Childhood Hunger
Latest News on November 2009
- November 24
Outside a World of Wealth Stands the Reality of Hunger -
You can drive past the lovely North Side house of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and smack into Chicago’s invisible poor.
The New York Times
By James Warren
November 24, 2009You can drive past the lovely North Side house of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and smack into Chicago’s invisible poor.
One block, two blocks, three blocks and there, at the corner of Wilson and Hermitage, is the Tuesday night line of the beleaguered and unlucky, seemingly bending to the horizon.
Whatever the weather, they await the opening of a food pantry run by All Saints Episcopal Church, right across the street from a seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 6,000-square-foot home with a wraparound porch, a two-bedroom coach house, gated private driveway and what refined members of the propertied class know as a porte-cochere.
The single file outside is as tidy an economic barometer as any Labor Department news release. Federal stimulus aside, the line only gets bigger and inspires grousing by a few neighbors that the church is “attracting” misbegotten souls from afar.
They squealed to the alderman, and now Ravenswood Community Services, a nonprofit group involved with the church, uses 6 percent of its budget for two convivial off-duty cops, Ray and Mike, to hang around on Tuesday nights. The money would be better used on the bags of groceries and hot dinners served to more than 350 people each week, up from 220 a year ago. Countywide, the Greater Chicago Food Depository broke its own melancholy record in September, with 427,660 visits to member pantries like this.
The men, women and children who show up at the church cling to life’s bottom with virtually no safety net. Yes, there is Mayor Richard M. Daley’s sparkling postindustrial Chicago, with miles of flowers, the sparkling Millennium Park, the Museum Campus, booming new financial markets, the theaters, restaurants and skyscrapers, like Aon Center and Willis Tower, renamed for global insurance brokerage powerhouses. Then there is our dirty little secret of godawful poverty.
James, who is in his 50s, battled drugs, was run out of the projects by gangbangers and lived under bridges for 10 years. Rico, in his late 40s, dropped out of college and went to work climbing poles for the phone company, then became addicted to drugs, screwing up a marriage and a life. Joe, 50, a divorced former trucker from Philadelphia, lives on the streets and spends hours each day in a public library, where he has learned much about an obscure French philosopher and molecular biology. He may have to take “a few more steps backward before I can go forward,” he tells me.
There is a bag of groceries for those with kitchens, one for those without. There are cans of spinach, carrots, applesauce, tomatoes and packages of spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, quarts of milk, loaves of bread, beef stew, walnuts, Triscuits, frozen chickens, toilet paper, peanut butter, chicken noodle soup and jelly.
Volunteers cook for a maximum of 160 at round, heavy-duty plastic tables seating nine. Last week it was beef tacos, rice and beans and churros. Once a month, a man who runs a catering service provides a feast pro bono; a recent evening it was a juicy pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes, salad and green beans.
There are examples of folks with bum luck but also of many with mental illness. Ironically, that big Queen Anne across the street was built in 1891 by W. C. Abbott, a Ravenswood pharmacist who founded Abbott Laboratories and pioneered pills to allow more regular dosages for patients.
The church and volunteers treat and serve their visitors as valued guests. A retired psychiatric nurse helps them to understand medications. There is H.I.V. testing. And while a majority, clearly wracked by a certain shame, just pick up their groceries and slip back into the night, those who stay for dinner are drawn by a multilayered hunger.
“What I’ve been struck by is how lonely people are and how the companionship is as important as the food,” says Anne Ford, a freelance writer contemplating a book of interviews with regulars. “It’s not as if they’re looking for deep, meaningful chats. But just the ordinary pleasantries of life.”
Oh, the couple across the street just put the Abbott House on the block for $2.3 million. Buy it and the porch will provide a box seat view of our complex economy. And, if so inclined, consider walking into a place like All Saints and keeping fellow citizens from drowning.
- November 23
Nat'l Teacher Survey Shows Many Children Too Hungry to Learn -
Hunger in America’s Classrooms: Share Our Strength’s Teachers Report shows schools & teachers are critical safety net for nearly 17 million U.S. children facing hunger.
Hunger in America’s Classrooms: Share Our Strength’s Teachers Report
November 23, 2009Washington, D.C. — Share Our Strength®, the leading national organization working to end childhood hunger in America, released powerful survey results today indicating that teachers across America see children arriving at school hungry. Whether they work in urban, rural or suburban communities, teachers believe that hunger is a problem negatively affecting their student’s ability to learn.
Hunger in America’s Classrooms: Share Our Strength’s Teachers Report, conducted by Lake Research Partners and funded by C&S Wholesale Grocers, shows that schools provide a critical safety net for kids when it comes to food and that teachers often are the first responders to hunger in our classrooms. In fact, 62 percent of teachers say they see children who regularly come to school hungry each week because they are not getting enough to eat at home.
“No amount of creative lesson planning on my part, no amount of studying on my students’ part can change the fact that if children don’t have their basic nutritional needs satisfied, they cannot learn,” said Christine Gottshall, a fifth-grade teacher at Orchard Green School in Roxbury, Mass.
The report contains highlights of a public opinion survey of 740 kindergarten through eighth grade public school teachers nationwide conducted October 21 to 28, 2009.
“No child in America should grow up hungry. We have national programs in place, like school lunch and school breakfast, that can help all kids in need. We need to overcome the barriers that prevent families from enrolling their children in these programs and make sure that all children have nutritious food where they live, learn and play,” said Bill Shore, founder and executive director of Share Our Strength.
