In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity , including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign  to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award , which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late.  –The Editors 

In our introduction to this series on childhood nutrition, we highlight the work of the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who won the 2010 TED Award and is using the $100,000 prize to launch an "eating revolution" in the United States. TED has been highlighting efforts to address childhood nutrition for years through its TED Talks. Here are a few highlights:

In 2006, Dr. Dean Ornish, M.D. spoke on diet as low-cost, high-impact, preventative medicine... 

In 2007, New York Times writer Mark Bittman likened the cow to the atom bomb when speaking on the demands of our meaty diets on the planet...

Also in 2007, “Renegade Lunch Lady” Ann Cooper spoke on teaching children about everything “from growing to disposing” of food...

Read all of the  Cafeteria Chronicles posts ... 

In Feruary, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity , including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign  to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award , which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late.  –The Editors 

A pair of eleven year-old girls from Manhattan sit at a conference table with two executives from the New York City Department of Education: the Executive Chef and the CEO. Without sounding contrived, as the same question from a parent might have, one of the girls asks, “What does healthy food mean to you?” The gentlemen explain how nutrition and hunger have informed school feeding programs over the years, and how low federal reimbursements are getting in the way of really reforming the quality of food in schools. I don’t know what’s more fresh: the girls’ curiosity about the system or the gentlemen’s frankness with them.

The film is full of moments like this: two clearheaded and curious kids demanding real answers from powerful adults. Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Riddle are best friends, both from mixed-race families. They spend a year educating themselves about a food system most adults barely understand. Sadie and Safiyah want to know why produce that is also grown in their home state is instead trucked in from far away places; how food affects their health (one girl has hereditary high cholesterol) and the health of their parents; and how cost—and neighborhood—mediates access to healthy food. They speak to their families and to friends, doctors, school administrators, farmers, politicians, and even poets. Sadie's mother is one of the film's producers, and likely the unseen hand in what comes off as the remarkable initiative of two ambitious young people. But that hardly gets in the way.

The girls return to their old elementary school with poet-teacher Idris Goodwin, who performs his spoken word piece “What is they feedin’ our kids?” to young students at their alma mater. Walking with Goodwin outside the school, the girls find an empty Funyuns bag on the sidewalk. They read the contents aloud to strike a joke, from Goodwin’s poem, that runs throughout the film: Seriously, what is a Funyun?

Read the rest of the Cafeteria Chronicles posts...

From infiltrating a school cafeteria to a celebrity chef's revolutionary campaign, Jaimie Stevenson has been reviewing creative efforts to improve childhood nutrition and reduce childhood obesity in her Cafeteria Chronicles. Now we want to hear from you. Are you happy with your child's school cafeteria? What special steps have you taken to educate your child about good food?

In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity , including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign  to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award , which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late. –The Editors 

School cafeterias are frightful. Social hierarchies play out at the tables, economic inequality is highlighted in the cashier’s line, and then there is the food. Chef/farmer/blogger Ed Bruske embedded himself in the cafeteria of his daughter’s elementary school and wrote about the experience in a six-part series for Grist. In recent years, H. D. Cooke Elementary (of the D.C. Public School System) has reverted to “fresh cooked” meals:

When I asked to spend time observing the kitchen operation at my daughter’s elementary school, I thought I was going to see people cook. The food service provider for D.C. Public Schools, Chartwell-Thompson, had recently ditched the old method of feeding kids with pre-packaged meals from a food factory and replaced it with something they called “fresh cooked.” Being one of those folks who is trying to return to cooking from scratch with fresh, local ingredients, I was anxious to see how Chartwell’s plan would play out.

Was I ever in for a surprise. As I soon discovered, there wasn’t much “fresh” about the food being served at H.D. Cooke Elementary School. When I passed through the doors of the “Kid’s Stop Cafe,” I walked straight into the maws of the industrial food system, where meals are composed of ingredients out of a food chemist’s lab, where highly processed food is doused with all sorts of additives and preservatives in distant factories, then cooked and shipped frozen so that it can be quickly reheated with minimal skill and placed on a steam table.

… Are these really the lessons we want our kids to learn about food?

Source: Grist

Read all of the  Cafeteria Chronicles posts ... 

In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity, including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award, which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late . –The Editors  

Interested in launching your own school lunch reform campaign where you live? It's difficult to know where to start. The book Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainabilty is a great resource, and includes this handy guide to typical food system responsibilities...

"Levels of Authority for School Food Systems" was originally published in Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability by Michael K. Stone/Center for Ecoliteracy. © Copyright 2009 Center for Ecoliteracy. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. For more information, visit www.ecoliteracy.org.This is a partial list of typical food system responsibilities.

