From rpage at mcd.org Wed Nov 4 08:39:01 2009 From: rpage at mcd.org (Renee Page) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:39:01 -0500 Subject: [farm.school] FW: [COMFOOD:] New York Times on Sam Kass References: <1A611176-A632-4829-B1A5-79427FD03EEE@familyfarmed.org> Message-ID: <773EE4CD5297064CA0E331D1D6655544273916@MCDEXCH02.corp.mcd.org> Renee Page, MPH, CLC School/Youth Program Manager Healthy Communities of the Capital Area A Local Healthy Maine Partnership 36 Brunswick Avenue Gardiner, ME 04345 tel. 207-588-5020 cell. 207-557-2945 fax. 207-582-5804 rpage at mcd.org Visit us online at www.healthycommunitiesme.org "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY: This document transmitted contains information from Medical Care Development and may be confidential and privileged information. This information is intended for the use of the addressee. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, photocopying, distribution or use of its content is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please call immediately so that we may arrange to retrieve the original document. ________________________________ From: Sympa user on behalf of Jim Slama Sent: Wed 11/4/2009 8:01 AM To: Comfood Subject: [COMFOOD:] New York Times on Sam Kass A White House Chef Who Wears Two Hats By RACHEL L. SWARNS WASHINGTON TWICE a month, President Obama 's senior policy advisers gather at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to hash out strategies for improving the health of the country's children. Among the assistant secretaries, chiefs of staff and senior aides sits an unlikely participant: a bald, intense young man who happens to be the newest White House chef. His name is Sam Kass. And when he's not grilling fish for the first family or tending tomatillos in the White House garden, he is pondering the details of child nutrition legislation, funding streams for the school lunch program and the best tactics to fight childhood obesity. Part chef and part policy wonk, he is reinventing the role of official gastronome in the Executive Mansion. Indeed, Obama administration officials describe him as a vital conduit to the first family. "How do I get to the first lady, how do I try to transmit ideas and messages to her? Sam Kass," said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy agriculture secretary. "He's been a real ally when we talk about farm to school." Mr. Kass, 29, forged a close bond with the Obamas while cooking for them and their children for about two years before they moved to Washington and has golfed with the president on Martha's Vineyard. Behind the scenes, he attends briefings on child nutrition and health, has vetted nonprofits as potential partners for White House food initiatives and regularly peppers senior staff about policy matters. ("Do we have a toxicologist who specializes in colony collapse disorder?" Mr. Kass asked in a recent e-mail message about the Department of Agriculture's position on honey bees, Ms. Merrigan recalled.) For some former White House officials, this is nothing short of astonishing. Walter Scheib, the executive White House chef during the Clinton and Bush administrations, called Mr. Kass's involvement in public policy unique. While he is steeped in all matters locavore and was a moving force behind the White House garden, Mr. Kass has no formal culinary training and has never run a restaurant or hotel kitchen. (He graduated with a history degree from the University of Chicago and honed his culinary skills at Avec, a Chicago restaurant, before becoming a private chef.) In recent months, Mr. Kass has emerged as one of the most high-profile promoters of Michelle Obama 's healthy living agenda. He has baked Swiss chard frittatas for students on the White House lawn, prepared chicken salad with red onions and toasted almonds at the Department of Agriculture's cafeteria and sprinkled crab meal and ladybugs - instead of chemical fertilizers and pesticides - on the first lady's garden. "You look around our country and you see that we have a lot of major challenges, the origin of which is food," said Mr. Kass, who wore a suit and tie instead of kitchen whites during an interview in the East Reception Room of the White House. "It's not a big step to think about a) What am I doing? How is that affecting this problem? How am I helping? "Cooking for people's pleasure is obviously a nice thing to do," he said, "but the No. 1 reason we eat is to nourish ourselves and take care of ourselves." Mr. Kass's title is assistant White House chef and food initiative coordinator. Friends say he cooks primarily for the Obamas, while the executive chef, Cristeta Comerford, handles most formal gatherings. "He really has been put in place for a different role, for advising the first lady, for being the face of the place," Mr. Scheib said. "It's great that someone who is still physically in the kitchen, chopping, dicing, roasting, physically cooking, not just talking about cooking, would be part of that discussion." But after reading yet another mention of the young chef's physique, Mr. Scheib warned that the buzz was a bit overblown. (People magazine called Mr. Kass one of "Barack's Beauties" in its list of 100 Most Beautiful people this year.) "Let's remember: the guy's a cook," Mr. Scheib said. "There are people who are much more qualified to