Lovely Lunches

Lynn from OrganicMania asked me to reminisce about my halcyon Berkeley food days after her posts about school lunch reform got me musing about times past. Thanks for the opportunity to guest post!

...In my students' minds, the crisp lettuce in the field we skipped through on our journey was just as fascinating as the computers that awaited amidst the stacks of books at our local library. It was 1998, and most of the young men and women loping past the garden had no access to computers at all (many had just arrived in the country). But it was the vegetables that held their attention. On a field trip off-campus with an English Language Learner class, I couldn't help but marvel at the audible excitement and interest over the garden and its teen gardeners. Teacher Patti Rathwell got her students into King's school kitchen routinely, brought food into the class to illustrate everyday concepts, and the students' families brought in delicacies representing cuisines from all over the world to mark special celebrations. Speaking over a dozen languages, the premium form of communication among our students was laughter, gesture, and the anticipation of flavor.

In 1998, I was a student teacher from UC Berkeley's MUSE Program apprenticed to two classrooms at Martin Luther King Middle School. The nascent Edible Schoolyard program, started in 1996 by a collaboration between Chez Panisse and the school (via the Chez Panisse Foundation), was thriving by the time I landed at King. As I recall, the kids called it the "Peace Garden" and every one of the kids I taught, from middle school second language learners ranging from 6th to 8th grade, to the 8th graders in my humanities class, was itching to get their hands dirty. You could almost see the infusion of energy into the crops. These kids were fascinated with what their peers were creating, with their bare hands and brains. They longed to be outdoors, to work with the soil. But even more, they longed to be in the kitchen, chopping and slicing and mixing and...eating! I've never seen such a worthwhile channeling of teen squirm in all my life.

I've been thinking about the Edible Schoolyard recently, as I face the reality of public school lunches here in DC for my daughter and her friends. I'm heartened by the fact that Berkeley, and other schools like Wisconsin's Appleton Central Alternative School (ACAS), have adopted programs harnessing the power of delicious and satisfying food to improve not just health but performance. Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes, is a riveting book that chronicles success stories like the Edible Schoolyard and Appleton's ACAS, while giving parents concrete suggestions: healthy recipes and contact info for organizations working to effect change in lunch programs.

One school that's crafted a school environment rich in healthy food and a focus on physical education is Appleton's ACAS (which banned vending machines and instituted fruit-and-vegetable rich breakfasts and lunches). Appleton has quantifiably documented the impact of providing "nonchemiccally processed foods that are low in fat, salt, and sugar, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables." Improvements seen include: more focused on-task behavior, increased cognitive development, fewer health concerns, fewer discipline problems, better attendance, and better nutrition outside of school.

Wouldn't it be great if all of our schoolchildren (many of whom rely on school breakfast and lunch programs as their primary source of nutrition) got a side of nutrition education and sustainable agriculture with their salad bar lunch?

Where to look for more info about transforming your own school? Check out the following organizations for ideas.

• The Center for EcoLiteracy
• Lunch Lessons
• Better School Food
• Food Change
• Farm to School

*photo courtesy of Dawn Allynn at sxc (see more of Dawn's work here.)

I'm a guest writer for OrganicMania today -- go check it out!
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Plastic Smile

I swear I feel like we are all trapped in the Batman movie where the deodorant chemicals interact with the shampoo chemicals which interact with the room deodorizer and lock the poor unsuspecting victims into a Joker smile....

You've read all about plastic stabilizers leaching out of baby bottles and sippy cups aka the Bisphenol-A fiasco of the summer. In case you're needing succinct recommendations, my favorite resources are Z Recommends' extensive research on bottles/sippys and the old Green Guide basic guide to plastics. We recently went cold turkey on CBoy's pacifiers (poor guy), in part bz the plastic shield on his preferred binky was made of #7 plastic, um, yes, the shield that he chews on cavalierly to make a clicking sound while he bounces and grooves. That and the fact that his one true pacifier love was discontinued due to The First Years' fears of latex lawsuits (bad allergies in some kids) and therefore I'd only been able to stock up for the past 6 months via EBay auctions filled with sleep-deprived parents. But I digress....

You can check your own plastics to see what you should keep and what you should toss. Altho skipping plastic altogether may be the safest bet, supposedly safer plastics are labeled #1,2,4, and 5. Look on the bottom for the recycling symbol. If something isn't labeled with these numbers, don't use it for eating/drinking. Do not use plastics #3, 6 and 7 for food consumption and don't reuse items for food consumption not intended for reuse (like sport water bottles, takeout containers or yogurt tubs, much as that hurts my Depression-era sensibilities). That doesn't mean you should chuck these items into the landfill, just use them as plant pots and sandbox toys, not as food containers. Or tuck them away until small humans who ram everything in their mouths stop DOING THAT.

Yes to 1, 2, 4, 5
No to 3, 6, 7
Don't use recycled plastic containers (like takeout containers) in the microwave or let acidic/fatty foods sit in them.
Do remove cling wrap from items you buy at the store asap (it's almost all PVC which is bad news) and put it into another storage container.
Make sure the containers and plastic wrap you do use (even glass and ceramic) are microwave safe (should be labeled).
Don't let plastic wrap touch your food while it's being heated (or just use a paper towel).
Skip the Nalgene bottles (they may leach Bisphenol-A too).
Classico jars make awesome storage containers.