Federal Government

• Sets reimbursement and income level requirements for national breakfast and lunch programs
• Determines minimal nutrition requirements for federally supported meals
• Creates policies for commodity foods offered to schools

State Government

• May supplement federal reimbursements
• Sets regulations for foods served in schools not participating in federal programs
• Administers food stamp nutrition education fund programs in schools
• Creates academic state-level standards and testing procedures

School Board

• Approves district operating budget
• Sets priorities for superintendent
• Approves federally mandated wellness policies for local districts
• Proposes tax measures for approval by voters

District Superintendent/Administration

• Establishes expectations and priorities for food service, guided by federal requirements (break even, maintain surplus, and so on)
• Recommends budget, may propose allocating additional funds to supplement food service income
• Determines where savings achieved by food service, such as reduced trash-hauling fees, will be applied, guided by federal requirements
• Oversees design, construction, and maintenance of kitchen facilities and resources
• Secures additional resources, such as funding to staff garden and kitchen classes

Food Service Director

• Creates and manages food service budget, determining how funds will be allocated among food purchases, personnel, equipment, and so on
• Sets menus and documents adherence to required national standards
• Procures and oversees preparation of food; locates and negotiates with farmers, distributors, and vendors
• Determines food service staff roles; oversees staff training
• “Markets” food service to students and families

Principal

• Sets the tone for campus regarding openness to change and spirit of cooperation
• Determines the level of support and encouragement for faculty and staff experimentation and innovation at the school site
• With teachers, creates class schedule (e.g. amount of time for lunch, order of lunch and recess)

Teachers and Staff (sometimes constrained by union contracts)

• Choose whether and how to incorporate food and nutrition into classroom lessons
• Determine how food may be used outside of meals (for instance for treats and celebrations, or as reward and punishment), within local and state requirements
• Can model attitudes toward school food
• Usually maintain the most direct communication with parents

Source: Smart By Nature 

Read all of the  Cafeteria Chronicles posts ... 

In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity, including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award, which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late.  –The Editors 

In its second annual “Intelligent Optimists” issue, Ode Magazine endeavored to find the “not yet famous” who are doing outstanding work in their fields. That’s where we came across the work of Dr. David Ludwig, Director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital, Boston.

Merely “identifying another gene related to obesity wasn’t going to change the health prospects of the children I was seeing,” Ludwig told Ode…

Instead, Ludwig started exploring the dietary, lifestyle, and environmental factors that have pushed obesity to epidemic proportions in the U.S. The prevalence of junk food and junk food advertising directed at children, coupled with few exercise opportunities for low-income children, has created what Ludwig calls a toxic environment. “It’s overwhelming our biology, undermining our behavior, and leading so many people to gain weight.”

  …In 1996, Ludwig founded the Optimal Weight for life (OWL) obesity clinic at Children’s Hospital, where more than 500 children a year are treated using dietary, lifestyle, and behavioral counseling. In 2007, he published Ending the Food Fight, drawing on the clinic’s experience to guide parents of overweight children in making wiser food choices. Ludwig also advises governments at the local, state, and national level. He advocates banning soft drinks in schools and advertising directed at kids, as well as restructuring federal farm subsidies to support healthy food rather than corn and soy, prevalent ingredients in packaged foods.

Source: Ode

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Across the globe, people are coming up with innovative ways to generate energy to aid their communities. Clean drinking water flows into a tank every time children play on a merry-go-round in a small town in South Africa. In Essam, Ghana, another merry-go-round built by BYU students generates battery-stored electricity that kids can take home at night.

Through a similar project called Kids Climb-It, a group of graduate students at Columbia University is aiming to educate future generations about energy and social interaction. The Columbia students, along with their professor, Alice Chun, are designing an playground to be built on a 16,000-square-foot lot in Manhattan. The structure will be made of a series of tripods covered in rubber balls and spanned by large climbing nets. Other so-called rubber donuts will be scattered throughout the playground floor for children to jump and climb on. The different components of the park will trigger various effects as children play, such as spraying water
or creating sounds, encouraging children to explore the entire structure. The group also plans to incorporate an energy stopwatch so kids can learn how much energy they can generate as they play.

Although generators positioned throughout the park create enough energy to light the fixtures up at night,  the project’s purpose is more focused on education than creating energy. The project’s blog states, “As sustainable energy practices take on ever-increasing importance, Kids Climb-It aims to educate the next generation on the potential power each of us has to affect our surroundings while providing new and unparalleled experiences of fun and exercise.”

