The Healthy School Food Coalition has worked with both parent advocates and the school district itself on reform in the school meal program since 2001.  We understand that there are a lot of problems with the school food system and that meal service in LAUSD continues to need a lot of improvement.  We also understand that the school food system is complex and that there are many factors determining what food is served, and how, and why.

Anyone who has spent time with LAUSD Food Services Director Dennis Barrett has heard him refer to the National School Lunch & Breakfast Programs as “the greatest hidden treasure in America.”  He says so because the program supplies 2 free meals a day to millions of low-income children, and  extremely low-cost meals (usually under $2) to any school child regardless of income.  LAUSD alone serves over 600,000 such meals every day.   When a school district this large sets out to make its meals healthier and undo the well-established stereotype of “county food,” it really means something.

In a school district with nearly 700,000 students spread among 900 school facilities serving the same menu every day, no change is likely to go smoothly.   The development of  a healthy menu without fast-food items is a process, one that is challenged by many obstacles (deliveries, supplier negotiations, staff training, etc.) in addition to outcry by students who are skeptical of change.  What can we do as advocates of healthy food for children?  TRY THE FOOD.  Try it.  Get your kids to try it.  Get your kid’s teacher to try it.  Supporting change in the school meal program is essential to moving towards healthier meals, healthier schools, and healthier children.

Contact: Zoë Phillips, Farm to Preschool Program Manager UEPI, Occidental College

323-341-5098 begin_of_the_skype_highlig            323-341-5098      end_of_the_skype_highlighting (office), 323-258-2917 (fax)

FARM TO PRESCHOOL PROGRAM BRINGS FRESH FOODS TO URBAN PRESCHOOL PLATES
Preschoolers Tend Their Garden and Demonstrate Their Salad-Making Skills

LOS ANGELES (May 12, 2011) – Forget junk food–preschool age children at Magnolia Place are preparing and eating cucumber salad, tending to an onsite garden and learning about food systems from their teacher. It’s all part of the Farm to Preschool program, a two-year pilot, funded by grants from The Kresge Foundation and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, and organized through a partnership between Occidental College’s Urban & Environmental Policy Institute and the Magnolia Place Family Center’s Children’s Bureau and PACE Early Childhood Education Head Start preschool programs. Ryan Reddy, Children’s Bureau Head Teacher says, “Our involvement in Farm to Preschool has given our students multiple exposures, in various contexts, to fresh produce. They have learned that trying new foods can be fun, and their overall opinion of fresh produce has improved dramatically. These foundational changes in their perspectives will have lasting effects on each child’s ability to make healthy food choices.”

What: More than 60 child care agencies and preschools from Long Beach to Santa Clarita are sending representatives to learn more about how this program can be adopted for their various urban locations.

When: Thursday, May 12th from 8:30am-12:30pm

Where: Magnolia Place Family Center (Johnson Auditorium and preschool playground) 1910 Magnolia Ave, Los Angeles 90007 (Near intersection of Washington and Hoover, south of downtown Los Angeles)

Through the Farm to Preschool program, kids between the ages of three and five years old learn about nutrition and local food systems as well as how to grow their own vegetables. The program also aims to increase access to fresh fruit and produce at Los Angeles and San Diego preschools by encouraging preschool operators to purchase from local farms. “The program has been immensely successful with preschoolers, families and teachers. We want to address the childhood obesity epidemic by helping kids and their families have better access to, and develop a preference for, fresh fruits and vegetables.” Says Program Manager Zoe Phillips, “This is one great way we can begin to accomplish that.”

The program has made an impact beyond the children to their parents and families through facilitated discussions on healthy eating and cooking demonstrations that emphasize homemade fresh food. Says Mary Helen Vasquez, Child Development Director, Children’s Bureau, “The Farm to Preschool program has brought an awareness about fruits and vegetables for the children that has resulted in children being involved in what is selected when they go to the market with their parents.”

Today’s Demonstration Day is attracting child care agencies and preschools from Long Beach to Santa Clarita including: Connections for Children, LAUP (LA Universal Preschool), LA Valley College, LAUSD (LA Unified School District), Lynwood USD, Hacienda-La Puente USD, Santa Monica-Malibu USD, Long Beach Day Nursery, LACOE (LA County Office of Education), ELACC (East LA Community Corporation) and Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, which operates in multiple counties.

Interviews and Follow Up Questions
Please contact us to arrange interviews with program participants and organizers, including:

• Zoë Phillips, Farm to Preschool Program Manager, UEPI, Occidental College
• Rosa Romero, Farm to Preschool Program Coordinator, UEPI, Occidental College
• Mary Helen Vasquez, Child Development Director, Children’s Bureau
• Marina Aguillen, Site Supervisor, PACE ECE Head Start
• Roberta Tinajero, Healthy Eating Active Living Manager, Kaiser Permanente

About Magnolia Place Family Center
Magnolia Place Family Center, dedicated in October 2008, serves as a community hub for families to meet, share, grow, and socialize with their friends and neighbors. The Family Center is a 46,000 square foot facility on three acres. Multiple organizations provide comprehensive programs and services in four areas which experts agree are the keys to strengthening families: nurturing parenting, economic stability, good health and school readiness.