talk about nutrition than cooks. At the end of the day, we make food; we're not geniuses." Still, proponents of sustainable farming and locally grown, organic foods are cheering Mr. Kass on. Dan Barber, the chef at Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, said Mrs. Obama and Mr. Kass were helping Americans "think about food in a different way." Melody Barnes , the president's domestic policy adviser, who convenes the bimonthly meetings on children's health, described Mr. Kass as remarkably "in tune" with Mrs. Obama's thinking, though Ms. Barnes joked that she and her colleagues feared he might show up with "?ber-healthy cupcakes." Not to worry. Mr. Kass, who loved making pancakes for his parents when he was growing up in Chicago, is known for creating healthy and tasty dishes. "He was a focused, clean, hardworking cook who really knew what good food should taste like," said Paul Kahan, the executive chef and a partner at Avec. "But he always made it very clear that his goal was not to work his way up through the ranks in the kitchen. He wanted to be involved socially with food." That's why Mr. Kass became the executive chef at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago last year, where he offered up free soup, encouraged food-related debate and sharply criticized the modern agricultural system. In blogs on the museum's Web site, Mr. Kass linked government agricultural subsidies to a national lunch program that he described as disproportionately high in fat, preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup. "We find ourselves in a fight to salvage a food system that has been ravaged by an approach of quantity over quality," he wrote. "The industry our society has built around food is harmful and unsustainable." Mr. Kass has toned down that kind of talk since he came to the White House in January. These days, he describes big agricultural producers and fertilizer and pesticide companies as "partners," not obstacles to reform. That has not assuaged the White House's critics. After Mr. Kass said the White House garden would not use pesticides, the Mid America CropLife Association, an agricultural chemical trade group, urged Mrs. Obama to acknowledge the benefits of conventional agriculture to families who lack the time or means to tend backyard gardens. Jeffrey Stier of the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer education group financed by big food makers, said the Obama message was unrealistic for ordinary families. "The average family can't feed themselves all year round on their own garden," Mr. Stier said. "If you're concerned about cost, organic and locally grown is more expensive and you don't get any nutritional benefit from it." Mr. Kass and other officials say improving school lunches and widening access to farmers' markets for people on government aid will benefit the poor. "He's often the one who stops the conversation and says, 'People will do this and won't do that,' " said Jocelyn Frye, Mrs. Obama's policy director, who has pronounced Mr. Kass's collard greens and barbecued chicken "very good." As for his own tastes? He confesses to only a few indulgences, including tacos and chicken wings, though his friend, Tara Lane, a former pastry chef at Avec, described him as a "human garbage disposal." Mr. Kass says the enthusiasm he encounters at schools, federal agencies, farmers' markets and the like shows "there's a lot of desire to make change." But he is keenly aware of the challenges. On a visit to a school that prides itself on its healthy lunches, Mr. Kass watched ruefully as students plucked each vegetable off their pizzas. "It's got to taste good, you know?" he said. "They're not going to eat it, no matter how healthy it is, if it doesn't taste good." -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: message-footer.txt Url: http://mailman.informe.org/pipermail/farm.school/attachments/20091104/2dbde714/message-footer.txt From rpage at mcd.org Fri Nov 6 13:22:07 2009 From: rpage at mcd.org (Renee Page) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 13:22:07 -0500 Subject: [farm.school] FW: [COMFOOD:] Virginia Farm to School Week Update- November 9-13, 2009 References: <9269AB049ED62741A28FBF28706E31D32512D50740@fangorn.cc.w2k.vt.edu> Message-ID: <773EE4CD5297064CA0E331D1D6655544273938@MCDEXCH02.corp.mcd.org> Check out Virginia's F2S webpage and resources. Renee Page, MPH, CLC School/Youth Program Manager Healthy Communities of the Capital Area A Local Healthy Maine Partnership 36 Brunswick Avenue Gardiner, ME 04345 tel. 207-588-5020 cell. 207-557-2945 fax. 207-582-5804 rpage at mcd.org Visit us online at www.healthycommunitiesme.org "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY: This document transmitted contains information from Medical Care Development and may be confidential and privileged information. This information is intended for the use of the addressee. