Last week an organization of retired military officers called Mission: Readiness published their findings that more than one quarter of Americans age 17-24 are “Too fat to fight.” They pinned the blame on our school food system.

Now being of the left-of-center-pacifist persuasion myself, my initial reaction was “Oh good, a little less cannon fodder.” But looking at this study with an eye toward history, it gives me great hope.

Near the beginning of the 20th century, it was military preparedness that necessitated the federal government’s implementation of physical education requirements in the nation’s schools. One can disagree with the motive there while acknowledging that the end result – active, healthier children – was a good thing. So, hopefully, this study might help push us toward a better school food system as well.

Today one in three children born after 2000 will develop early-onset diabetes before they are old enough to enlist. Among minorities that ratio rises to one in two. Even setting aside military readiness, and regardless of what health reform will or will not do, no society can support a population where one third to one half of it is diabetic.

What Mission: Readiness has demonstrated is that the need for improving our children’s diets spans all ideologies. Libertarians and some conservatives may find my ideas about real food and gathering around the table too touchy-feely-hippie for them, but it’s easy for them to understand implications to our national defense if Johnny can’t bounce out of his bunk at reveille and touch – or even see – his toes.

When he signed the School Lunch Act in 1946, which was in part explicitly “a measure of national security,” President Truman said, “In the long view, no nation is healthier than its children….” It was a simple weak-link argument that no one can deny, hawk or dove.

Since then though our nation’s school lunch program has become little more than a dumping ground for our tax-subsidized, corporate-owned, chemically-processed, fat-and-HFCS-laden surplus food-like substances.

The Child Nutrition Reauthorization now in limbo in the Senate, which is what the retired generals from Mission: Readiness were on Capitol Hill last week to address, does indeed earmark $4.5B for improving school lunches over the next 10 years. Good as that may be, it’s less than a tenth of what is needed. Besides altering the nutritional guidelines to give the district foodservice directors the freedom to use more local, fresh meats and produce, we need to spend – at a minimum – at least a dollar more per meal. That works out to about $5.4B annually.

That’s one-half-of-one-percent the US Military’s projected 2010 budget. So, seeing that we spend as much as the next 14 nations combined on our military, I suggest that we spend only as much as the next 13, fully fund our school nutrition programs, and wait to see if number 14 (Australia) tries to invade us.

via Civil Eats » Blog Archive » Why Johnny Can’t March: School Food Threatens National Security.

Tags: CivilEats, Op-Ed, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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One of the advantages we enjoy here in Iowa is that we get to see our presidential candidates and their families up close and personal during our caucus process.  While I had seen then-Senator Obama give that stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, it was really a speech here in Iowa by his wife Michelle that made me a fan of his.  I figured if a lady this smart and classy married him he must be worth a look.

Many of us foodie-activist types were excited when Barack Obama was elected because we believed that maybe finally something could be accomplished for our agenda of “Good, Clean, and Fair” food for everyone.  Sure enough, that first spring there was the First Lady out there planting an organic garden on the White House grounds.  Say what you will about their former opponents, no one could imagine Cindy McCain doing anything even remotely similar.

So now a year has gone by and Mrs. Obama is launching a childhood obesity initiative the way such things get launched these days, on NBC’s Today Show.  It’s tradition for FLOTUS to have a cause such as this, and these causes are almost always worthwhile: literacy, homelessness, “Just Say ‘NO!’” etc.

Ms. Obama’s initiative is no exception.  The statistics are alarming – 1 in 3 American children born in 2000 or after will develop diabetes before they are old enough to vote.  Among minorities that ratio rises to 1 in 2.  There is no health system that can hope to cope with the implications of that no matter what her husband and Congress manage to accomplish.

Whole post an video clips @ Civileats.org

Tags: Articles, Barack Obama, CivilEats, Health Reform, Michelle Obama, President Obama, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, hunger, school gardens, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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All across the country this past Labor Day, folks gathered for picnics. That’s no surprise, of course. After all, it was a holiday, and the weather was grand across nearly the whole continent. But there was something unique about one group of picnics; 307 of them to be exact, in all 50 states. They were dubbed “Eat-Ins” (modeled on the sit-ins of the ‘60s), and they were a call to action by Slow Food USA

At those picnics, including one right here in Iowa City, more than 20,000 people gathered around tables in parks and farms and school grounds to tell Congress to fix the School Lunch Program. Most of the discussions at these events and in the press afterwards centered on improving the food itself through increased Federal spending and local food initiatives. But there was another topic directly relevant to Labor Day: the call to create green jobs with a “School Lunch Corps.”

via Nationwide “eat-ins” show way to a revived National School Lunch Program | Grist.

Tags: Articles, Events, Grist.org, Health Reform, Iowa, School Lunch, Slow Food, food, food politics, recipe, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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There’s a new food site out there I’ve just started writing for. Called Nourish Network, it has a strong focus on healthy, fresh, tasty food with plenty of eye candy too. Here’s what the site’s publisher, Lia Huber, had to say in the intro to my first piece (she calls me “talented!”).

It seems I’m meant to talk about kids’ lunches right now. This past Tuesday, I did a segment on ABC-TV’s View from the Bay on making healthy lunches fun for kids. But even better than peanut butter banana spirals is the fact that, right now, we have an opportunity to be a part of re-framing the school lunch program in America. Here to tell us all about it and how we can get involved is one of our talented new Contributors, Kurt Michael Friese.

Read the whole post here

Tags: Articles, Nourish Network, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollan recently addressed this problem well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the “Home Economics” of my high school years. No, instead the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) teaches something called “Family and Consumer Science.” There you have it—we are not raising citizens, we are raising consumers. Our children are being taught one way of surviving in this modern, fast-paced world: the way of conspicuous consumption.

via Let’s (re)do school lunch | Grist.

Tags: Articles, Grist.org, School Lunch, Slow Food, conviviality, food, food cost, food politics, food security, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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