Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

Ann Cooper: Reinventing the school lunch

A Variety of Interesting Tidbits!

Since my last post, I have been finding a variety of news articles and websites that are relevant (and interesting!) to my project. I'll give a brief description of each and then post the link so that you can choose which ones interest you as well!

Fooducate- Eat a Bit Better

Fooducate is a fascinating website. I spent at least three hours going from article to article, reading about Mountain Dew, M&M's, food dyes, pink fluff that is apparently chicken (?!), summer diets, food sold at pharmacies, and so much more. This first article I found was about children's food, and it posed the question 'do children really kids food?' which was particularly interesting to me, especially after researching school lunches. (Click on the link to read the article.) 

Let's Move!

Sarah Palin comments on Michelle Obama's childhood obesity prevention campaign.

Less Active at Work, Americans Have Packed on Pounds

A New York Times article about how the American workplace is contributing to the obesity epidemic. 

Under an Arizona Plan, Smokers and Obese Would Pay Fee for Medicaid

Another New York Times article and discussion about Arizona's plan to finance its Medicaid program by charging patients who are either obese or who smoke. Really interesting, but there's one thing I don't understand... If people are using Medicaid, that probably means that they aren't too well-off in the first place. So if these obese people are buying cheap foods (which ultimately contribute to their obesity), is making them pay more money a solution?

Goodbye Food Pyramid, Hello Dinner Plate

One more New York Times article... A (hopefully) new and improved food pyramid? Looks more efficient to me!

School Lunch

 

After reading about fast food, I began to look into the whole 'school lunch dilemma'. It's interesting to read about the problems and proposed solutions because people have such strong feelings toward different sides. I've been reading recent newspaper articles and other people's blogs about the school lunch system, and it has definitely shown me how diverse this topic is. For the most part, the main idea is that our schools need to provide healthier meals to help solve the childhood obesity problems we are faced with. However, there seem to be multiple methods being put into action to improve the lunch programs in the United States.


An article in Yahoo News discussed the methods of a school in Chicago: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110411/us_yblog_thelookout/chicago-school-bans-homemade-lunches-the-latest-in-national-food-fight

At Chicago's Little Village Academy, homemade lunches are actually being banned. Unless you have a special dietary need (which I think a lot of people will suddenly mysteriously develop...), you are only allowed to eat school lunch. This has created a huge uproar for a variety of reasons: (1) families feel they can provide better food for their children, (2) eating the school lunch can cost more than families can afford to pay, and (3) the school lunches are still not healthy!

Chicago School Lunch

The article included a link to a Chicago teacher's blog that had been started to protest the school's lunches: Fed Up With Lunch- The School Lunch Project. (http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/) She ate school lunches EVERY day for a full year, and kept a blog going the entire time. The descriptions and pictures she posts are great! Scary of course, but very insightful. I highly recommend checking out her blog so you can see for yourself. I've never been at a school where those kinds of lunches were served (thankfully), so it really made this school lunch problem clear to me.

At the beginning of the year, another article was published: http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/food/diet-nutrition/2011-01-12-schoollunch13_ST_N.htm

This article is also worth checking out because it shows the new rules the USDA wants to put on school lunch programs. And again, all these changes are attempts to fix the childhood obesity problems.

Although I think that school lunches need some major improvements, I couldn't help wondering how some of the rules would be enforced. For example, in the Yahoo News article about banning homemade lunches, it mentions that a school in Arizona allows homemade lunches- but only if nothing in them contains white flour, refined sugar, or other "processed foods". I just don't understand how that kind of rule can be regulated... Sure, it would be great if everyone brought lunches that followed those rules, but how realistic is that? Going back to one of my previous posts, I think the solution is to have a closer relationship with your food. If kids could be a part of making their food, growing their food, or even purchasing their food, much more awareness would be brought into the school lunch scene.

NY Times- Softs Drinks and Food Stamps

Here's an article that was recently published in the New York Times. It's about food stamps and what people are allowed to buy with them. There's been talk of trying to make it so people can't use their food stamps to buy soda and other sugary beverages- super interesting!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/us/politics/30food.html?ref=health

And here's something else interesting and worth checking out... A video from Michelle Obama's website, www.letsmove.gov

Fast Food

I've been reading about fast food this week, and it has made me think about the whole concept of fast food from a variety of different views. When I think of fast food, usually the first thing that comes to mind is the health issues surrounding the food items they serve. However, as I thought about it in more depth, I realized that there are many other obvious issues about eating fast food (and the fast food companies themselves). 

