School Breakfast and Lunch

This is what my kids at Seneca Center had for breakfast today. Homemade Orange Marmalade Buttermilk Pancakes, Saggs Chicken Apple Sausages, and fresh warm fruit.

As many of you know, I have been working with the Slow Food folks on the School Lunch Initiative and awareness about this upcoming legislation coming before Congress in March this year. I guess you could say, it has become my passion to get all of my friends, family and acquaintances to lobby Congress that we need change across the board in school food. A move to healthier, more localised food....prepared daily for our kids by people like me who care.

It boggles my mind when I think of the slop my Husband Troy's daughter is served at school in Benicia. This is one of the Bay's wealthiest suburbs....lovely waterfront homes, a historic downtown and a safe town to raise your kid in with highly acclaimed schools. But what do they have for lunch? Steamed hamburgers out of wrappers. Soggy deep fried stuff. Canned fruit and vegetables or when the fruit is fresh....it has been sitting around for a very long time.

Why? Well like many school districts around the state of California and our great country...it is because we spend less per week on our kid's school food than we do FOR A SINGLE VENTI LATTE at Peet's.

Yes.......you heard me correctly. We spend less than $5 a week per child for breakfast and lunch for our kids. No wonder today's children are stressed, unhealthy, and hard to control! They have no nutrients in their little bodies to run them and their minds efficiently!!! This is not rocket science folks! What we put in.....we get out. We are creating an unhealthy future for our children and habits that will put them in the running to die before we do (for the first time in history). 1 in 5 children in this generation will have insulin dependant diabetes by the time they are 15. If you know any one with diabetes....you know that they can lose mobility, eye sight, and in the worse cases, people with uncontrolled diabetes can lose their limbs! Did you know that people with diabetes cannot get life insurance? Did you know that people with diabetes pay higher medical premiums? Did you know that automatically, many MDs will put people who have diabetes on blood pressure and cholesterol meds too? Did you know that all this medicine and the things that go with it can cost upwards of $200 a month?

Yes.......I have first hand experience. My sweet husband Troy is diabetic. He has learned about the damage to his body all too late. I know what this horrific disease can do and it is the food that we are choosing and the food that our government is choosing to feed our children everyday that is creating this epidemic.

But it can be stopped. WE can stop it. YOU can stop it!!! Demand from Congress that our schools get just $1 a day more for each student for nutritious, healthy, local, largely organic and sustainable food. Just a dollar a day more, can change everything.

It is up to you and me. If you would like to join me in lobbying Congress for just a dollar more for our kids.....for good, clean and fair food for everyone. Please click on the link below and let your voice be heard!

http://capwiz.com/ffff/utr/1/JGZUMAABWG/JUPUMAALPC/4652622756

Slow Food USA's Time for Lunch EAT-IN, Time for REAL food in schools!

Okay so most of you who know me well, know that I cook for kids and several times a year do special food functions for the CEO of Seneca Center and Alameda Board of Education representative, Ken Berrick. Ken is a master fund raiser and for the 22 or so years he has headed up Seneca, he has been fighting to make things better for Bay Area kids. The meals are important, because they keep Seneca at the fore front in legislators minds.

One thing is common, among all the people who visit Seneca each and every year. They all say what a good job our staff and administrators do in living and modeling our motto "unconditional care" and they say how great the food is.

I have been with Seneca for eight years. In that time, many changes have happened. But constant is the support that I have gotten in planning, ordering and producing good, clean and fair food for my kids and staff here. I would like to think that other therapeutic agencies and schools are modelling this part of what we have done here at Seneca, but alas....they are not.

Kids in most California public schools and in schools all over the country are treated like bargain trash compactors. The schools sell the USDA mass produced product that they get for free to our kids, and as a result, our kids are the fattest, most lethargic and unhealthiest in recorded history. In my opinion, this is due to several reasons....one of the most important being the quality of food that they are being offered and served in schools.

It is bad enough in our society that most of us cannot afford our own homes, and have to choose to put good, clean and fair food on the table or put gas in our cars to get to work each day. No matter what challenges we face as adults, our children deserve to have good food in their bellies. Food that will not only nourish their bodies and minds...but their souls!!

Where our food comes from makes a difference! If you have not yet seen the barrage of politics of food and food supply books and movies out recently, I urge you to educate yourself about this issue if you haven’t already. Books like Fast Food Nation and the Omneviores Dilema. Movies like: SuperSize Me, Food Inc, King Corn and Fresh....show mass food production like it is. When a sick and injured cow is herded by a forklift into the slaughter house, alive and knowing what is about to happen...does that fear that rushes into that poor animal's brain also rush cortisol and adrenaline into the meat that we later consume? My opinion is that it does.

Modern day enslavement and abuse of immigrant and low-income American workers, mistreatment of our livestock and animals, diabetes, disease, death. If these costs were exposed to the average person, they would understand clearly that real, healthy, locally- and fairly-produced food is actually much cheaper than fast-food.

The time to act is now. Legislation for The Child Nutrition Act is a federal law that comes up for re-authorization in Congress every four to five years. It governs the National School Lunch Program, which sets the standard for the food that more than 30 million children eat every school day.

In the last few decades, as school budgets have been cut, our nation's schools have struggled to serve children the real food they need.

The deadline for reauthorizing the current Child Nutrition Act is September 2009. Unless we speak up this summer, “business as usual” on Capitol Hill will let Congress pass a Child Nutrition Act that continues to fail our children.

I urge all who read this to sign the petition and "EAT IN" for change this Labor Day. Around this great country of ours, Slow Food conviviums are organising huge community pot lucks to draw attention to this issue. If you really care about our children and believe that they deserve better food and food education in schools, then please click on the link below and sign up to join us in the fight! You will have the opportunity to eat some great food yourselves, get to know your neighbors and local food activists and learn what you can do to help.

Alice Waters says it best. "Good, clean and fair food is your right...as a human being". Let's work with her and Michelle Obama to make we don't let our kids health slip through the cracks and good nutrition in schools is a great place to start!

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/campaign/time_for_lunch/about/