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On the Scene

October 27, 2011
 

 

It wasn’t just A-list foodies and celebs like Mario Batali, Ellie Krieger and Morgan Spurlock who promoted the merits of a healthy food system in Times Square on Monday — PreventObesity.net Leaders also joined the festivities on Food Day.
 
Leader Deborah Lewison-Grant and her organization, FoodFight, took part in the “Eat Real, Eat In” Times Square gathering, teaching attendees about the local food movement. Leader Grace Freedman and the rest of our friends from the Blog for Family Dinner movement also were spotted in Times Square, stressing the importance of eating home cooked meals with the family.
 
After that event, the FoodFight team headed to another Food Day event featuring celebrity Chef Marvin Woods, who showed attendees how to whip up healthy snacks and smoothies. 
 
As astute readers of The Inside Track will recall, FoodFight is a New York program that offers an extensive curriculum that teaches students about the food system. It’s designed to teach students about how the corporate landscape and consumer culture has shaped the food system, and how they can work to change it for the better.
 
And students were on hand at the event to show off what they’ve learned, sharing lessons from that curriculum.
 
More than 1,800 events were held nationwide for Food Day, which was primarily organized by our friends at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. 
 
Many folks in the childhood obesity movement celebrated Food Day by taking part in events held at schools, from pre-schools to college campuses. Bobby DeMuro and his North Carolina-based nonprofit group, No Fizz USA, went to a local elementary school to stress the importance of healthy hydration (read: ditch the sugar-sweetened beverages) to students.
 
Some Food Day efforts were designed to spread the word in the media. Leader Dana Woldow wrote several op-eds that appeared in major newspapers in support of serving healthy meals at schools and local food banks. Woldow knows this area well — she’s the co-chair of the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) student nutrition and physical activity committee, and created the advocacy group PEACHSF to push for better food in the City by the Bay’s public schools. 
 
In a piece for San Francisco’s alternative online newspaper, Beyond Chron, she writes about how healthy school meals are often so expensive that schools simply cannot afford them — and why it’s vital that we look at fixing our entire food system in order to bring down those costs.
 
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Woldow co-authors an op-ed with Eric Mar arguing that SFUSD should open a central kitchen, which would be a cost-effective method of serving fresh and healthy food to students.
Issue - Healthy Food Access Food in Schools