has been unseasonably warm. In fact, I didn’t even pull out some of my garden plants this fall. We’ve used the thyme (above) and even kale for months after the harvest should have ended.

I love winter, but even on the prettiest snow days, I can’t help dreaming of the spring and planting. I’ve been researching seeds we can plant in the school garden for harvest before school ends in June (Evergreen has a great list of heritage varieties here) and thinking about what to do in our own urban patch.

I know I’m not alone. Take Cleveland’s Martinez Garcias, an artist who created a comic series called Brink City: Green in the Ghetto about urban farming, vermicomposting, food deserts and more. The series is aimed at kids and features an unnamed metropolis on the brink of destruction that is forced to rely on a shape-shifting alien to help scientists, kids and community groups reclaim their land. (Thanks to City Farmer for linking to the series.)

Incidentally, Cleveland seems to be a bit of a hotbed of  animation meets urban farming right now. Check out another City Farmer link here highlighting the comic/zine Urban Farm Manifesto by Old Husher, a self-proclaimed “first generation, third year Cleveland farmer.”

School lunch rules

The big news in lunch this week was the USDA released its new standards for school meals. Pizza will still be considered a vegetable and the french fry lobby maintained its hold on the list of acceptable foods (and still isn’t happy that “the potato is being downplayed,” reports the New York Times), but according to observers like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, these new standards are the best ever, representing “one of the most important advancements in nutrition in decades.”

New nutrition standards: does that mean no more Frito pie?

The USA will now join countries around the world that offer healthy guidelines for school meals.

Salt will be limited, no trans fats allowed, kids will be offered a wider variety of fruits and veg, milk will be low fat and whole grains are prioritized. School lunch providers will get an additional six cents per school lunch in order to achieve these new standards. (USA Today offers a few more details here.)

It’s about time.

But the fight for healthy school lunches is not over. The new standards will be phased in over time, there will no doubt be food companies looking for ways to cut costs, and the amount provided per meal may simply not be enough in the first place. Vigilance is necessary.

Check out Bettina Elias Siegel‘s always excellent analysis at The Lunch Tray for more on the Good, Bad and Ugly of the new standards. I also thought Mrs. Q., of Fed Up with School Lunch fame, did a nice job expressing how parents can help improve school lunch in her babble.com column.

Incidentally, Mrs. Q. posted an interesting piece about lunch ladies. Seems the staff of Chicago school cafeterias were actually asked what they think about school lunch. More evidence of their makeover, methinks.

Lunch lady makeover

For years, in movies and books, the lunch lady was a symbol of all that was wrong with school (and school lunch). They were the kids’ version of the Russian character in almost every North American movie from the 1950s to 1990s—shorthand for villain.  (Now you know someone’s bad in an adult movie if they smoke cigarettes.)

A (very) quick search uncovered book titles ranging from Killer Lunch Lady to Revenge of the Lunch Ladies to Attack of the Mutant Lunch Lady and Help! I’m Trapped in my Lunch Lady’s Body.

Those poor lunch ladies couldn’t get a break—as if they were solely responsible for the nasty food served in so many school cafeterias.

Now that school lunch is being reclaimed—not least by the self-proclaimed “Renegade Lunch Lady” herself, Ann Cooper—the ladies of the lunchroom are faring slightly better in the world of pop culture.

Take the Fly Guy series, one of my 7-year-old son’s favourites.

These hilarious and  easy-to-read books follow a pair of googly-eyed friends, one a boy (Buzz), the other a fly (Fly Guy). Fly Guy loves garbage soup, piles of dirt, smelly mops and dirty dishes, and the pair have many icky adventures over the 10 books in the series. In Super Fly Guy, our little hero finds happiness in the lunchroom.

At first, it seems like the lunch lady hates him, but the good woman is swayed by his intelligence and feeds him chicken bones and fish heads in sour milk (served with a straw). Her boss, however, isn’t pleased that she’s entertaining flies in the lunchroom and fires her. Everyone is sad since the lunch lady was actually a good cook!

There’s also a graphic novel series for older readers about a superhero Lunch Lady—”serving justice and serving lunch”!—by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. Named 3rd and 4th Grade books of the year in 2010 and 2011 at the Children’s Choice Awards, the series is reportedly being made into a live action movie with Amy Poehler. This lunch lady fights cyborg substitutes, evil authors and swamp monsters using only her wits, food gadgets (a banana boomerang, a lunch tray laptop) and floods of sloppy joe mix.

From super villain to superhero, the ladies who (make) lunch have truly had a makeover. Now if school lunch itself could only get the same super treatment…

What’s for lunch in Brazil?

[Over the next couple of months before What's for Lunch? How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World is published, I'll be highlighting some of the countries that are featured in the book. This is the first in the series.] 

In the last few years, Brazil has emerged as the darling of the world economy. The GDP is growing while income inequality is decreasing.

Of course, it had no where to go but up on the equality issue. It wasn’t so long ago that Brazil was the most unequal country in the world, with the wealthiest 10 percent earning half of all income. But a vast suite of government programs aimed at poverty reduction has meant poverty has actually been cut in half. Countries around the world are now looking to Brazil for advice on how to do the same. (In fact, political economist Doug Henwood wrote recently that New York City could use a few tips—it’s now more unequal than Brazil.)

Food access is a huge part of the Brazilian strategy and free school lunch programs in public schools have long been part of the  landscape.

Photo from What's for Lunch? Copyright Yvonne Duivenvoorden

But it’s not just about free food for kids. School lunch is integrated into other aspects of the food system. Seasonal produce, for instance, is prioritized and schools must buy a portion of ingredients from local farmers (like the banana in the image above). Everyone benefits: kids get great fresh food; farmers have a ready outlet for their produce; and these new relationships grease the economy.

This kind of connecting the dots between schools and farms, education and the economy is exactly the way forward. No wonder Brazil is becoming a model for the rest of us.