Tag Archives: food and ag

This Is What a Farmer Looks Like

by Abby3598bb Posted on August 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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During the 2013 Super Bowl, Marjorie Gayle Alaniz was captivated by a commercial for Dodge Ram trucks that featured portraits of American farmers. She couldn’t help but notice, however, that among the many farmers shown, there were only a handful of women. Alaniz, who comes from a family of Iowa farmers, was disappointed. “I wondered, how has this happened, that images of farms don’t include women, when practically every farm has a woman working on it?” Indeed, according to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, 46 percent of American farm operators are women.

Shortly after her Super Bowl revelation, Alaniz quit her job at a crop insurance company and started documenting women farmers in Central Iowa. The result is FarmHer, an online collection of photographs of some 40 lady farmers and counting. “The feedback has been fabulous,” says Alaniz. “It’s usually coming from women who grew up around agriculture or are currently involved in ag. They say, ‘Thank you for showing the rest of the world that we are out here doing this, too.'”

Kim Waltman, along with her family and about 20 neighbors, drives a herd of her beef cattle from the pasture to a holding area for vaccination and branding.

Angelique Hakazimona, who farmed in her native Rwanda before coming to Iowa as a refugee, digs sweet potatoes on the certified organic farm where she works.

Kate Edwards, who farms veggies on a few acres to feed 150 families through her CSA program, harvests produce during the last light of a long summer day.

Inga Witscher pushes a wayward cow back into the barn on the organic dairy farm that she runs with her husband.

Kellie Gregorich drives her John Deere tractor, which has been handed down through generations on her family’s cattle and row crop farm.

Carolyn Scherf holds a heritage-breed turkey she raised on a farm in rural Iowa.

Danelle Myer, the sole owner and operator of her farm, carries a box full of freshly washed produce from the field to the nearby barn, where she will sort and package it in preparation for the farmers market.

Jill Beebout checks on her alpacas. With her partner, Beebout grows produce and raises bees for honey, chickens for eggs, and alpacas for fiber.

FarmHer photographer Marjorie Gayle Alaniz

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This Is What a Farmer Looks Like

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5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

by ArielO42brir Posted on August 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Welcome to the worst breakfast-related crisis since Lord of the Rings: There might be an impending Nutella shortage. And there’s a good chance the culprit is climate change.

The price of hazelnuts, a main ingredient in the delicious chocolate spread, is up 60 percent after unseasonable ice storms devastated hazel tree farms in Turkey’s Black Sea coastal region this year. And colder winters and heavier precipitation are exactly what the EU’s Centre for Climate Adaptation says the Black Sea coast should expect as climate change advances. Though Nutella’s manufacturer hasn’t raised its prices yet, it’s facing increasing strain as palm oil and cocoa get more expensive, too.

It would be bad enough if Nutella were the only food that melting ice caps and changing weather patterns are threatening to rob from the breakfast table. But no—the list of climate change’s culinary casualties goes on. Here are some other ways it’s making the most important meal of the day a little less satisfying:

  1. Rising cereal prices. Kix might be kid-tested and mother-approved, but have fun buying them in 2030, when their cost could be as much as 24 percent higher due to drought-stricken grain crops, according to an Oxfam International report. (And that doesn’t even account for inflation.) Lovers of Frosted Flakes and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes should also start stockpiling now—Oxfam predicts their respective prices will rise by 20 and 30 percent by 2030.
  2. A global bacon shortage. The aporkalypse is nigh. Even if you’re on a no-carb diet, shrinking grain supplies are bad news. Pricier corn and soybeans equals pricier pig feed, and pricier pig feed equals smaller pig herds. In 2012, Britain’s National Pig Association announced that a pork and bacon shortage “is now unavoidable.”
  3. Bland-but-costly coffee. There’s an epic drought in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee exporter. As a result, one commodities trading firm says caffeine addicts will consume 5 million more bags of beans than coffee growers can produce in the 2014-2015 season, and the price of coffee futures has already doubled to $2 a pound. To make matters worse, beans grown at higher temperatures don’t develop the blend of aromatic compounds that give coffee its distinctive flavor.
  4. Waffle woes. The nation had to collectively leggo its Eggos in November 2009, when record flooding in Atlanta stopped waffle production at the local Kellogg plant. Sure, this has happened once so far, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “projected sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and associated storm surge may lead to further erosion, flooding, and property damage in the Southeast.”

