Failure to Cultivate: A Response to Caitlin Flanagan on School Gardens
[Kurt Michael Friese, the chef and owner of the Iowa City restaurant Devotay, is the founder of Slow Food Iowa City and serves on the Slow Food USA National Board of Directors. He joins us here for a guest post] In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan has written a ...
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January 12, 2010
Obama Brings Up a New Side of School Lunch: Student Taste
President Obama has been talking about school lunch a lot lately, but last week he touched on a new side of the issue. In response to a question about healthy eating at a forum on health care, Obama brought up what I see as one of the biggest obstacles to ...
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August 24, 2009
Michelle Obama: School Lunch Should be a Lesson
Legislators and USDA officials are slowly starting to talk about school meals as a health initiative. They see school meals as an opportunity to ensure that students are getting the proper nutrients in the proper amounts — at least for one meal of the day — and they say an ...
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May 30, 2009
Counting Calories in the Cafeteria
When it comes to the bottom line, selling junk food is good for school cafeterias. Fries and chips not only have a high profit margin, but they also sell by the thousands. So how do you encourage healthy eating habits without giving up your best sources of revenue? North Carolina's ...
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May 30, 2009
In the Classroom, Madison Students Get a Taste of Local Veggies
By Shannon Henry — There is something truly powerful about seeing a kindergartner happily snacking on a carrot stick that until recently was growing in a local farmer’s garden. These past three weeks, my daughter’s K-2 school, Franklin Elementary, in Madison, WI, has been running a pilot classroom snack program with Wisconsin ...
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May 13, 2009
Country Watch: Japan
By Deborah Lehmann — This is the first post in a series that will examine school meals across the globe. We'll start off with Japan, where school lunch is considered an important part of public education. Japanese schoolchildren eat lunch in the classroom, and students take turns serving the meal and cleaning ...
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April 23, 2009
Putting the School in School Lunch
By Deborah Lehmann — Here's a bit of history about school meals: before the National School Lunch Program received permanent funding in 1946, advocates tried to move the initiative from the USDA to the Department of Education. In a Senate hearing in 1944, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee argued that the USDA's ...
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April 18, 2009
Study Sessions and Sausage Biscuits
By Deborah Lehmann — Georgia schools have a new way to get students to study for the state graduation exam: free pizza, soda and Chick-fil-A sausage biscuits. According to this article in the Florida Times Union, administrators in a number of high schools say the treats are both an incentive to ...
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April 6, 2009
History Handouts, Courtesy of the Local Pizzeria
By Deborah Lehmann — Is all that thinking making you hungry? In an effort to bring money into his cash-strapped school, a teacher in Idaho is running pizza ads on all his tests, worksheets and handouts. Molto Caldo Pizzeria has given economics and history teacher Jeb Harrison 10,000 sheets of paper ...
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March 28, 2009
A White House Vegetable Garden!
By Deborah Lehmann — Excellent news from the White House front lawn! The New York Times reports that Michelle Obama will break ground tomorrow on the White House's first vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt. The primary goal of the organic garden, which will grow 55 varieties of vegetables, is to educate children about delicious, ...
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March 19, 2009
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