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, photocopying, distribution or use of its content is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please call immediately so that we may arrange to retrieve the original document. ________________________________ From: Sympa user on behalf of Benson, Matthew Sent: Thu 11/5/2009 2:46 PM To: 'comfood at elist.tufts.edu' Subject: [COMFOOD:] Virginia Farm to School Week Update- November 9-13, 2009 Especially for those in Virginia... On behalf of the Virginia Department of Education (DOE), Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (VDACS) and Virginia Farm to School Work Group, I would like to provide a brief update regarding the upcoming Virginia Farm to School Week, November 9 - 13, 2009. Official communication from both Virginia DOE (http://www.doe.virginia.gov/info_centers/administrators/superintendents_memos/2009/304-09.shtml) and VDACS (http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/news/releases-b/102809f2s.shtml) has been released encouraging every School Nutrition Director, community and the states agricultural industry to participate in sourcing local and regional foods for there cafeterias and lunch lines next week. As part of this initiative, special focus is being made to source Virginia apples for lunches. Already, we are aware of many participating school districts such as Albemarle County, Goochland County, James City County, Augusta County, Harrisonburg City, Madison County several private schools in Richmond, Rappahannock County and Rockbridge County. Many resources are available on the Virginia Farm to School Website: http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/farm.shtml. These include: * Getting Started- Farm to School 101- http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/pdf/f2sgettingstarted.pdf * Where to find Virginia Apple Growers- http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/pdf/applefarms.pdf o Virginia Grown Apple Fact Sheet- http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/pdf/applefacts.pdf * Virginia Produce Availability Chart- http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/pdf/farmproducechart.pdf Although it is a little late in the growing season, many products are still available such as apples, pears, asian pears, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, greens, potatoes, swiss chard and butternut squash. And of course meats and dairy products are available year round! Farm to School is something we can all support by connecting our local producers and growers to our local cafeterias, cultivating school gardens, and talking with Virginia's youth about the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. Best regards, Matt Matt Benson Virginia Cooperative Extension Community Viability Specialist Northern District Office P.O. Box 701 Warrenton, Virginia 20188 (540) 341-7961 -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: message-footer.txt Url: http://mailman.informe.org/pipermail/farm.school/attachments/20091106/f9ee3993/message-footer.txt From rpage at mcd.org Fri Nov 6 16:09:09 2009 From: rpage at mcd.org (Renee Page) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:09:09 -0500 Subject: [farm.school] Innovative Marketing Message-ID: <773EE4CD5297064CA0E331D1D665554427394E@MCDEXCH02.corp.mcd.org> Here is what European farmers are doing to direct market their milk to the public! Regardless your opinions on raw milk, this is a great idea, check out the short YouTube video. http://hartkeisonline.com/2009/11/05/milk-o-matic-a-big-hit-in-slovenian-farmers-markets/ Renee Page, MPH, CLC School/Youth Program Manager Healthy Communities of the Capital Area A Local Healthy Maine Partnership 36 Brunswick Avenue Gardiner, ME 04345 tel. 207-588-5020 cell. 207-557-2945 fax. 207-582-5804 rpage at mcd.org Visit us online at www.healthycommunitiesme.org "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY: This document transmitted contains information from Medical Care Development and may be confidential and privileged information. This information is intended for the use of the addressee. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, photocopying, distribution or use of its content is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please call immediately so that we may arrange to retrieve the original document. From rpage at mcd.org Thu Nov 19 09:09:21 2009 From: rpage at mcd.org (Renee Page) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:09:21 -0500 Subject: [farm.school] New Farm to School Resource Message-ID: <773EE4CD5297064CA0E331D1D66555442739C2@MCDEXCH02.corp.mcd.org> Check out this 3 1/2 minute cartoon video about growing food on a farm. The underlying message is "organic" (which may or may not be a message you want to send to students) but the tune is fun and would probably appeal to the Elementary crowd. I have to say I found it catchy and may add it to my iPod! http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=batch_download&send_id=778046440&email=57db3720cb1c698250dd705c053d44f4 Renee Page, MPH, CLC School/Youth Program Manager Healthy Communities of the Capital Area A Local Healthy Maine Partnership 36 Brunswick Avenue Gardiner, ME 04345 tel. 207-588-5020 cell. 207-557-2945 fax. 207-582-5804 rpage at mcd.org Visit us online at www.healthycommunitiesme.org "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY: This document transmitted contains information from Medical Care Development and may be confidential and privileged information. This information is intended for the use of the addressee. If you are not the addressee, any disclosure, photocopying, distribution or use of its content is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please call immediately so that we may arrange to retrieve the original document.