Calling all Spielbergs!

Here’s a chance to have fun, be creative, learn about good food for your school cafeteria and win some money. The Real Food Video Contest (details here) could earn you $1.000 for your school project. Not to mention an all expenses paid trip to the 5th National Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Detroit, Michigan, May 17-19, 2010. Make a video that tells what real food means to you and your community and submit it before March 29th. Then visit the site to vote for the best one and wait for the announcement of the lucky winner on April 13th.

In praise of the rutabaga!

There is a delightful article in today's New York Times singing the praises of a little known vegetable: the rutabaga. Melissa Clark tells of first resisting and then being totally enchanted with this vegetable. She suggests roasting as the best way to cook it - and isn't roasting the best way to cook so many vegetables? Here in Washington we grow rutabagas, so if you haven't tried one lately, first read this and then try them again. You're in for a treat.

HealthierUS School Challenge

The USDA has started a challenge for schools that are trying to offer a healthier environment at school. They are awarding four levels of superior performance based on the promotion of good nutrition and physical activity.
The Food and Nutrition site has information, tools and resources about success stories, grants, fact sheets, FAQs and more.
The online application is available now.

An example from Washington (the other one)

A few hours ago Michelle Obama hosted a White House event to spotlight kids and nutrition. Her speech talked about what to eat and how to eat. She talked about child obesity, the USDA HealthierUS School Challenge - more about that in my next post -, getting exercise and ensuring that kids have healthier and healthier options at school. The Associated Press has some photos of Mrs. Obama participating in the fun and games and they report that she was able to do 142 swivels. Pretty impressive on all counts!

A Proposal to Separate Fast Food and Schools

The New York Times recently featured an article linking the tendency to be overweight with the location of fast food restaurants in a tenth of a mile or one block radius of the schools. 

The study looked at weight rates in teens and pregnant women who lived near such resteraunts and found location to be detremental in both cases. Now Eric Giola, a city councilman from Queens wants to use the California study to ban fast food establishments from opening so close to schools.

"Immediate proximity played a crucial role in obesity, according to the report, the Effect of Fast Food Restaurants on Obesity, by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. If a fast-food restaurant opened a quarter-mile or more from a school, obesity rates were not affected."

Speaking of corporate interests in kids' eating habits ...

Straight A’s, With a Burger as a Prize. Over at the New York Times, Stuart Elliott talks about a Florida arrangement in which McDonald's gives kids free food in exchange for good report cards. They send report cards home in paper sleeves with information and advertising about the McDonald's reward program. It's criticized as just one more way that corporations are advertising to children in order to build life-long "brand loyalty." Interestingly, only one parent had complained at the time the article was written. (They also mention that they had no complaints when Pizza Hut gave away free personal pan pizzas as reward for good grades in an earlier promotion.)

Nutritionists and others warn against using food as rewards, under the argument that obesity is often about emotional eating, or eating in response to the need for comfort or the idea that we've "earned it" and that these responses may be influenced by eating patterns learned in childhood.