Food shock

Manna to a fast-food child?
Image: © L. Kathryn Grace

Call me a bleeding heart. A few weeks ago I fought tears as I watched a family of four checking produce prices on one of those television news magazines. The camera caught the daughters racing to the fruit and veggie aisles, the younger begging her mom to buy her an apple. Her older sister told her to put it back. It cost too much.

Mom and Dad could buy fresh fruit and veggies only if they could get enough to feed four people for the same price they would pay for a fast-food meal at a local drive-through. At $1.49/lb, the apples didn't hold up to that 99 cent burger, fries and Coke meal.

The child who craved the apple has Type II diabetes, the kind that used to afflict older people. Like so many of today's children, her life expectancy is shorter than her parents'. Her dad has diabetes too. His medications take a huge chunk of the family's income, far more than they can afford. So they take all their meals in the car, driving through, paying at the window, 99 cents each. Maybe Dad gets a bigger, slightly more costly meal.

Name that vegetable
http://www.flickr.com/photos/epsos/
CC BY 2.0

If that wasn't bad enough, today I watched British Chef Jamie Oliver's video of his visit to a first grade classroom in Huntington, West Virginia. In the town some call the unhealthiest city in the United States, where almost half the grown-ups are obese, where diabetes and heart disease stalk nearly everyone, Jamie Oliver asked six year olds to name the shiny, red vegetables in his hand.

No one knew.

Not one child.

How about this one? He held up a potato. No takers. Big, purple thingy? Maybe it's a turnip. Oliver gave them a hint. First word in its name is egg. "I know, I know!" said one kid in the back. "Egg salad!"

Beets, mushrooms. Cauliflower. Not one child knew the name of even one of the foods Oliver showed them. Not one.

See for yourself.



If these children have never seen a tomato, let alone tasted one, when will they discover its mystery, that it is a fruit disguised as a vegetable? And if they've only tasted greasy pizza, hamburgers that look like they were cloned in a plastic food factory, and syrupy soda pop, how many severely delicious delights have they missed already in their young lives?

Have their taste buds, unaccustomed to the nuances of fresh, whole foods, atrophied? If you sliced open a tree-ripened pear and handed it to them, then handed them a tea rose, would their olfactory glands be developed enough to tell the difference? Would they smile and inhale deeply? Could they revel at the spurt of sweet, flavorful juice of a just-picked, perfectly ripe strawberry, warm from the sun? Will they ever have the chance to experience a strawberry that actually has flavor and juice?

Building Ordinary is going to take a lot more work than I thought.

Thankfully, Oliver is on the job. So is Chef Ann Cooper, and Chef Alice Waters with her Edible School Yard project, and so many others, perhaps you among them.

In his TED prize acceptance speech, Oliver says if one of us teaches three others to cook a few simple, inexpensive meals at home, and they teach three others, who teach three others, in just 25 turns, everyone in the country will know how to cook affordable, healthy meals at home, and we can begin to give our children the gift of a longer life, perhaps as long as we older Americans can hope to live.

So to get started, I will begin sharing, now and then, some of the cheap, extremely simple meals we eat in our house.

What about you? Got any ideas for teaching three people to cook inexpensive, wholesome meals at home?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

We can fix school lunches

It's the Ordinary thing to do.

Public domain image via Wikipedia

When I was a kid, the lunch ladies still made big pots of tasty homemade soup like this woman is dishing up. Yeasty, oven-baked rolls made our mouths water all morning. Our stomachs growled so loud during the last period before lunch we could have started a chorus.

You saw an example of the meals Mrs. Q and her Illinois students eat yesterday (Would you eat this?). Hungry tummies may still compete with the teach for attention, but I doubt those BPA-laden, processed food units smell as good heating in the industrial microwave as the scent of the soups, breads and homemade desserts that wafted through our hallways.

When did we abdicate responsibility for the welfare of our children to a bureaucracy so tied to Big-Food and Big-Agriculture that we feed our children unappetizing, unappealing substances their teacher can barely choke down?

To build Ordinary, we must take back responsibility for our food, our children's welfare, and our own welfare, for that matter. I'm not advocating throwing out the government programs. I'm advocating getting involved in making them work for us.

Want to be part of the change to healthier school lunch programs? Boy have I got a resource for you: The Lunch Box. You won't be alone. On Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let's Move Campaign to improve school lunches, get kids moving, and give them a chance to live as long as their parents expect to live. If things don't change soon, expectations are slim that they will, so let's all get moving. Join the school lunch revolution!

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Fast food--cheaper than homemade?

Not according to the Washington Post's Sally Sampson. In Dude, It adds up, Sampson tells of her quest to prove whether commercial fast food is cheaper and tastier than the same homemade fast food. Her panel of experts: nine teenagers. Her methodology: find out what's in that popular, breakfast egg-sausage-muffin, that juicy lunch-time double-patty burger, and that cheesy, hand-tossed suppertime pizza, then replicate it at home.

Her findings: Not only did she make the fast food at home at considerable cost savings, but her teenage panel found her versions to be juicier where juicy count, crunchier where crunchy counts, and tastier all round. What's more, she delivered the goods at significant calorie savings.

Yes, Virginia, if your mama can afford to buy fast food for you, your papa can afford to fix the same thing for you at home, and it will be better for you and taste a whole lot better.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.