Beautiful account of a public school in France using fresh, local foods within 30 miles for the cafeteria…make sure to listen to the audio version to enjoy the sounds of cooking and laughter.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91687769&sc=emaf

Morning Edition, July 2, 2008 · Chef Dominique Valadier starts each day at 5:30 a.m., just as the fish market opens in the southern French provincial town of Salon de Provence.

On one particular day, he picks up 20 pounds of fresh, live mussels at the market before heading off to Lycee de l’Emperi, the public high school where he is the cook.

At the school, he prepares meals for about 800 students, using all fresh, local ingredients. The introduction of healthy school lunch programs, like this one, is one major reason France has been able to curb childhood obesity rates after two decades on the rise, according to two recent studies.

From Within 30 Miles

The menu on this day at Valadier’s high school: mussels in cream sauce over rice with leeks and stuffed turkey thighs, accompanied by a squash au gratin casserole.

Nothing here is frozen or pre-prepared, Valadier says.

“Voila. This sticker here shows where these mussels came from and when they were harvested,” he says. “This guarantees their freshness.”

Eyes twinkling and knives flashing, Valadier opens up the plump turkey thighs, cutting out the bones.

The flattened turkey filets are wrapped around a stuffing of ground up parsley, garlic, cheese and smoked pork shoulder. The loaves are then tied with twine and baked for three hours at low temperatures to keep in the juices and flavor. When sliced, they will serve hundreds of students, 10 times the number that could have been fed on the plain turkey thighs. Preparation and proximity are the keys to high quality meals at lower prices, says Valadier.

“We try to get our base products — meat, fish, vegetables — within a 30-mile radius, because there are fewer intermediaries and we can negotiate prices and quality with the producer. These turkeys were raised and slaughtered just near here,” Valadier says. “If I have a problem, I’ll ask the producer to come see me, and I can guarantee you things will be a lot better the next time!”

Healthy and Cheap

All around the school kitchen, food is cooking in various pots and pans. Gallons of bechamel, a seasoned white sauce, bubble for the squash casserole. A vat of chickpeas boils for homemade hummus. It is hard to believe this is a public school cafeteria and not a three-star restaurant.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Valadier’s meals is that they cost the students only $3 a day, less than the typical fast food fare served at many French high schools.

Another way Valadier saves money is by getting maximum use out of every ingredient. He never throws anything away. In one corner of the kitchen, he is boiling down the fish heads, flesh and bones from yesterday’s salmon to make a tasty bouillon for today’s mussels.

As lunch hour begins and the students file in, Valadier serves them while answering questions about the meal. He reaches across the counter with a forkful of the squash au gratin to give 17-year-old Valentine Biemence a taste. Biemence says she and her friends have all but quit eating lunch at McDonald’s and have discovered a lot of new dishes.

“It’s all the time different food and very, very good,” Biemence says. “People are really happy, because it’s really hard now to eat well and cheap.”

Investing in the Future

Valadier once worked in the glamorous world of Riviera restaurants. He says he left that life for something more meaningful. Investing in students’ well-being is also an act of citizenship, he explains. If young people learn to eat well early on, they will cost the country’s health care system a lot less in the future.

He has clearly found his calling here, while winning over the students — and teachers. Danielle Viou teaches drama and English at the high school.

“We are very, very lucky because it’s a real project. It’s not just doing the cooking, it’s a whole concept of educating and taking time and enjoying it,” Viou says. “And it’s artistic at the same time.”

Schools are taking the mystery out of the meat they serveSome nutritionists are opting for organic dishes and generally healthier meals — and students are finding that they like them.By DeeDee Correll,

deedee.correll@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-food22-2008jun22,0,4846063.story

From the Los Angeles Times

L.A. Unified’s new top chef trying to put the ‘wow’ in school lunches

Mark Baida is taste-testing some new recipe ideas on students, hoping to change attitudes about cafeteria fare.

