Agriculture Society

Obesity. Diabetes. Heart Disease. High Blood Pressure. Auto-immune disorders. Allergies. Food intolerances. Are you familiar with any of these illnesses? Chances are, you know someone who is suffering with one of these problems. Maybe silently. Maybe it’s you!

We hear statistics everyday in the media about these health issues and how they are on the rise for people living in developed countries. It’s now affecting our children, and we need to do something definitive about it. Here are the statistics:

• According to one survey (a report published by The US Department of Health and Human Services), 14% of adolescents in the United States are overweight. In the last 20 years, this number has nearly tripled.
• Among overweight children and teens between the ages of 2 and 19, 36.7% state that they have been told by a health care practitioner that they were overweight (for children between the ages of 2 and 5, this percentage was 17.4%)
• Children are now not expected to outlive their parents. This should be unacceptable!

These problems are occurring for a variety of reasons – because our food is no longer food, and corporate interests and profit are taking precedent over human health like never before in recorded history. It is unfortunate that issues like these don’t seem to get the airtime and promotion they deserve until someone famous becomes an activist. Here is the Public Service Announcement which calls for action from citizens for the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act (this is an effort that is in conjunction with the film Food, Inc.)

I’m here to urge everyone to help save our children’s lives – children (and adults, for that matter) all across America eat toxic, unhealthy foods right in their own school lunch rooms. It’s time we took a stand, as lawmakers, taxpayers, parents, grandparents, politicians, lobbyists, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, neighbors, and citizens to demand that our children are served healthy food to give them a fighting chance at growth, development, academics, and health. Real food should not be a luxury item that people can’t afford.

Our constitution states:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

When we talk about establishing justice and promoting the general welfare, does allowing the manufacturing, selling, and feeding of toxic food to our children and citizens seem like a breach of these tenets? It should!

We are not showing patriotism, ethics,  integrity,  morals, nor justice when we allow something as broken and trampled upon as our health care and food systems to remain in the condition they are in. It is time to stop letting the authorities that be – the USDA, the FDA , government lobbyists, special interest groups, and bloated corporations controlling most of our food supply dictate these critical factors of everyday life and well-being – our health and our food.

As part of the film Food, Inc., this petition is available on the web site to ask Congress to change the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to make it mandatory that real food be available in the school lunch environment to nourish our children. Place your name on it and let your voice be heard.

It’s time for us to insist our children to be served healthy food, and to demand that schools stop serving hormone-filled milk from factory farms, industrially-produced meat, starchy, trans-fat containing, refined carbohydrates that are devoid of nutrients and that cause toxin build up, weight gain, and poor health. Sign the petition to give our children the chance and future they deserve. Please don’t delay in being an activist in one of the most important causes you could ever be involved in.

What else can you do?

• Buy local foods from organic, sustainable farms where you know how your food is produced.
• Boycott processed foods of all kinds – you’ll save money in your bank account now and on health care costs later on down the road.
• Grow your own food chemical and toxin free.
• Become an activist and let your voice be heard – tell others, maintain a blog, sign petitions, attend rallies in your community, see the film Food, Inc. and other important films about food, have discussions to help others who are less informed, and join committees and groups where making safe food a priority is the theme

For more information on school lunch initiatives:

Hormones in the Milk – Do You Know What Your Kids Are Drinking?

Changing the Face of School Lunches – There’s Still a Lot of Work to Do

You Decide: Is Junk Food GOOD for Children?

Disturbed About What Your Kids are Eating in School?

Meals for Children – Restaurants and School Lunches are Lacking in Nutrition

Also check out these important resources:

Visit Chef Ann Cooper, Renegade Lunch Lady and a revolutinary who is making changes all over the nation

Better School Food – Dr. Susan Rubin

Almost one year after the beginning of our quest to improve school lunches and children’s health, we are ramping up for our meeting with the school district in our city (Boise, Idaho on June 17th, 2009). We want to bring the school lunch initiative to the forefront of our citizens’ consciousness, both locally and to the wider communities. This initiative seeks to do what other communities have already brought to their districts – notably led by pioneers in this movement such as Chef Ann Cooper, Alice Waters, Amy Kalafa, and Dr. Susan Rubin of Better School Food.

Last year, we brought the film ‘Two Angry Moms‘ to our city in the hopes of delivering an important message to parents, food growers, school district employees, and the community at large – the foods we are serving to children in the school environment and the attitudes we foster about nutrition are contributing to the following health disorders – obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, decreased test scores, learning issues, depression, and cardiovascular disease. We still have a long way to go to implement our desired program goals – but we’re on our way to showing our district and our city just how important a change like this will be and what it will mean to our children’s future.