About Occidental College and UEPI
Occidental College is a small liberal arts college located in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Occidental is regularly ranked as one of the most diverse college campuses in the country, and encourages its students and faculty to engage Community-Based Learning opportunities. The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) at Occidental College is a community-oriented research and advocacy organization with a mission of creating a more just, livable and democratic region. UEPI serves as the umbrella for a variety of affiliated programs addressing work and industry, food and nutrition, housing, transportation, regional and community development, land use, and urban environmental issues.

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The Riverside Press Enterprise published an op ed today written by Bob and Rodney Taylor, the Food and Nutrition Director at Riverside Unified School District. They talk about the transformation of school food that is happening in many ways around the country, and discuss their involvement in the beginnings, and continuation, of the movement.

Read “Kids like healthy food; so let’s give it to them” here

The article also mentions the event at Growcology in the upcoming week. Both Bob and Rodney will be sharing stories about their involvment in Farm to School and other parts of the food justice movement. They will be joined at the event by Bob Knight of the Old Grove Orange Growers Collaborative, and Bianca Heyming, the director of Growcology. For more information about the event please visit the events page.

The food justice movement is alive – and growing – in Arizona. This, despite, or perhaps even due to, a political climate that, at least at this moment, is chilling.

For example, just Thursday, when I was returning back to L.A., less than two months after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and nine people were killed in Tucson, the Arizona State Senate debated legislation that would allow students to bring guns into the classroom. When the measure was finally passed, the legislators decided to modify the bill to allow students to bring guns onto campus on the sidewalks and into the common areas but not yet into the classroom. “Sometimes you have to take baby steps,” the bill sponsor Sen. Ron Gould told the local Fox news station, asserting that he still eventually wants to give those gun toting students full access to the entire campus, including the classrooms.

If it’s not guns, it’s subsidies for the Tea Party. Arizona Senate Republicans introduced a bill to create a Tea Party license plate, with the Tea Party slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” The bill seeks to create a fund from the proceeds of the “Don’t Tread on Me (DTM)” license plates that would be administered by a state appointed Arizona Tea Party Committee which would in turn have available $17 out of the $25 payment for the plates. Those funds could then be distributed by the Tea Party fund managers through grants to any nonprofit dedicated to promoting “Tea Party governing principles.”

The Arizona legislature has also led the way in establishing what can only be called a campaign of terror against immigrants, especially those without papers but ultimately against all Latinos. More than 100,000 immigrants left the state in the first several months after the passage of SB 1070, the racial profiling and criminalization of immigrants legislation currently held up in the courts. And while the numbers of those exiting the state has since declined (although there is still net migration out of state), the mood of continual vulnerability pervades Latino and immigrant communities. This is terror in the guise of the legislature’s immigration policy and it has come to symbolize, along with guns and Tea Party subsidies, a right wing politics out of control.

Yet the mood at the various talks and discussions I had in Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix last week, was upbeat, and the level of participation was high, both at the campus and community events. There’s a lot of passion about food issues and it’s also clear to many of those who came to the events, that food issues are part of a larger social change agenda; an agenda that is also about changing the politics – and the mood – in the State.

In Tucson, at the community gathering sponsored by the Community Food Bank where I spoke, there were dozens of ideas, programs, policy approaches, and related on-the-ground initiatives talked about and new connections made. There were also those engaged in border and immigration issues, health issues, and political mobilization. In a community still shell-shocked about the shootings in January and horrified by the right wing Tea Party takeover of the Legislature, the passion for engagement and desire for change was palpable.

In Flagstaff, community food activists from groups like FoodLink who have embraced a food justice agenda have teamed up with several of the faculty and students who are part of what they call action-research teams, based at programs ranging from the Program for Community, Culture and Environment to a Holocaust-focused program that is highlighting issues of human rights. There was a clear desire of many of the participants who came to the talks on food justice to want to see themselves as change agents, and to help bring about a change in the politics of the state.

In Phoenix, more than a hundred students and faculty came to hear a quickly organized Food Justice talk at Arizona State University, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability. There was also an afternoon event at the Public Market, an innovative outdoor market and indoor alternative food store located in downtown Phoenix and an evening book talk at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, a surviving independent book store that has become an important community gathering place. Like the events in Tucson and Flagstaff, where participation exceeded organizer expectations, there was a strong sense of commitment and desire to make things happen. Immigrant rights continued to complement the focus on food justice along with the desire to kick the rascals out, symbolized by an emerging recall campaign against State Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, the leader of the war against immigrants. This is the face of Arizona that gives one hope, even – or especially — for those who might otherwise be assumed to have abandoned hope.

At the Changing Hands bookstore event in Phoenix, a question was asked about the problem of issue silos, whether those in the food movement, or the immigrant rights movement, or the environmental movement, had weakened their own advocacy by focusing on their single issue.  I answered by talking about the need to make connections, and gave an example of how some community-based environmental justice groups had come to be involved in issues around global trade and freight traffic impacting their communities. Afterwards, I thought that perhaps the answer was too limited, that the challenge for each of those movements was the need to not just connect the dots but see the work as part of building what used to be called in the 1960s, the Movement for Social Change. This would necessarily become a redefining of politics in an age of Tea Partyism, the war on immigrants, and a food system that is neither just, nor healthy, nor meeting the needs of the producers or the eaters. And there’s no place better for that to happen than in Arizona.

The Arizona Republic ran this story today, Professor links food to economic, social, environmental issues, with a short interview of Bob. And if you are in the Pheonix area in tonight be sure to check out Bob’s talk at the Phoenix Public Market and book signing at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe!

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