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5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

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The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

by BlondelMcBurney Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin does a bit of interesting gastronomic sleuthing today using a New York Times tool that counts the number of mentions of a word in the archives of the Times. The question is, how fast do new food trends go mainstream? Take, for example, fried calamari:

Now, of course, every strip-mall pizza place and suburban Applebee’s serves fried calamari. But not all that long ago it was an exotic food. The term “fried calamari” did not appear in the pages of The New York Times until 1975, according to our nifty Times Chronicle tool, and didn’t show up frequently until the 1980s. Lest you think it is only a change in vocabulary, the term “fried squid” made only a couple of scattered appearances before that time.

Fried calamari made a voyage that dozens of foods have made over the years: They start out being served in forward-thinking, innovative restaurants in New York and other capitals of gastronomy. Over time, they become more and more mainstream….In the last decade alone, the list includes tuna tartare, braised short ribs, beet salad and pretty much any dish involving pork belly, brussels sprouts or kale. In an earlier era, the list might include sun-dried tomatoes, pesto and hummus.

Fascinating! But readers with long memories will recall that I was surprised at how recently tacos became mainstream. In 1952 they were apparently uncommon enough that the Times had to explain to its readers what a taco was. So how about if we use this nifty new search tool to get some hard data on taco references? Here it is:

Sure enough, there are virtually no mentions of tacos in the 40s and 50s. There’s a blip here and there, but they don’t really get commonly mentioned until the 70s.

But that’s not what’s interesting. Back in 1877, a full 3 percent of all Times articles mentioned tacos! In fact, tacomania was a feature of the Times during all of the 1870s and 1880s, before suddenly falling off a cliff in 1890. What’s up with that? Why did tacos suddenly become verboten in 1890? Did a new editor take over who hated tacos? And what’s the deal with the blip from about 1917 to 1922? Did World War I produce a sudden explosion of interest in tacos?

This is very weird. Does anyone have a clue what’s going on here?

UPDATE: On Twitter, Christopher Ingraham suggests that this is an artifact of bad text recognition of ancient microfilm. I don’t have access to the full version of Times Chronicle, but a look at some of the summaries of articles that allegedly mention tacos makes this seem like a pretty good guess. It’s quite possible that there are no genuine mentions of tacos until the 40s or 50s.

This is a sadly boring explanation, but it seems pretty likely to be right. However, I’m still curious about the sudden dropoff in 1890 (did archive copies suddenly improve? did the Times start using a different font?) and the blip after World War I.

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The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

by AllisonL87 Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce “an exciting video series” on the “topics of food, food chains and sustainability.”

Since then, I’ve learned that Condé Nast’s Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate.

Marion Nestle, author of the classic book Food Politics and a professor at New York University, told me she was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Nestle almost accepted, because at first she didn’t know Monsanto was involved—the initial email she received only referred to the company in attachments that she didn’t open, she said.

“It wasn’t until we were at the end of the discussion about how much time I would allow (they wanted a full day) that they mentioned the honorarium,” she wrote in an email. “I was so shocked at the amount that I had sense enough to ask who was paying for it. Monsanto. End of discussion.”

James McWillams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly and a pundit on food issues whose work appears in The Atlantic and other publications, got offered even more. “They were not evasive or misleading” about Monsanto’s involvement, he told me, “just not immediately forthcoming … within a question or two it was clear that this was a PR project.”

He wouldn’t tell me on the record how much they dangled, but described it as “more money than I’ve ever been paid to talk” and “considerably north” of Nestle’s offer. He declined.

Apparently, the infamous gender gap in pay lives on, even in the market for corporate flackery. I would have thought that snagging Nestle, a long-time industry critic, would be worth much more than bagging McWilliams, who has written favorably about GMOs. Nestle, who is quoted frequently in major-media articles on food topics, also arguably has a considerably higher public profile than does McWilliams.