(Thanks, Dwell.)

Image by  D. Sharon Pruitt , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a  Task Force on Childhood Obesity , including the launch of  Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign  to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British chef Jamie Oliver won a  2010 TED award , which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late .  –The Editors 

Get ready to learn how to cook from scratch. British chef Jamie Oliver, already influential with policymakers and grassroots activists in the UK, is launching Jamie’s Food Revolution USA with the $100,000 he won as a TED prize recipient.

Central to Oliver's mission is childhood nutrition at home. Even Mrs. Obama acknowledges that government must follow the leadership of parents who educate their kids about nutrition in their own homes. Jamie Oliver's stateside food revolution actually began in fall 2009 at a community cooking center he opened in Huntington, West Virginia. He modeled the center on his growing Ministries of Food network in towns throughout the UK. Oliver’s cross-industry mission for the TED-backed food revolution solicits the support of everyone from realtors and truck drivers to writers and nutritionists.

Here is Oliver talking about what he has seen and what he will do...

Read all of the  Cafeteria Chronicles posts ... 

In February, Barack Obama signed a memorandum to establish a Task Force on Childhood Obesity, including the launch of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to address childhood obesity and nutrition. One day earlier, British Chef Jamie Oliver won the 2010 TED award, which will help him to launch a cross-industry initiative to fight obesity by educating families about food. This week we will be looking at childhood nutrition by highlighting books and articles that have passed through our library of late . –The Editors 

To write a single sentence that explains just the school cafeteria side of the obesity debate is a challenge. Here's a shot: In America, we have a population of kids united by poor nutrition, but divided by economic strata--there are those who eat too much, and poorly; and those who eat too little, and poorly.

In her new book Free For All: Fixing school food in America, Sociologist Janet Poppendieck says the U.S. should eliminate the funding factor by providing free lunch for all kids, as a first step toward remedying the issues of malnutrition and obesity.

Poppendieck’s hefty analysis of subsidized school lunches in the U.S. is an important read. For a sampling, read Washington Monthly's review. In it, Michael O'Donnell writes:

Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. Vending machines light up the hallways, usually through an exclusive contractual arrangement between school or school district and a company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Fast-food operations like Subway and KFC set up shop in the food court, tempting away all the students with enough money to afford a hoagie or fried chicken strips. Alongside the traditional cafeteria meal are a la carte lines where burgers and French fries (and their unholy cousins, tater tots) glisten with grease under the lamplights, exempted in all their fatty glory from USDA nutritional requirements. Even those children who buy the standard hot meal eat mostly junk: pizza with fries hits all of the major food groups, if you define the groups expansively enough. As Ronald Reagan’s USDA famously taught us, ketchup is, after all, a vegetable. 

Source: Free For All, Washington Monthly

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Soon after Vancouver, Washington converted its one-way Main Street into a two-way street in 2008, the city found that traffic to downtown stores had doubled with no discernable increase in congestion.  Amidst this era of budget crunches, cities that want to revitalize their downtown districts can’t draw on traditional capital-intensive techniques like subsidizing new convention centers, apartments, or office buildings.  Instead, many are trying a simple way to get people to come into downtown, to stay, and to shop: painting double yellow lines down the middle of the street.

On a two-way street, urbanites and suburbanites alike find it easier to get to the places they’re looking for and to pull over when they see an interesting store or restaurant, rather than just blowing by.  “The old two-way streets, whatever [their] occasional frustration, had real advantages in fostering urban life," writes Alan Ehrenhalt for Governing. "Traffic moved at a more modest pace, and there was usually a row of cars parked by the curb to serve as a buffer between pedestrians and moving vehicles. How many successful sidewalk cafes have you ever encountered on a four-lane, one-way street?”

Source: Governing

According to Natural History, animal species rarely go out of their way to save one another from risky or dangerous situations. In the animal kingdom, these life-saving interventions have only been observed among dolphins, capuchin monkeys and ants. Recently, however, research biologists Robert L. Pitman and John W. Durban witnessed a remarkable act of interspecies compassion in Arctic waters. On two separate occasions they found humpback whales acting as body guards for seals under killer whale attack. In one instance, a humpback flipped over onto its back, scooped the threatened seal onto its belly and arched its back, lifting the seal high above the water and out of killer whale reach. It's a fascinating read.