On a related note, check out the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep report as it ranks beauty care products (think baby shampoo) in terms of safety (the FDA isn't the strictest regulatory agency so even though you'd think that anything labeled baby shampoo has to be safe, well, read the report). Things to avoid: phthalates, which are commonly found in perfume and nail polish remover as well as plastics and may be linked to male reproductive disorders among other issues -- they're banned in the EU, and inexplicably still here in American products (like the iPhone). You can find phthalate-free nail polish/remover at Whole Foods. It's also worth avoiding parabens, which are a preservative in most shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers, even though the jury's still out on safe levels of these chemicals. They are a potential carcinogen and may mimic estrogen (high paraben levels were found in a breast cancer study). The 365 brand of beauty products is pretty cheap, believe it or not.

Interesting thread on raising an eco-conscious baby at this WashPost online discussion transcript basically urges us just to buy less stuff. Which is certainly not going to be your takeaway from my lunchbox suggestions, which are more along the line of investments you'd make to avoid creating a pile of disposable lunchstuffs like juiceboxes and the like. But then again, I don't just want a green baby, I want a green healthy baby. Heck, I want a green, healthy baby who actually eats her lunch!

In terms of avoiding plastics in your kid's lunchbox (I don't know about you but that's what almost all of our kidgear to date was made of until recently), check out Sigg (aluminum, though, which has raised health concerns in the past) or Klean Kanteen (stainless steel, but make a chirpy noise) bottles, Thermos Foogo storage jars, Reynolds Cut Rite wax paper sandwich bags (looove these! hardly ever available at Whole Foods, grab em when you can -- I'm going to try this online vendor), sandwich wraps, and Built NY lunchbags (go leadfree on the reusable lunch sacks). I really love the efficiency and food variety you can cram into Bento lunchboxes but wish they weren't filled with plastic tubs. And while we are talking kidlunch, do check out the archives of veganlunchbox for awesome ideas. If you want to buy any of this expensive enviro lunch packaging, check out Lunch in a Box and see if their coupon code/link to Reusable Bags -- can get you 20% off your order.

Speaking of bags, the Washington Post ran a phenomenal comparison of the enviro cost of paper vs. plastic bags recently. Bottom line tho: forget paper, forget plastic, we should all bring our own durned bags. In case you don't have 1,001 political/tech conference tchotchke bags already floating around your front hall closet, there are lots of clever reusable grocery bags out there. Makes me smile thinking back to college when roommates L and S and I used to wear our sweatshirts to the grocery store, take them off, and wrap up our food purchases in the zipped hoodies. I bet hoodies don't have crazy chemicals in them.... Read more!

Water, Water, Everywhere...and Nary a Drop To Drink

So, while I was pregnant with CBoy, the Post reported that male fish in the Potomac were starting to bear eggs. Sigh. This after the lead scare during EGirl's babyhood, and echoes in 2004 of the ecoli/coliform bacteria warnings in the early 90s that made me start boiling and then buying water in the first place.

I know that the environmentally friendly thing to do is to embrace tap water, as most of it is safe to drink, but I think the movement to skip bottled water (did you know that only 23% of those horrid little plastic bottles are recycled?!) may very well stagnate in our nation's capitol if the Potomac's water quality continues to go downhill. After all, bottled vs. tap in DC happens to be a faceoff between questionable quality and absurdity. Why, just this very morning, the Washington Post noted that female fish are starting to become "intersex," too, because of pollution in the Potomac. We'd used a variety of filters over the years but opted to buy bottled water in response to lead scares and to have water delivered as a response to hormone disruption press.

Another thing that fueled a change in the sourcing of my (for those who know me, prodigious) water consumption? Seltzer is not regulated like other drinking water bz it is considered a food by the FDA! So as I have long thought, Lord knows where the water in that seltzer comes from. (see the substance of a 1999 NRDC letter to the FDA).

The recent plastics press about Bisphenol-A leaching made me finally get off my duff and get rid of the plastic bottles. I had to solve the conundrum of getting clean water delivered in giant, 5-gallon #7 bottles that leach endocrine disruptors into said water. Our family is now getting water delivered from Arkansas, believe it or not (I know, I know, where *would* there be more hormone runoff than in a poultry state?!), extensively tested water sourced from a natural spring inside 600+ acres of protected land and delivered in glass bottles. Glass 5-gallon bottles that are heavy enough to make for some quality hoisting noises and expensive enough to provoke some quality sputtering noises at bill-paying time. I shudder to think about the environmental impact of shipping our water from Arkansas to DC but when I emailed our fabulous new mayor about my concerns (hormone disruption up at the tippy top with some gratuitous comments about the possibility of organic school lunch offerings a la Berkeley's affiliation with Alice Waters) his staff sent me back a chipper little snippet saying he'd be working on making healthy school lunches for *all* kids in the District. Sigh...

Next up on the agenda is to get a whole house water filter. If you own your own home, I say go for it. If you want to start thinking about drinking water issues in general, NRDC did a tap water study in 2003 called What's On Tap? that's a great place to start. Consumer Reports has a 2007 report on water filters that's helpful, too.

But what I really need to do is just drink more wine (organic wine from the Prestons should do nicely!) Read more!