Then there’s Anna Lappé, author of the book Diet for a Hot Planet and prominent critic of the agrichemical industry. She forwarded me an Aug. 4 email a representative of her Small Planet Foundation received from Jillian Nichols, identified of as “Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, the Condé Nast Media Group.” The email, printed below, invited Lappé to participate in an “exciting video series being promoted on our brand websites i.e: Self, Epicurious, Bon Appetit, GQ & Details) and living on a custom YouTube channel,” centered on “food, food chains and sustainability.” It didn’t mention Monsanto, but added that “compensation will be provided, along with travel two/from the shoot location.” It contained no mention of Monsanto, or specifics on the compensation offer.

Coincidentally, Lappé was already wise to the Monsanto/Condé Nast tie-up. Back in June, she had been forwarded an email about a forthcoming web-based TV show sponsored by Monsanto and produced by Condé Nast, in search of experts to appear as talking heads. Lappé wrote critically about the project in an Al Jazeera America column published Aug. 1, just days before the Condé Nast rep approached her. “I guess they didn’t read the column,” Lappé says.

She replied to Condé Nast’s Nichols on August 7, complaining that “it was misleading to approach me about participating without divulging the series is being funded by Monsanto.” She never heard back.

That same day, Gawker came out with its post, which contained a leaked email from another Condé Nast employee to unnamed charity group, which contains similar language to the one Lappé received. “We are contacting you to see if there might be a person at charity group who could speak to one or two of the episode subject,” the email states. (The email also names documentary film maker Lori Silverbush as someone Condé Nast hoped would be part of the panel. Silverbush’s husband, the famed New York City chef Tom Colicchio, later tweeted, “Lori declined the Monsanto ‘opportunity’ when it was first offered, for reasons you can imagine.”)

The series’ host, the email continued, would be Mo Rocca, a famed comedian and correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Lappé, McWilliams, and Nestle were also informed that Rocca would appear as the show’s host. “When I looked up Mo Rocca, he sounded like fun,” Nestle told me.

Soon after the Gawker item appeared, Rocca wrote a note to the publication denying his involvement. “Yes, I was pitched that project but before I gave my answer a letter went out suggesting I was signed on,” he wrote. “That’s not the case. I’m not involved with it.”

I’ve reached out to Condé Nast for comment, and will update this post if the company gets back.

Here’s the email Lappé’s associate got from Condé Nast:

And here’s Lappé’s response:

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

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The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

by AnthonyArevalo Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last weekend, Toledo’s 400,000 residents were sent scrambling for bottled water because the stuff from the tap had gone toxic—so toxic that city officials warned people against bathing their children or washing their dishes in it. The likely cause: a toxic blue-green algae bloom floated over the city’s municipal water intake in Lake Erie. On Monday morning, the city called off the don’t-drink-the-water warning, claiming that levels of the contaminant in the water had fallen back to safe levels. Is their nightmare over?

I put the question to Jeffrey Reutter, director of the Stone Laboratory at Ohio State University and a researcher who monitors Lake Erie’s annual algae blooms. He said he could “almost guarantee” that the conditions that caused the crisis, i.e., a toxic bloom floating over the intake, would recur this summer. But it’s “pretty unlikely” that toxins will make it into the city’s drinking water. That’s because after the weekend’s fiasco, a whole crew of public agencies, from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to the US Environmental Protection Agency to the city of Toledo, have been scrambling to implement new procedures to keep the toxins out. “I think they have a pretty good plan in place,” he said. But “you can’t guarantee there won’t be a recurrence because you can’t predict “how bad the concentration of the toxins going into the plant from the lake is going to be.”

Reutter added that he “anticipated” that the new system for protecting Toledo’s would be more expensive than the current one. Back in January, the local paper The Blade reported that Toledo “has spent $3 million a year battling algae toxins in recent years, and spent $4 million in 2013.”

