Kids, Good Food, and the White House

The headline on White House chef Sam Kass’ blog recently read, “Planting the Winter Garden.” He was referring to the White House vegetable garden, which he and First Lady Michelle Obama use to promote fresh, healthy, and local eating, particularly among school children.

But Mr. Kass’ comments at a conference I attended last month, along with a flurry of new legislative activity in Congress, indicate that the Obama administration is planting more than gardens right now. It is planting the seeds for a big improvement in the country’s food policy, especially for young people.

There’s a groundswell of activity in Washington and around the country to make sure our kids grow up strong and vibrant, their brains and bellies nourished by fresh, healthy food. If you’re at all interested in helping schools and farmers add tasty, healthy local food to school meals, now is the time to pay attention and weigh in.

Mr. Kass, who spoke Dec. 10 at a W.K. Kellogg Foundation conference in the nation’s Capitol, made it clear that he and the Obama administration are deeply aware that children face alarming rates of obesity and debilitating diseases like diabetes that can be prevented with healthy eating and exercise.

“The First Lady intends to lead the effort in the health of our children,” said Mr. Kass, who has become something of a media darling with his shaved head, passionate promotion of healthy local foods, and unusual joint title of assistant chef and food initiative coordinator at the White House. “This will be an administration-wide effort.”

Support is building for making schools a pivotal part of this good food movement, providing good food for kids and an economic engine for farmers. For example:

• The Obama Administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched a “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” campaign, and “tactical teams” to visit schools around the country to learn how best to help schools be able to purchase fresh food from local farmers.
• The key bill that provides federal funding for school lunches, the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, is up for renewal. The national Farm to School Network, among others, is working to make sure it includes increased funding for school meals overall and mandates $50 million funding over five years for grants to help start up farm-to-school programs
• Three new bills that Congress is considering-and the subject of action alerts-specifically support farm-to-school programs.
• A National Farm-to-School conference is being planned in Detroit for May 17-19. The typically every-other-year conference will now happen two years in a row because of growing good food momentum across the country.

Mr. Kass is a strong proponent of better supporting schools in their efforts to feed our kids. He called school meals, which feed 30 million children, our nation’s largest nutrition program-and its largest anti-hunger program.

“For so many kids, school food is the only food they get, or the majority of calories they get,” he noted.

Another statistic also weighed on Mr. Kass’ mind, and showed his resolve: a new report that shows the highest number of Americans going hungry since 1995, the year such trends started being recorded. And that includes more than one in five children.

“All people have the right to have access to good, healthy food,” Mr. Kass said. “That is the line in the sand.”

Diane Conners is the Michigan Land Use Institute’s senior policy specialist for its Entrepreneurial Agriculture program. Reach her at diane@mlui.org.