Green Options

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I’d like to add to the growing list of the benefits for healthy school lunches and school lunch reform that we blogged about yesterday. On Tuesday, USA TODAY ran an investigative story about tainted school lunches that shows how safety lapses in food production or distribution can put children at risk.
The lead of the piece is a story of almost 70 students at a Wisconsin elementary school who got sick two years ago after eating tainted tortillas. A subsequent investigation discovered that flour tortillas from the providing company were responsible for outbreaks at “more than a dozen schools in two other states” over five years. The FDA issued a warning about the tortillas, but the article says the warning never made it to school officials.

However, this case isn’t an isolated incident. According to the article,

The story of how food with a history of making kids sick continued to get into schools illustrates broad failures in government programs meant to provide safe, quality meals for America’s children, a USA TODAY investigation found. Parents and schools often have no idea where the food comes from. They know even less about the safety records of the companies that supply it. And if they try to find out, they face government roadblocks that put the rights of manufacturers ahead of providing information that could protect children.

It goes on to explain how food-borne illnesses often don’t get reported, authorities struggle to find the cause of the outbreak, or action on the issue comes to late — all factors that can potentially create safety risks.

Last weekend Madison was host to Tales from Planet Earth, a local environmental film festival screening 50 films over three days. One film I saw was Our Daily Bread, a German film about the industrial food production and high-tech farming that managed to comment on the process without actually doing any talking. The image above, reminiscent of old movies and war films, is just one visual that’s stuck with me since.
Rather than my trying to muddle out a summary, here’s the filmmakers’ synopsis of the movie:

To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

When the synopsis says the film “looks without commenting,” that’s exactly true. There is no narration and almost no actual talking throughout the entire movie. And since it’s in German I couldn’t understand any speaking anyway, meaning all I could interact with in the movie were the images.

One issue that’s come to my attention since I started thinking more about my food is the debate about organic foods — are they healthier, and is the cost worth the potential benefits?
I’d love to buy organic food all the time, but it’s just not financially possible for me right now. That said, I believe in the health risks of pesticides on foods and would like to start moving in the direction of eating foods grown without them. But if I’m going to get a bang for my buck, which foods should I buy organic in order to protect myself from ingesting the most pesticides? Are some fruits and vegetables more susceptible to absorbing pesticides than others?

One list I found that can help answer this question is the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, which ranks 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on how many pesticides they contain, often after being washed and peeled. The list was put together by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit group working on public health and the environment.

With seasons changing yet again, starting a garden might be the last thing on a person’s mind. Not so here in Madison, Wisconsin, where a local group is pushing for more community garden spaces in the downtown area. This isn’t especially newsworthy until you hear where they’re proposing to add the garden – the top of the Madison Public Library.
Community gardens and downtown green space aren’t new ideas, but at a public presentation on Thursday night, members of Downtown Madison Community Gardens, said if their proposal is accepted, the garden would be the first rooftop community vegetable garden on a public library in the world.

Chicken nuggets. Taco salad. Pizza. Cartons of milk. Hot dogs. Mystery meat. These foods were all staples of my elementary and high school cafeterias, despite clear guidelines about the nutritional benefits for school meals. Efforts to reform school lunch got a boost Tuesday when Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released “School Meals: Building Blocks for Healthy Children,” a report of recommendations for how to reform school lunch.
The report was requested by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in order to help align the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs with the most recent set of dietary guidelines for Americans. Current school lunches must meet guidelines set in 1995, but nutritional knowledge has progressed since then, and the report tries to address those changes.

Last Wednesday, two of my favorite foodies were on tv doing a segment about “guilt free” eating. Using simple substitutions, I learned I can save more than 200 calories by switching my morning bagel to an English muffin with Laughing Cow low-calorie cheese spread and almost 1,000 calories by switching from fettuccine alfredo to tofu noodles and light cheese. Simple changes that make decadent foods more health-conscious, what’s not to love?
For some people, quite a bit, actually. The foodies in question are Rachel Ray and Lisa Lillien — women who love talking about food in a way that doesn’t make a person like me feel overwhelmed. But their philosophies for simplicity, healthy substitution, and fun in cooking don’t always mesh with the more serious demands some food activists make. What I’m still not sure of is whether there’s a compromise to found somewhere in the middle?

Common dieting advice suggests eating breakfast because it can jump start your metabolism and helps prevent you from eating more later in the day. Researchers in London may have finally figured out why — skipping a morning meal can fool your brain into thinking the body actually wants high-calorie foods, which, if eaten too often, can inhibit weight loss.
So What Is This Study Exactly?
A team from Imperial College London presented these findings at the Endocrine Society’s 91st annual meeting held in Washington D.C. in July. Scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which measure blood flow in the brain, to see how eating impacted the brain’s reward center.

The study involved 20 healthy people who took an fMRI scan on a morning when they skipped breakfast and on a morning when they ate breakfast. During each test they were shown photos of high-calorie foods like pizza and cake, and low-calorie foods like salad and fish. On the morning they had breakfast, the participant’s reward center lit up more in response to the high-calorie foods. On the morning when they had breakfast, the reward center didn’t show any difference between high- and low-calorie foods.

I recently heard a claim that people of my generation (I’m 23-years-old) are so disconnected from the food system that we can’t identify the correct season for our fruits and vegetables. At first, I scoffed at this idea – of course I know when to eat plants, that’s easy!
Turns out, I have no idea. I looked at a list of vegetables and beyond pumpkins, which I know are fall plants because I carve a jack-o-lantern every October, I couldn’t place any of them. Strawberries… maybe early spring? Lettuce… I didn’t think lettuce had a season?

I’ll admit defeat – I’ve been spoiled by supermarkets that show me tomatoes and carrots and lettuce and spinach year round, and I probably can’t identify the season for any of them. During my dieting phase at the end of college, these vegetables were staples of my daily eating whether they were in season or not. I’m so used to seeing them all the time it never occurred to me there was a better or worse time to eat them until I started listening to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on audio book.