And those hard realities highlight a hard fact about our way of farming: It manages to displace the costs of dealing with its messes onto people who don’t directly benefit from it. The ties between Big Ag and Toledo’s rough weekend are easy to tease out. “The Maumee River drains more than four million acres of agricultural land and dumps it into Lake Erie at the Port of Toledo,” The Wall Street Journal reports. More than 80 percent of the Maumeee River watershed is devoted to agriculture, mainly the corn-soy duopoly that carpets the Midwest. Fertilizer and manure runoff from the region’s farms feed blue-green algae blooms in the southwest corner of Lake Erie, from which Toledo draws its water.

And those blooms don’t just tie up oxygen in water and push out aquatic life, creating dead zones. They also often contain the compound that triggered the water scare: microcystin, a toxin that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, fever, and even liver damage. Apparently, a particularly noxious chunk of algae floated over Toledo’s water intake equipment, causing the microcystin spike.

Back in early July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Michigan delivered their forecast for this year’s bloom on the western part of Erie: It would likely be much smaller than it was in 2011, when a record 40,000 metric tons of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) accumulated, but likely much higher than the past decade’s average of 14,000 metric tons—the researchers forecast a 2014 bloom weighing in at 22,000 metric tons. The blooms don’t peak until September, which is why Reutter is convinced that the condition that created last weekend’s troubles will likely re-emerge.

Here’s a chart from the report:

Chart: NOAA and University of Michigan researchers

The bottom half of that chart tracks the flow of phosphorus, the component of fertilizer and manure that triggers freshwater algae blooms, into Lake Erie. Of course, farm runoff isn’t the only way phosphorus makes its way into the lake. Municipal sewage and industrial waste play a role, too. But reforms imposed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 minimized those sources, pulling Lake Erie from the brink of death.

The below chart, taken from a 2013 Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force report, shows the sources of Lake Erie phosphorus over the past several decades. Under pressure from the Clean Water Act, pollution from “point” sources like wastewater treatment plants and factories have been severely curtailed. But the CWA doesn’t regulate “non-point” sources, mainly agriculture. “Harmful algal blooms were common in western Lake Erie between the 1960s and 1980s,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes. “After a lapse of nearly 20 years, blooms have been steadily increasing over the past decade.”

Chart: Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force

Climate change plays a role, too—both because longer, warmer summers give algae more time to build up, and because warmer mean temperatures are also likely driving a steep increase of heavy rains in the Upper Midwest, which force more phosphorus off farm fields and into waterways. Changes in the way farmers apply fertilizers are also apparently making phosphorus more mobile as this 2012 article by Jessica Marshal for the Food and Environment Reporting Network shows.

Of course, western Ohio isn’t the only Corn Belt region encountering toxic algae. “A reported chemical spill on the Des Moines River above Saylorville Lake Wednesday turned out to be a blue-green algae bloom,” the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported in late July. More recently, the Army Corps of Engineers issued an advisory against swimming in two beaches of Lake Red Rock, Iowa’s largest lake, “in response to the presence of a significant blue-green algae bloom which has the potential to impact the health of humans and their pets.”

The web site Toxic Algae News tracks blooms nationwide. Here’s its latest map. Red pins in a state mean harmful algal blooms recur annually in “many” lakes; orange pins mean they recur in one or two lakes.

And phosphorus isn’t the only fertilizer component that feeds algae blooms. Nitrogen does to saltwater what phosphorus does to freshwater—and every year, the Mississippi River carries titanic amounts of nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico, more than half of which comes from corn and soy farms. These flows feed a vast algae bloom that creates an aquatic dead zone that can reach the size of New Jersey—blotting out a wild, abundant source of high-quality seafood, in order to grow crops that mainly go to feed livestock, cars, industrial cooking fats, and sweeteners. This year’s dead zone clocks in at 5,008 square miles—”area roughly the size of Connecticut and is three times larger than the 2015 goal established by a task force specifically created to address the problem,” the Mississippi River Collaborative announced Monday.

Such sacrifices are what economists call “externalities”—the costs of doing business that don’t show up on the bottom lines of farmers, or the companies that buy their goods for animal feed and ethanol, or the firms that sell them the seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers that facilitate mass monocropped plantings.