This Huffington Post article from 2008 by Amy Kalafa discusses some of the many reasons why changes need to be made – the massive meat recall of February 2008 and Mad Cow Disease, farming practices which focus on profit not health, contamination in the food supply, and agencies that fail to take accountability for their production practices.

To make a difference in your community, start by talking to fellow parents, food growers, health experts who understand the critical importance of this issue, and school board officials. Generate an interest to bring Two Angry Moms to your community and encourage a panel of speakers involved and interested in food issues to attend. Get in communication with members of the local legislature – representatives and senate – and partner with them to create legislation which will make it mandatory that children are eating healthy food in school.

For another informative article about school lunches and why they are unhealthy to consume,  read Meals for Children – Restaurants and School Lunches are Lacking in Nutrition. Also, check out our Do You Feed Your Kids Junk Food Archive for an important bulletin about hormones in milk and another school lunch article.

What’s for lunch? We ask this question every day, and it becomes challenging at each and every meal to come up with something nutritious and interesting to eat. Think about what it must be like to serve meals to kids every day of the week and how difficult to come up with foods that help young bodies grow and appeal to their typical finicky tastes. Unfortunately, many children are finicky eaters simply because they are not exposed to a wide variety of nutritious foods. Instead, they are offered the same things over and over again; and much of the choices for children’s meals in schools and restaurants alike is processed, chemically-loaded, nutritionally devoid items. The only saving grace with restaurants is (hopefully) they are used more few-and-far between as people generally don’t eat out each day. School lunches present a much bigger problem since many children eat them daily or several times a week in their schedule of meals.

I’ve noticed that many parents and others assume children won’t eat vegetables. When children are not expected to eat healthy foods, they seldom ask for them and/or refuse to eat them if they are offered. A good example is restaurant menus. If you go into an eating establishment, you can see that mostly children’s menus are separate from everyone else’s, and the choices are less than nutritious: hot dogs/corn dogs, hamburgers and french fries, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti noodles with marinara sauce are common selections. Children are given a variety of deep-fried and processed foods with little to no vegetables or whole grains. The only whole food I’ve consistently seen on menus is the occasional fruit or carrots, but kids are already getting so much sugar in the main course items, it’s just more of the same with a little fiber. Any type of bread or bread food served is often the processed, white variety and no real whole grains. Whole grains are those that are not ground up and are actually “whole”, something you will rarely see in most stores or restaurants that sell bread and bread products.

The school lunch program available in public schools is another example of poor choices offered to children. Kids can only eat what is available, and generally won’t make good choices for themselves if other more appealing items are repeatedly served in the lunch line. Here is a sample lunch menu for one school week:

Monday – Corn dog or macaroni and cheese, breakfast pocket, build a salad, fruit

Tuesday – Pepperoni cheese bread or teriyaki chicken and rice or half bagel and yogurt, fortune cookie, build a salad, fruit, vegetable blend

Wednesday – Soft shell taco or fruit and yogurt plate or deli turkey sandwich, snickerdoodle, tortilla chips, lettuce, tomato, cheese, fruit

Thursday - Toasty cheese sandwich or Chef Boyardee Ravioli or deli ham and cheese sandwich, vegetable barley soup, fruit, variety crackers

Friday - New York Style Pretzel or burrito or baked potato, cheese sauce, chili beans, vegetable toss, fruit, flour tortilla

At a glance, many of these meals may seem fine. These do contain some vegetables and fruit. Aside from those few whole foods, the rest of the selections are processed and unnatural as can be. Foods like Chef Boyardee Raviolis are one of the most processed products you can find, and are enriched with synthetic vitamins and minerals to make up for their gross deficiency in nutrient content. The meat and dairy selections (which are pasteurized) are undoubtedly from factory farms, and there is nothing good to say about the quality of factory-farmed meats and dairy products which are laden with chemicals, steroids, antibiotics, hormones – without even mentioning the types of feed given to the animals who are slaughtered for food. Grain products (corn on corn dogs, bread on which pepperoni cheese sits, crackers, pretzels, tortillas, bagels, etc.) are also highly processed and enriched to make up for lack of nutrition. It is virtually impossible to take a food that is nutritionally empty and “enrich” it with vitamins and minerals it otherwise wouldn’t contain, and then label it as “healthy”. School lunches contain exorbitantly high amount of carbohydrates, so adding desserts is completely unnecessary.

