The Bell Tolls for Thee at Lunch Hour
Cooks Illustrated sent out an email promoting Parents Against Junk Food (its effort to improve school lunches around the country), which is being launched April 1. The site will offer a variety of ways for you to get involved (including contacting your representatives in Congress). But the very next paragraph promotes its sister publication, Cook's Country--which verges on just this side of white trash, albeit tasty--and its recipe for onion rings using ground potato chips. Apparently junk food is OK for dinner, just not school lunches.
Alice Waters, proprietor of Chez Panisse, the restaurant often credited with bringing the emphasis on fresh, local ingredients to the US, last week proposed in the New York Times to improve not just the 1 hour of a school lunch but “engaging them [children] in interactive education that brings them into a new relationship with food.” She writes: “Not only are our children eating this unhealthy food, they're digesting the values that go with it: the idea that food has to be fast, cheap and easy; that abundance is permanent and effortless; that it doesn't matter where food actually comes from. These values are changing us. As a nation, we need to take back responsibility for the health of not just our children, but also our culture.”
She proposes a core curriculum for all students from kindergarten through high school on the study and understanding of food; only through growing, production, and eating will children begin to think critically about what they eat, and begin to shape long-term behavior. Based on her experience with the Edible Schoolyard program, she says “When children grow and prepare good, healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and, what's more, they like this way of learning.” And anyone who has watched children germinate corn kernels on the window sill, plant the sprouts in spring, and anticipate the corn, knows she is onto something.
We know this will not be cheap, but with the costs of treating obesity and the catastrophically rising rate of Type 2 Diabetes and their side effects (blindness, amputation, critical and emergency care), she correctly points out that escalating national healthcare costs will far exceed the cost of raising well-fed, healthy children.
OK, no more words. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to eating, period. Some buddies are coming over for dinner, and I am planning on some food from Ms. Hesser and Cooks Illustrated.
Alice Waters, proprietor of Chez Panisse, the restaurant often credited with bringing the emphasis on fresh, local ingredients to the US, last week proposed in the New York Times to improve not just the 1 hour of a school lunch but “engaging them [children] in interactive education that brings them into a new relationship with food.” She writes: “Not only are our children eating this unhealthy food, they're digesting the values that go with it: the idea that food has to be fast, cheap and easy; that abundance is permanent and effortless; that it doesn't matter where food actually comes from. These values are changing us. As a nation, we need to take back responsibility for the health of not just our children, but also our culture.”
She proposes a core curriculum for all students from kindergarten through high school on the study and understanding of food; only through growing, production, and eating will children begin to think critically about what they eat, and begin to shape long-term behavior. Based on her experience with the Edible Schoolyard program, she says “When children grow and prepare good, healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and, what's more, they like this way of learning.” And anyone who has watched children germinate corn kernels on the window sill, plant the sprouts in spring, and anticipate the corn, knows she is onto something.
We know this will not be cheap, but with the costs of treating obesity and the catastrophically rising rate of Type 2 Diabetes and their side effects (blindness, amputation, critical and emergency care), she correctly points out that escalating national healthcare costs will far exceed the cost of raising well-fed, healthy children.
OK, no more words. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to eating, period. Some buddies are coming over for dinner, and I am planning on some food from Ms. Hesser and Cooks Illustrated.
posted by jaka at 4:30 PM
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