Residents of places like Toledo are left holding the bag. Many people there are questioning the safety of their water supply and turning to pricey bottled water instead, USA Today reports. And now, the city’s taxpayers (or some public entity) will likely be paying more than ever to keep algae toxins out of the tap water.

Originally posted here – 

The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the Anti-GMO Crowd, Round 2

by UJMCharles Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, we (and many others) posted a viral video (embedded below), in which Cosmos star Neil deGrasse Tyson is shown sounding off about genetically modified organisms. Tyson tells GMO critics to “chill out” because, as he explains, humans have been changing the genetics of the organisms that we consume for food (through artificial selection) for millennia.

Apparently Tyson received a lot of negative response to this video—though it also drew much applause—because now he has taken to Facebook with a quite long and often witty post explaining his views on the subject in a more “nuanced” way. The post is still pretty pro-GMO, in the end. But it certainly has many more shades of gray. As Tyson notes, the original video was very short, just over two minutes, and

had I given a full talk on this subject, or if GMOs were the subject of a sit-down interview, then I would have raised many nuanced points, regarding labeling, patenting, agribusiness, monopolies, etc. I’ve noticed that almost all objections to my comments center on these other issues.

Tyson then goes on to address topics like the patenting of seeds (he’s basically okay with it); whether GMOs should be labeled (“Since practically all food has been genetically altered from nature, if you wanted labeling I suppose you could demand it, but then it should be for all such foods”); the role of monopolies in agriculture (“Monopolies are generally bad things in a free market”); and much else. You can read all of his thoughts here. Tyson concludes:

If your objection to GMOs is the morality of selling nonprerennial sic seed stocks, then focus on that. If your objection to GMOs is the monopolistic conduct of agribusiness, then focus on that. But to paint the entire concept of GMO with these particular issues is to blind yourself to the underlying truth of what humans have been doing—and will continue to do—to nature so that it best serves our survival. That’s what all organisms do when they can, or would do, if they could. Those that didn’t, have gone extinct extinct sic.

In sum, it seems that in the original video, Tyson’s major beef was with the idea that somehow, the genetic modification of food is novel or even unnatural. It isn’t, he argues, because we’ve been doing it forever. But as soon as GMO critics saw that, they wanted to argue back about all the other issues in the GMO debate, and Tyson thinks that’s missing the (rather limited) point he was trying to make.

“In life,” Tyson concludes his Facebook post, “be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don’t agree with.”

Here’s the original video that started the ruckus:

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Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the Anti-GMO Crowd, Round 2

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Tells GMO Critics to “Chill Out”

by TerrancHammons Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Cosmos star Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for defending climate science and the science of evolution. And now, in a video recently posted on YouTube (the actual date when it was recorded is unclear), he takes a strong stand on another hot-button scientific topic: Genetically modified foods.

In the video, Tyson can be seen answering a question posed in French about “des plantes transgenetiques”—responding with one of his characteristic, slowly-building rants.

“Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food,” asserts Tyson. “There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows…You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.” You can watch the full video above.

In fairness, critics of GM foods make a variety of arguments that go beyond the simple question of whether the foods we eat were modified prior to the onset of modern biotechnology. They also draw a distinction between modifying plants and animals through traditional breeding and genetic modification that requires the use of biotechnology, and involves techniques such as inserting genes from different species.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Tells GMO Critics to “Chill Out”

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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.

by CarltonLenehan Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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From all of the commotion around the new federal school lunch standards, you’d think they were really Draconian. Republican legislators have railed against them. Districts have threatened to opt out. The School Nutrition Association (SNA), the industry group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food employees, has officially opposed some of them—and doubled its lobbying in the months leading up to July 1, when some of the new rules took effect.

Here’s who doesn’t mind the new standards: kids. For a study just published in the peer-reviewed journal Childhood Obesity, researchers asked administrators and food service staff at 537 public elementary schools how their students were liking the meals that conformed to the new standards. Half of those surveyed said that the students “complained about the meals at first,” but 70 percent said that the students now like the new lunches. Rural districts were the least enthusiastic about the new meals—there, some respondents reported that purchasing was down and that students were eating less of their meals. But respondents from schools with a high percentage of poor students—those with at least two-thirds eligible for free or reduced-price meals—were especially positive about the new standards: They found that “more students were buying lunch and that students were eating more of the meal than in the previous year.”