Here are the ingredients for breaded popcorn chicken, a popular meal item served on  school lunch menus across the country:

Chicken Breast with Rib Meat CONTAINING: Up to 20% of a Solution of Water, Salt and Sodium

Phosphates.

BREADED WITH: Bleached Wheat Flour, Yellow Corn flour, Salt, Spices, Leavening

(Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate),

Nonfat Dry Milk, Dried Whey, Soy Flour, Dried Whole Eggs, Sodium Alginate, Partially Hydrogenated

Soybean Oil, Dextrose, Garlic Powder, Mono and Diglycerides and Dried Yeast.

BATTERED WITH: Water, Wheat Flour, Yellow Corn Flour, Dried Whey, Dextrose, Spices, Salt, Leavening (Sodium

Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate), Sodium Alginate, Soy Flour, Oleoresin Paprika, Nonfat Dry

Milk, Dried Whole Eggs. Breading set in vegetable oil.

ALLERGENS: EGG, MILK, SOY, WHEAT

Do you really want your children eating this garbage?

One of the biggest problems with sources of food for school lunches is that the supplies for feeding children come from government subsidies which purchase mostly lowest quality foods from wherever they can be found. Foods are packaged and shipped all over the country, and little to no consideration is given to natural, organic, or local selections for children’s meals. The recent massive meat recall in February of this year, 2008, should be a wake-up call to parents and other consumers alike who believe this type of food is safe to consume. I hear a lot of rhetoric about how to reform school lunches, and most call for changes falls under one of the following:

• To reduce fats and calories – low and non fat foods like reduced fat dairy and meats are not going to help children’s health because they are not whole foods and will only contribute to the rise in health issues our nation is currently experiencing such as obesity and Diabetes. Consumption of pasteurized and low or non-fat dairy causes malabsorption of nutrients and actually leeches calcium from the bones. Proteins and fats are denatured and rendered toxic for the human body. For more information, see Why The Consumption of Milk is Harmful to Your Health on this site.

• To offer non-dairy solutions (I can only assume they mean soy, rice, or almond products which are no better than their chemical-filled counterparts because they are processed, and not whole foods)

• Because everyone just wants to lie down and accept that “children won’t eat vegetables”, I have seen proposals that school lunches start to include more fruit, but don’t bother so much with vegetables. This is not a solution, it is just adding to the problem that children are not getting the nutrients in vegetables they desperately need, many of which cannot be provided in just fruits.

• To replace menu items like hamburgers, pizza, and hot dogs with so-called “healthier alternatives” such as grilled cheese sandwiches (with processed, enriched bread), peanut butter and jam on “whole grain” breads (which couldn’t be farther from whole grain), and bagels with low-fat cream cheese. These foods are just as processed and empty of nutrients as the ones that have been on school lunch menus for 50 or more years. And they include NO vegetables. Come on people, wake up! Generally speaking these items contain not more than a little protein that can actually be absorbed, processed carbohydrates, and chemicals.

Why should our children be eating differently? Overwhelming amounts of research tell us that nutrition is the foundation of our children’s health, including brain function and cognitive abilities. Children need calories, protein, good carbohydrates, and fats — wholesome, unprocessed fats with which to perform in school and be physically active. But what they are getting in school lunches, and a great deal of other eating environments, is processed foods. How can a child be expected to behave and be successful in school when the food he or she eats is not wholesome or nutritious? Children who are ill-mannered, hyperactive, depressed, moody, or lethargic could well benefit from changes in diet.

What’s that, you say…we’d have to raise taxes substantially to accommodate this? Perhaps, perhaps not. It would really depend on how the program was set up. Local foods should cost less than those shipped all over the country. But if taxes were raised, I cannot think of a better cause than investing in the health of the people who will be running the world someday. This is an extreme problem contributing to the downfall of our health, and an extreme problem requires extreme action. A return to truly healthy, slow foods is at the epicenter of answers to our health crisis.

What could be better than reducing the amount spent on pharmaceuticals, hospital fees, and doctor bills in this country – especially by starting at the ground level which is in our schools where the children are? Think of the savings in health and insurance costs alone due to a regularly consumed, healthy lunch. It may seem insignificant, but the effect would actually be enormous given the amount of children who eat school lunches and the frequency of which these meals are served.

Compare the first school lunch menu in this article to the one shown above with local, organic, and chemical-free alternatives. When you live a healthier lifestyle, you are not burdening health care and insurance systems as heavily, and therefore are not contributing to those rising costs. It is also very important to place children in an environment where they are offered and educated about real choices in health and healthy food. If everyone made the effort, we could institute healthier lunches for our children, a sound investment for the future.