Food For the 21rst Century

Michael Pollen had an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday.

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

Can we finally move into the 21rst century? Pollen has given us a map to a new paradigm.

More Bear Stories

This time from the NY Times, from last Fall, that reports (may need to log in for this link) on the relationship between black bears and the resort town of Whistler, BC.

Beyond providing a setting of uncommon natural beauty, however, all this mingling of humankind and the wilderness seems to have produced something almost taxonomically unique: Wild bears so habituated to the presence of people that the biologists who have come here to study them say they’ve never seen anything like it — bears that lift the door handles of trucks to take possession of the cabs; bears that manage to snag the bait from a trap with one foot while holding the steel gate open with the other; bears that stroll munificently through the crowds at the Canada Day parade; bears in the pubs, the hotels, the day-care centers, the landfills, meat lockers, grease vents, underground parking garages. In Whistler, if a bear doesn’t get into something humans are guarding, it’s usually because too many other bears got there first.

People and nature collide hard. What to do?

Camp Vision is 20/20

The American Camp Association has a vision.

The time is now to create a 20/20 vision–a vision of commitment to serve 20 million by the year 2020. Today, 10 million children and youth go to camp annually. Yet, we only directly impact 3 million of those experiences. By 2020, we want no fewer than 20 million children going to camp annually with the ACA camp community directly impacting the lives of those 20 million children.

Check out more at their website and their blog.

The more kids that head to camp, the better our future will be.

Obesity is the Hot Topic

The recent articles on obesity in the Post have sparked some interest and good analysis.

Andrew Sullivan jumps into the issue here by linking to Ezra Kline's piece in the American Prospect. As Kline notes, lots goes into this problem.

"Only in December did the U.S. Department of Agriculture modify the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program to assist low-income families in buying fresh fruits and produce," reports The Washington Post in their feature on obesity. "The addition was blocked for a decade by politics and by industry sectors worried that WIC's food packages would contain less milk, eggs and cheese."

The WIC is a federal program that "provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk." In other words, it's a health program for expectant mothers and young families. And for decades, the program was blocked from encouraging families to buy fruits and produce and instead used to push saturated fat, cholesterol, and more cholesterol milk, eggs, and cheese. Charming.

Time to get our priorities in line, where outdoor activity is mixed with healthy diets, no?

Here We Go

So a snowball is starting to roll from the Right.

Now the American Spectator attacks the No Child Left Behind Movement. Funny how the author immediately discounts all of the work and research done simply because a state proposes a tax, which I'm told died in committee.The article also plugs the importance of Nintendo to kid's health.

Fiscal arguments aside, what about the concerns about kids' health and their appreciation of the great outdoors? Interestingly, physical education teachers have had demonstrated success by using indoor play as a reliable way to fight obesity in schools across the country, using the same tools that the No Child Left Insiders want to tax.

That's right, the popular Dance Dance Revolution and even Nintendo Wii games have been incorporated into P.E. classrooms to promote physical activity. The American Academy of Pediatrics conducted a study of this phenomenon published in the journal Pediatrics, with some fascinating findings.

Nobody is saying that exercise in a gymnasium is not a tool to fight childhood obesity.

Then she wraps up with this:

There's the real purpose behind the No Child Left Inside initiative. It's not "for the children"; it's for the activists.

Perhaps the author of this piece, a policy analyst for the American Taxpayer's Union (she specializes in monetary policy, the housing market, and brand loyalty), should stop cherrypicking her research and look at the whole issue of nature deficit.

A postscript, the purpose of this site is not to examine tax proposals, so we'll have no comment on the merits or problems of such a tax.