Source: Natural History  

Image by  Claudio Matsuoka , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Liza Monroy reports in Bust that since last October, Puebla, Mexico has been putting women behind the wheels of pink taxicabs in an effort to make the experience safer and harassment-free for women passengers. The program also helps combat stereotypes about women drivers and it provides job opportunities for women. It’s been so popular, that the Pink Taxi company plans to add a couple hundred more cars this year. Monroy also addresses any concerns that this is simply a quick fix that doesn’t solve the larger problem at hand. She writes:

Some women’s-rights activists have pointed out that painting a cab pink and putting a woman behind the wheel does not address the larger issue of sexual harassment, emphasizing that the city should do a better job weeding out harassers. Yet, in a country where machismo is still so commonplace, the service at least raises awareness and provides an alternative. And one undeniable benefit is the increase in employment opportunities for women in a traditionally male-dominated field. “I was eager to use Pink Taxi, not only because it’s safer,” says [Melissa] Ayala, “but also as a way to support other women who are trying to improve their economic situation.”

Source: Bust

Image by didbygraham, licensed under Creative Commons.

Scientists are currently hard at work sequencing the genome of a Neanderthal woman who died some 30,000 years ago. Soon, Archaeology magazine reports, scientists believe they’ll be able to clone that Neanderthal, effectively bringing the long-extinct humans back to life. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks told Archaeology, "we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I'm just sure of it."

If, or when, the scientists succeed, a host of ethical and legal questions come into play. Would the Neanderthals be considered human? Would they have human rights? If scientists were to clone just one, he or she would lack any social structure, and could face fear and danger from humans. Archeology sums up the problems:

The ultimate goal of studying human evolution is to better understand the human race. The opportunity to meet a Neanderthal and see firsthand our common but separate humanity seems, on the surface, too good to pass up. But what if the thing we learned from cloning a Neanderthal is that our curiosity is greater than our compassion? Would there be enough scientific benefit to make it worth the risks?

Source: Archaeology 

UPDATE: Neanderthals were mistakenly identified as a human "ancestor," and that reference was deleted from this post.

A virtual reality video game where participants crush virtual cigarettes may help people quit smoking. In a study from the Universite du Quebec, highlighted by IEEE Spectrum, 91 smokers were randomly assigned to two video games—one involving grasping at orbs and the other centered around crushing cigarettes. Both groups were given minimal therapy. After six months, the cigarette crushers were twice as likely to have quit smoking than the control group. Now a question remains about how to get people to play what sounds like a mind-numbingly dull game about crushing cigarettes.

Source: IEEE Spectrum (Article not available online)

Pop psychologists, beware! In the current issue of Psychology Today, the magazine’s expert bloggers debunk some of our most cherished conventional wisdom, including popular social myths surrounding anger (no, “venting” doesn’t help), lying (it’s not about eye contact), and romance (Paula Abdul and her cartoon-cat-lover were wrong). The piece isn’t available online, but here are a few fun examples, with links to the Psychology Today blogs the magazine's experts call home:

Venting Reduces Anger
One of my pet peeves is how widely the notion of catharsis has been accepted. People think they will feel better by “getting it all out” or even that a hockey game is a release for their aggression. Aggression begets aggression. People are better off taking a deep breath and counting to 10 than “venting” their hostilities. — Jann Gumbiner, Ph.D., professor at the University of California–Irvine College of Medicine 

Opposites Attract
A persistent myth is that in romance, opposites attract. In fact, one of the most powerful predictors of liking is similarity, regardless of the type of trait—personality, values, interests, or physical characteristics. — Andrew Galperin, graduate student in social psychology at UCLA 

Men Aren’t Romantic
Many people think men are less romantic than women. Yet men fall in love faster (because they are so visual); men tend to be more dependent on their girlfriends or wives for intimacy; men are over two times more likely to kill themselves when a relationship ends; and men show just as much activity in brain regions associated with romantic passion. — Helen Fisher, Ph.D., anthropology professor at Rutgers University

Source: Psychology Today

Watching someone pick up a carrot instead of a cookie makes other people more likely to pick up the carrot, too. On the other hand, watching someone give in and eat the cookie makes people less likely to resist the sweet temptation of the dessert—even if those people have no other social interaction.

People tend to see self-control as a personality trait, not as something influenced by those around them. But according to research highlighted by Jonah Lehrer, self-control and the ability to resist temptation both have a strong social component. That may be why fast-food restaurants bombard the airwaves with images of people giving into temptation—to overwhelm other people’s ability to resist. The research also suggests that self-control can be learned. If just one person starts making the decision to eat healthier, everyone around them may be more likely to eat healthy, too.

Source: The Frontal Cotex 

Image by  Pink Sherbet Photography , licensed under  Creative Commons .