“Kids who really need good nutrition most at school are getting it,” says Lindsey Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author and a research scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “That’s really good news.”

SNA’s response? To issue a statement declaring that “these reported perceptions about school meals do not reflect reality.” The group cites USDA data that participation in school meals has declined by 1.4 million since the new rules went into effect in 2012. But Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author, notes that this is only about a 3 percent drop. She also points to a Government Accountability Office study that found that most of the drop-off was among students who pay full price for lunch.

What makes SNA’s stance on the new rules even stranger is that they actually are not all that strict. For example: Foods served must be whole grain rich, but as I learned from my trip to SNA’s annual conference last week, that includes whole-grain Pop Tarts, Cheetos, and Rice Krispies Treats. Students are required to take a half cup of a fruit or vegetable—but Italian ice—in flavors like Hip Hoppin’ Jelly Bean—are fair game.

Not all members of SNA consider the task of tempting kids with healthy foods onerous. As I reported last week, Jessica Shelly, food director of Cincinnati’s diverse public schools, has shown that all it takes is a little creativity.

HT The Lunch Tray.

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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.

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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

by Rosella60F Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Striding past samples of Pop Tarts and pizza and cookies, Jessica Shelly made a beeline for a booth selling individually packaged sliced fruits and veggies. She picked up a pouch of sliced mangos and let out a yelp of delight. “This could be really fabulous,” she said. “I’m thinking yogurt. I’m thinking granola. I’m thinking make-your-own breakfast parfait!” She waved the peaches around in the air triumphantly. People began to give us odd looks.

Before meeting Shelly, I hadn’t known it was possible to muster quite this much enthusiasm for sliced peaches. Then again, someone with any less energy probably wouldn’t be able to do Shelly’s job: As the director of food services for Cincinnati’s public schools, she is wholly responsibly for providing nutritious breakfast, lunch, and snacks to 34,000 public school students, three-quarters of whom are on free or reduced-price meals.

Here in the exhibition hall at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food professionals, Shelly wasn’t the only one with a tough job—all 6,500 attendees had their work cut out for them. They had to find food that would appeal to kids, otherwise it would go right from a child’s tray to the garbage can. The food must be easy to prepare; some school kitchens are too small to do anything more than heat up a prepared meal. It also has to be very, very cheap. Most of the nutrition directors told me that once they pay overhead costs, they are left with only a dollar or two per student.

This month, their job got harder still. A new set of federal nutritional standards—including a requirement that students must take a fruit or vegetable with lunch and a rule that 51 percent of a food’s grains must be whole—went into effect on July 1. Even stricter rules are coming: Later this year, the whole grain requirement will be raised to 100 percent, and the sodium limit will be reduced. (Read Mother Jones‘ Alex Park’s guide to the food companies that lobbied on the new rules here.)

The School Nutrition Association supports some of the changes that have already been implemented—the 51 percent whole grain rule, for instance, and the stipulation that only skim milk can be flavored. But it opposes others, such as the fruit or vegetable requirement, and the increase to 100 percent whole grains.

Patti Montague, the School Nutrition Association’s CEO, blamed the rules for a 1.2 million-student decline, since 2011, in daily cafeteria attendance. “It got to the point where we felt like we needed to do something,” she told me. “We’re looking to get some flexibility for our members.”

Some of the school food directors I talked to echoed Montague’s concerns. Yvette Burrows, from Picayune Memorial High School in Mississippi, worries that her students will turn their noses up at unfamiliar foods. “It’s not that we don’t try to get them to try it,” she said. But most of them end up not liking the healthy stuff they’re required to taste.” Earlier this year, when her kitchen switched its biscuit dough from white to whole grain, students were not pleased. “One white biscuit is not going to make them unhealthy,” she said.

