Great Article by Jill Richardson: Are School Lunches Setting Kids Up for Obesity and Poor Nutrition?

General | Friday February 26 2010 11:32 am | Comments (1) Tags: ,

Reposted with Permission By Jill Richardson:

Are School Lunches Setting Kids Up for Obesity and Poor Nutrition?

The Obamas are taking on childhood obesity by tackling problems with the National School Lunch Program. But will their fixes be enough?
From Alternet.org

February 25, 2010 |

Photo Credit: Beau Wade

Michelle Obama launched her “Let’s Move” campaign to fight obesity with a flood of media attention and a Presidential Memorandum, signed by her husband, establishing a new Task Force on Childhood Obesity. But how does the rhetoric of the Let’s Move campaign stack up against what President Obama’s administration is actually doing to address childhood obesity? While many of the president’s priorities have lost steam in Congress, tackling childhood obesity is thankfully not one of them. But are the administration’s efforts on the right track?

While the First Lady has been a champion for healthy, sustainable food since the creation of her historic garden in her first days in the White House, the title of her campaign, Let’s Move, rings of food industry influence. (more…)

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Jill Richardson on my visit to San Diego:

General | Friday February 19 2010 7:26 pm | Comments (1) Tags: , ,
Reposted with Permission:

An Ann Cooper School Lunch Makeover

by: Jill Richardson

http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3277/an-ann-cooper-school-lunch-makeover

Thu Feb 18, 2010 at 23:33:59 PM PST

Whole Foods held a competition, promising the winner a school lunch makeover by famed “Renegade Lunch Lady” Ann Cooper. As luck would have it, the winner was Albert Einstein Academies, here in San Diego. And the store putting on the Ann Cooper events and working with the school was the very same Whole Foods where I used to work! The school lunch makeover with Chef Ann is a two-day event and today was day one.Part of today’s activities focused on bringing together local farmers with the San Diego school lunch staff and talking about how they could work together to bring local produce into the schools. Chef Ann kicked off the meeting with an absolutely brilliant set of props:

What you have here is a pretty standard American school lunch. Chicken nuggets (which serve as the grain and the meat), French fries (the vegetable), and some fruit cocktail (the fruit… and the high fructose corn syrup). Plus a carton of chocolate milk. Pathetic. We make fun of Reagan for making ketchup a vegetable, but calling French fries a vegetable ain’t much better. (more…)

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