According to The World is Fat, more than half the money Americans spend on food goes toward food that is not eaten at home. I was thinking about how that type of "on-the-go" lifestyle could affect one's life and family. I grew up without the typical fast food (like McDonald's, Burger King, etc...), and most of my meals were at home. My mom and I (it was just the two of us) would get food to go at a restaurant in town if we didn't feel like cooking that night, but for the most part we prepared our own meals and ate at home. Even my school's hot lunch program was all made as a home-cooked meal, and it was prepared by students. I think there is something particularly special about being involved in making your own food, even if it's not on a regular basis... A little is always better! 

As a family especially, I find it very important to spend quality time cooking and eating together. It seems like people's schedules just keep getting busier, and it's hard to find time when everyone is together. Think about how much more relaxing and genuine it is to sit down to a meal at home in comparison to picking up some food from a drive-through and eating it on the go? Plus, if all the kids grow up eating fast food, that is just going to create a cycle of fast-food eaters. By watching and helping their parents cook, a child learns the basics of cooking as well, but if they aren't exposed to that, then they won't have the skills to pass on to their kids (and the cycle will go on...). 

These reasons are on top of the health concerns as well. Anything homemade is going to be much healthier and nutritious than fast food! In addition to the health concerns, the lack of family time, and not being involved in making your own food, a few more issues surfaced as I was reading:

• Where does the food at fast food restaurants come from? You hear all these horror stories of factory farms, people finding feathers and bones in their food, and getting food poisoning... How much of that is true? How is the meat really being processed? What are the living conditions of the animals before they are slaughtered, and how does that affect the quality of the food? 
• How are the workers paid and treated? What are the working conditions like?
• How do fast food restaurants affect the towns that they are in? Are they located near schools and neighborhoods where kids would have easy access to them?
• What impact do they have on the environment? (Factory farms, transportation of food, pesticides, mass production.

The Evolution of our Diets

I've been reading a great book titled The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products that are Fattening the Human Race by Barry Popkin. Popkin is a Professor of Global Nutrition at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the director of the UNC Interdisciplinary Obesity Center. The World is Fat is a very informative book that I have found very useful while trying to understand the implications that surround the world's obesity problems. Popkin gives a brief background explanation about how our diets have evolved, starting thousands of years ago, and I think he brings up many interesting points. 

People have been tracing the patterns in the human diet back thousands of years to the Upper Paleolithic period (which began about forty thousand years ago) when stone tools were made and used. Paleolithic humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, and the average diet consisted of seeds, nuts, roots, fish, and aquatic mammals. With a diet that relies heavily on seeds, nuts, and roots, the body ends up getting large amounts of fiber to aid in digestion. The food available back then depended entirely on the seasons, so the Paleolithic humans ended up with a varied diet. Among the people who lived long enough to grow old, chronic diseases (such as diabetes, obesity, were not a known or relevant problem. 

The agricultural developments and advancements that took place around 10,000 to 11,000 BC changed people's eating habits drastically. People were able to base their diets around a few specific crops, sometimes fewer, and farming created the ability to have a surplus of foods. Barley, wheat, corn, rice and millet became the chief crops throughout the world. 

I think the development of farming is an event that needs to be examined from many aspects when studying world hunger and obesity. From one aspect, I think our newer farming techniques could be somewhat responsible for our world food problems for a couple different reasons. Firstly, the methods of farming we use now make us very disconnected from our food. For the most part, no one really knows what goes on to get their food to the store so they can purchase it. Secondly, we farm on such a large scale that machinery has taken over manual labor. If we all had to do our own farming, I'd imagine that we would all be getting a lot more physical exercise on a daily basis! And thirdly, enough food is produced to feed the entire world, yet a good portion of the world's population goes unfed.

All of these aspects and problems surrounding the evolution of the human diet are important to consider when thinking about the world's malnourished and obese population. I think Popkin brings up a lot of other interesting things as well, so if you'd like to read more I highly recommend the book, or you can check out his website: www.theworldisfat.com