By Mary MacVean
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 22, 2008

Mark Baida was pleased with his latest taste test: lots of empty little black trays, sometimes stacked three deep in front of his guinea pigs, a group of Garfield High School students.

But the pressure is on the new executive chef of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Demands are growing from parent groups, the school board and students for food that is delicious, healthful, served quickly — and really, really inexpensive. In the last few years, the school board has banned soda and set standards for salt and fat, among other things. Now the aim is to make it more appealing too.

Garfield, where about 3,000 students eat cafeteria food each day, is one of several places Baida has gone to see how students will react to his new menu.

“We’re changing menus. A Chef’s Signature Series . . . very different packaging, look, taste, smell,” limited-time offerings, said Baida, who wore a white L.A. Unified chef’s jacket with pens and an instant-read thermometer in the pocket on his left sleeve.

He oversees 500,000 meals a day (about 76% of them provided free or at reduced prices) at more than 700 locations. In some schools, more than 3,000 students have to eat in 30 minutes — something no restaurant does, Baida noted.

“I’m here to move a mountain and I need a lot of shovels,” he said.

Elementary school students pay $1 for lunch; secondary students pay $1.50. A lunch, including labor and overhead, costs about $2.66, with much of that coming back to the district in federal reimbursements; L.A. Unified spends about 75 cents on food per meal, some of that for such federal surplus commodities as cheese and beef, said David Binkle, the district’s deputy director of food services. (Food services is required to be self-supporting.)

On a recent Wednesday afternoon the Garfield student volunteers tasted entrees the district expects to start serving this fall: enchiladas and lasagna, as well as bags of chips — popped, not fried. For each item, the students were asked to circle icons for thumbs up or thumbs down.

There were very few of the latter.

“It’s delicious. Real lasagna,” said Daniel Delarosa, an 18-year-old senior at Garfield. He said he would buy it in the cafeteria, where he finds the food now to be “decent, not more than that.”

“It’s better than what we have now,” said Daniel Bolanos, 17. His chief complaints? The pizza is too greasy. The burritos “don’t have enough taste.”

Several officials and activists were also at Garfield, showing off marketing material and nutritional charts and trying to assess perception as much as reality.

What kids think could make the most stalwart cafeteria lady wince.

Consider these lyrics from the teen cult band the Aquabats: “So I got a book of tickets and a schedule and it read / Monday: hot dogs / Tuesday: tacos / Wednesday: hamburgers and chocolate milk / Thursday sloppy joes and burritos in a bag / Friday was pizza day, the best day of the week.”

Worse, students sometimes call school lunch “county food,” meaning food served by juvenile authorities, said Matt Sharp, director of California Food Policy Activists.

But even critics say there’s a noticeable change, with a new team running the food service and a school board ready for change. “We’ve made so much progress since we started this conversation,” said board member Marlene Canter, who has been a leader in efforts to improve what’s served in schools.

“We are trying to change the image” as well as the food, starting with high schools, where only 38% of students eat school lunch, Binkle said.

One big complaint is that the lunch lines are so long that students don’t have time even to get food, let alone eat it. To address that, 64 high school cafeterias are scheduled for remodeling this summer to make the lines more efficient, and 70 more will be renovated in the fall.

But making school food cool will take more than shorter lines.

Baida hopes his Chef’s Signature Series will help. It includes such items as an open-face Chicken Italiano Sandwich with tomatoes. Also ahead are barbecued chicken sliders and roasted-vegetable-and-bean wraps using whole wheat tortillas.

He has other ideas, “3 a.m. chef ideas,” he calls them: classroom room service, using students’ family recipes, dim sum, even a different menu for the faculty.

“I’m not a nutritionist and I don’t want to be. I’m a chef,” he said. “We have to go back to making people love food.”