But Shelly has found that with a little creativity, it’s possible to tempt kids to the lunchroom. Ohio tightened its nutrition standards several years ago, so Shelly has had some time to develop tricks. One winning strategy, she says, is to encourage kids to personalize their meals. She worked with her produce distributor to create affordable salad bars, where kids can load up on the veggies they like. She also installed spice stations—think ranch, lemon pepper, and hot chili—so that kids could decide how to season their food. One day a week, she invites teachers into the lunchrooms to model healthy eating. On these mentoring days, teachers eat free.

Another part of the job, she says, is marketing. She regularly asks students to score foods served in the cafeteria. When she changed the name of a sandwich from “chicken patty on a whole grain bun” to “oven baked chicken sandwich,” the students scored the sandwich three points higher on average. She also made lunchrooms more inviting, ditching the long tables for booths she picked up for cheap at restaurants that were going out of business. During a conference session she led, she underscored the importance of letting parents know that healthy food was available at school. “They don’t know,” she said. “They think we’re feeding them carnival food. They think I’m making mystery meat in the back kitchen with road kill.”

Her tactics seem to be working. While the rest of the nation’s lunchrooms have seen historic declines in attendance over the last few years, cafeterias in Shelly’s program have actually grown more popular—and turned a $2.7 million profit.

Similarly, Steve Marinelli, a school food director from a rural Vermont district where 43 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch, told me his schools “had no problems whatsoever implementing the new changes.” He attributed the success to partnerships with nutrition-education nonprofits that offer taste tests of healthy foods in classrooms to help get students used to unfamiliar flavors. Marinelli believes that it takes time to change a child’s diet, and that schools shouldn’t be forced to implement the new changes too quickly. But “I think SNA has to fix their PR. They are so negative about these standards.”

Indeed, when I suggested to SNA’s Montague that maybe the students just needed more time to get used to the new foods—and maybe the cafeterias needed a few years to figure out how to make the healthier options appealing—she shook her head. “They don’t have enough money to wait for kids to get used to these new regulations,” she said. “Where is that money going to come from when the kids aren’t going to the lunchroom anymore?” And “even if you got all the money it wouldn’t solve all the problems,” she said. “Kids want what they have at home.”

The conference’s exhibition hall certainly reflected Montague’s belief. As I reported earlier this week, it was filled with new food formulations that follow the letter of the law, but offer little by way of nutrition: 51 percent whole grain funnel cakes and Rice Krispies Treats, for example.

A display of Pop Tarts in the conference’s exhibition hall Photo by Kiera Butler

I asked SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner whether the group had considered limiting junk food. “Exhibit floors in general reflect a vast array of company sizes and offerings,” she responded via email. “Exhibitors were required to only offer items that meet USDA regulations for Child Nutrition programs.”

Shelly isn’t giving up, though. The first time her cafeterias served chicken nuggets breaded with whole-wheat flour, the kids thought something must have gone terribly wrong in the kitchen. “They went back into the lunch line and said, ‘you burnt these,’ Shelly said. “Practically all the nuggets ended up in the garbage.” Undaunted, she scoured her suppliers for an alternative and finally she found a nugget with a lighter-colored breading. It also happened to contain whole-muscle meat instead of processed chicken parts.

“Some people think making kids eat healthy food is an impossible task,” she says. “I think it’s an opportunity.”

Credit:

Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

by Kandace86G Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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At exactly 10 a.m. on Monday, hundreds of school cafeteria professionals ran hooting and clapping down an escalator into an exhibition hall that looked like a cross between a mall food court and the set of Barney. Pharrell blared over loudspeakers. The Pillsbury Doughboy was on hand for photo ops, as was Chester the Cheetah (the Cheetos mascot) and a dancing corn dog on a stick. Attendees queued up to be contestants in a quiz show called “Do You Eat Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and flocked toward trays groaning with every kind of kid food one could imagine: tater tots, PB&Js with crusts pre-removed, toaster waffles with built-in syrup, and endless variations on the theme of breaded poultry: chicken tenders, chicken bites, chicken rings, chicken patties, and of course chicken nuggets.

I was at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the professional group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food workers, and the biggest draw of the event—the exhibition hall—had just opened for business. More than 400 vendors vied for the attention of the conference’s 6,500 attendees, who had descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center with one main goal: to find new foods to serve at their schools.

