In the early days of TLT I used to post here as often as four or five times a day (really!) but sometimes a post was little more than my passing on a link to an interesting kid-and-food article. Eventually I regained my sanity and I now use TLT’s Facebook page for that purpose. (By the way, that’s why I ask readers at the end of each post to consider “liking” the FB page – it really does offer “value added” content to the main blog.)
But every now and then there’s a link that’s worth posting here, to reach all TLT readers, and I put this recent article by Marion Nestle in that category. Nestle is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University, and here she provides a concise but comprehensive overview of where federal school food reform now stands, almost one year after President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 into law. The article is short but it will give you a good understanding of the current stumbling blocks to school food reform, including efforts of various food lobbyists to derail some aspects of law and efforts by House Republicans to get the USDA to scrap the law’s hard-won reforms entirely.
As Nestle states in the conclusion of this article, it’s imperative that we contact our legislators and tell them we are watching their actions with respect to school food. To that end, I recently received this email from The Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Action Center, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The email provides a helpful link to make it easy to contact your senators, urging them to allow the USDA to move ahead with the reforms contemplated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.
If you care about school food, please take a few moments to express your views to your representatives in Congress. Thanks, all.
[Hat tip: PEACHSF.org for originally sharing the Nestle article on its Facebook page.]
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Done (Senators Lieberman and Blumenthal of CT), though I suspect I was preaching to the choir, particularly with respect to Blumenthal (as CT attorney general, he was a key leader in the successful fight to ban marketing of tobacco products to children nationwide as well as the fight for agreements with social networking sites to better protect children from Internet predators). It will be interesting to see how the revisions to the USDA regulations play out. Now it occurs to me that I ought to contact my House rep as well. Belt & suspenders and all that jazz.
Many thanks for posting all those helpful links, Bettina.
Thank you, Kim, for contacting your legislators and I’m glad these links were helpful. It’s hard for busy parents (including myself) to stay on top of these developments and the figure out how to be heard, so I’m glad to provide any assistance I can.