Baida, 39, who spent more than eight years as the executive chef at USC before coming to L.A. Unified last August, has worked with some of L.A.’s top chefs. He grew up in Philadelphia and Miami, moving to Southern California as a teenager. He went to North Hollywood High and brought lunches made by mom to school. His own children are divided: One likes school food, one won’t eat it.

And he’s looking at students in a new way. They “are my customers, not my students. That’s my point here,” he told a dozen food service managers gathered recently in his test kitchen, upstairs from the enormous kitchen at the district’s Newman Nutrition Center.

He shows them the Chicken Italiano nestled in a clamshell plastic box, black on the bottom, clear on top, like those used at chain coffee bars or delis.

“This is something I would sit down and eat,” Baida said. “It’s got that wow.”

Activist Sharp said many people once thought the choices for school lunch were Brussels sprouts or Jack in the Box. Today, instead of trying to make healthful imitations of fast food, school food authorities are trying to “expose students to an entirely different ethic of eating,” Sharp said.

Baida, he said, has begun “an enormously difficult undertaking.”

Baida seems like a nice guy, as full of enthusiasm as he is lacking in hair when he talks about how honored he is to have his job. But he describes himself as a “Hell’s Kitchen” type, pounding the desk as he mimics his expectations: “Yes, chef. No, chef.”

“What I’m here to do is to take the culinary and the hospitality world and the nutrition world and merge them,” he said. “If I can’t eat it, I can’t serve it. My standards are very high.”

He might need more than high standards. After the Garfield taste test, the students were asked what they eat after school: “Soda and chips.”

mary.macvean@latimes.com

This was on NPR - should make us all think……

Finding the Flexibility to Survive

by Brighton Earley

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91065890

Every Friday night the cashier at the Chevron gas station food mart on
Eagle Rock Boulevard and Avenue 40 offers us a discount on all the
leftover apples and bananas. To ensure the best selection possible, my
mother and I pile into our 20-year-old car and pull up to the food mart
at 5 p.m. on the dot, ready to get our share of slightly overripe
fruits.

Before the times of the Chevron food mart, there were the times of the
calculator. My mother would carefully prop it up in the cart’s child
seat and frown as she entered each price. Since the first days of the
calculator’s appearance, the worry lines on my mother’s face have only
grown deeper. Today, they are a permanent fixture. Read the rest of this entry »

June 13, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Bad Cow Disease

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”

That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe. Read the rest of this entry »

Uncertain Peril

By Claire Hope Cummings

Claire Hope Cummings was an environmental lawyer for 20 years. An environmental journalist, she has also farmed in both California and Vietnam. This essay is an excerpt from her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, 2008) . On a frozen island near the North Pole, a huge hole has been blasted out of the side of an Arctic mountain and a tunnel has been drilled deep into the rock. When the facility under construction here is completed, it will be lined with one-meter-thick concrete, fitted with two high-security blast-proof airlock doors, and built to withstand nuclear war, global warming, terrorism, and the collapse of the earth’s energy supplies. It’s known as the “Doomsday Vault,” and in it will be stored millions of seeds and mankind’s hope for the future of the world’s food supply. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten11-2008jun11,0,865799.column

>From the Los Angeles Times

Attack of the poison tomatoes

The supply chain that ships foods to far-flung consumers is also good at spreading disease.

Tim Rutten
June 11, 2008

Aproper insalata Caprese is one of the jewels of Campania’s incomparable
cuisine.

All that’s required are ripe tomatoes just off the vine, fresh mozzarella di
bufala, basil coaxed to aromatic fullness by the sun’s heat, a sprinkling of
coarse salt, a grind of pepper and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. It’s
a gloriously simple dish that happily reproduces the colors of the Italian
flag and virtually stares up from the plate, whispering “high summer.”

The fact that you now can order some variation of it in February from half
of America’s restaurant menus or supermarket takeout counters goes a long
way toward explaining what’s behind the current national recall of tomatoes
across the United States. Read the rest of this entry »