Many of the vendors were household names: Sara Lee, Kraft, Perdue, Uno, and Pizza Hut, to name a few. Among the corporate sponsors who collectively put up about $200,000 to help stage the affair were Domino’s Pizza, PepsiCo, Tyson, General Mills, and AdvancePierre Foods, which bills itself as “the No. 1 provider of fully-cooked protein and assembled sandwiches to school systems across the country.”

The Pizza Hut booth. Kiera Butler

To be sure, you won’t find most of the items on exhibit in supermarkets or restaurants. That’s because they are specially made to conform to the new federal school nutrition standards, some of which took effect July 1. There are new fruit and vegetable requirements; limits on calories, sodium, and saturated fats; and a mandate that more than half of the grains in products be whole grains. The rules—which I’ll cover in more detail in a subsequent post—are contentious, and the SNA opposes some of them. Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported that after First Lady Michelle Obama spoke out in favor of the rules, organizers told the White House that its senior advisor for nutrition policy, Sam Kass, would not be allowed to speak at the conference.

Politics aside, the vendors were armed with newly formulated products designed to conform to the rules. At the Kraft booth, a rep gushed about the virtues of the company’s new flavored cream cheeses, available in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and caramel, “with half the calories of Nutella.” She told me they were designed as dips for fruits with the new produce rule in mind. “Nowadays, it’s the only way to get kids to eat anything that’s good for them,” she said.

The Smuckers “Uncrustables” mascot and his disaffected handler.

Indeed, the exhibitors’ guiding principle seemed to be something like: “Whatever you do, don’t tell them it’s healthy.” I watched as a Sara Lee rep promised a cafeteria director from Louisiana that her students wouldn’t be able to detect the whole-grain flour in her company’s chocolate muffin. The PepsiCo booth stocked a flier (below) informing attendees that newly formulated Cheetos fit with the guidelines. When I sampled a vitamin-fortified, low-cal Slush Puppy, the rep asked me, “Doesn’t that taste just as good as a regular slushy?” (It didn’t.) A food service company rep promised me that his funnel cake was “plenty sweet,” even though it fit within the calorie limits. (It was.)

I picked up this flier from the PepsiCo booth.

While the exhibitors were eager to show off their products’ nutritional stats, few offered actual ingredients lists. When I asked the rep at the Uno pizza booth why ingredients weren’t included on his nutrition information sheet, he told me the list wouldn’t fit on the page.

“Don’t the school nutritionists ask you what’s in this?” I asked. Nope, he said. Most of them just wanted to know whether the product met the legal guidelines. He offered to email me the list later. When he did, I learned that Uno’s Whole Grain Low Sodium Sweet Potato Crust Pepperoni Pizza contained nearly 50 ingredients, including sodium nitrite, which has been linked to cancer. I also persuaded the Domino’s rep to email me a list of ingredients in his company’s specially formulated school pizza, SmartSlice. It was also nearly 50 items long, and included silicone dioxide, otherwise known as sand.

After wandering through most of the 180,000 square feet of exhibits, I came across an earnest gray-haired woman in the back of the cavernous room selling frozen “pulses”—mostly lentils and chickpeas—to stir into soups and sauces. I was the only one at her booth. Had she noticed that everyone seemed drawn to the big-name foods up front? She responded that she hoped attendees would consider fortifying their name-brand meals with some of her lentils. “If you add a pulse product to a potato salad, it steps up the nutrition,” she offered hopefully.

But the attendees would have to find her first, and that would be a tall order: Corporations such as PepsiCo and General Mills had rented out multiple exhibit spaces ($2,400 to $2,600 a pop) in the high-traffic front and central aisles of the exhibit floor. Some big booths even had café-style seating areas where attendees chatted as they gobbled up samples. “You have to go in the far corners to find the more interesting stuff,” says Steve Marinelli, who runs the food program for a rural Vermont school district and told me he was having trouble locating the wholesome foods he wanted. “Someone was selling this really cool hummus, but you really had to look hard to find it.”

The lentil lady didn’t stand a chance.

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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

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