The study reveals that teachers report seeing a range of physical and behavioral symptoms of hunger in their students, including lack of concentration (92%), lethargy (72%), complaining of hunger (69%), stomachaches (68%), headaches (60%) and irritability (53%).
More than three-quarters of teachers said they respond to hunger in the classroom by helping students’ families sign up for free or reduced-price meals. And, shockingly, 63% of teachers report that they spend money from their own pocket to buy food for kids in their classrooms.
Recently released figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that nearly 17 million U.S. children — almost one in four kids—face hunger today, which is an increase of more than 4 million children in one year. Share Our Strength’s report also indicates that the problem in worsening. Among teachers who believe hunger in the classroom is a serious problem, three-quarters say the problem has increased in the past year.
“More families in my school are struggling for the first time. They don’t know how to sign their children up for school meals and are embarrassed to ask for help,” said Amanda Whitaker, a fifth grade teacher at Gilchrist Elementary School in Tallahassee, Fla. “I teach in a middle class community where few people would believe there are hungry kids, but five out of 24 kids in my class struggle with hunger on a regular basis.”
This report was made possible by C&S Wholesale Grocers. “We are proud to support Share Our Strength in its efforts to end childhood hunger in America by 2015,” said Gina Goff, Director of Director of Community Involvement at C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc. “This report shines a light on a critical problem in this country, and it perfectly aligns with our core priorities of caring for children and eliminating hunger.”
What You Can Do
- November 18
Broader Strategy Urged To Combat Hunger In U.S. -
Just one day after a federal report revealed that 1 in 7 U.S. families struggled to get enough to eat last year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urged lawmakers to reauthorize school nutrition programs that help feed the nation’s schoolchildren.
National Public Radio
Deborah Tedford
November 17, 2009Just one day after a federal report revealed that 1 in 7 U.S. families struggled to get enough to eat last year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urged lawmakers to reauthorize school nutrition programs that help feed the nation’s schoolchildren.
Appearing before the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee on Tuesday, Vilsack said the child nutrition programs provide an opportunity to fight child hunger. A USDA report released Monday said 49 million people experienced what the government calls “food insecurity” in 2008.
“Yesterday, the department released a report showing that in over 500,000 families with children in 2008, one or more children simply do not get enough to eat. They had to cut the size of their meals, skip meals or even go whole days without food at some time during the year,” Vilsack said. “This is simply unacceptable in a nation as wealthy and developed as the United States.”
In the 2010 budget, President Obama has proposed an additional $10 billion over 10 years for programs to provide meals and improve child nutrition.
The National School Lunch Program serves 31 million children in 100,000 participating schools across the country; the School Breakfast Program serves about 11 million children in 88,000 schools.
“For many children in our programs, school lunch and breakfast represents the only healthy food that they eat all day,” Vilsack said. He also encouraged lawmakers to expand the programs and work to ensure that children have food during “gap periods” when school isn’t in session.
On Monday, Vilsack said a broader strategy is needed to eliminate hunger, and he lauded the Obama administration’s efforts to address the reasons that many Americans don’t have enough food.
“The fundamental cause of food insecurity and hunger in the United States is poverty — marked by a lack of adequate resources to address basic needs, such as food, shelter and health care,” he said in a statement on the USDA Web site. “The Obama administration has taken aggressive action on these fronts through the expansion of critical services for Americans most in need.”
The USDA’s annual report on food security painted a bleak picture of food availability. According to the report, 17 million U.S. households didn’t always have access to food last year — up from 13 million households in 2007. The figure was the highest level since the USDA began tallying the figures in 1995.
Many of the families relied on federal food and nutrition assistance programs, community food pantries and soup kitchens, the report said. Family members often skipped meals, and many adults did without food to provide for children in the family.
As bad as the USDA report is, Shamia Holloway of the Capital Area Food Bank said it doesn’t reflect what’s going on in communities now.
“Those figures are for 2008, but we expect to see even more families in need, more people suffering” this year, Holloway said. Calls to the food bank’s Hunger Lifeline, an emergency food referral program, have increased 91 percent this year, she said.
Holloway said the worsening situation is partly due to the poor economy and rising national unemployment — which hit 10.2 percent in October.
“The economy has exacerbated the situation of the working poor, and it’s affecting middle-class people now” because of unemployment, said Holloway. “The economy has significantly weakened, so there are more families struggling to get access to enough food, and nutritious food.”
The Washington, D.C.-based food bank gives groceries to 700 agencies, churches, food pantries and other community groups to distribute to those in need. But the increased demand means supplies are being quickly depleted, and food distribution agencies have less to give.
Holloway said area food distribution agencies have reported increased requests for aid, ranging from 30 percent to 100 percent. She added that more than 633,000 people are at risk of hunger in the Washington area.
Vilsack said the elderly are especially vulnerable.
“We see seniors who have to decide, ‘Am I going to buy my medicine this month, or am I going to eat this month,’ ” Vilsack said.
- November 17
Meal program aims to keep kids hungry for learning -
D.C. schools try to boost participation in free service with classroom breakfasts
The Washington Post
Bill Turque
November 16, 2009The lights are still off in Alex Brown’s fourth-grade classroom at Friendship Public Charter School’s Southeast Elementary Academy just before 8 a.m. as he tends to an integral part of his early morning routine: placing small purple-and-yellow boxes called “breakfast breaks” in front of each seat.
It’s a modest meal: cereal (Lucky Charms on this day), graham crackers, juice and milk. But for many of his math students, who will soon be filing in, it is more than they often get at home.
“We have some students who need this,” Brown said. “If you haven’t eaten, the last thing you think about is learning.”
Educators and health experts have long stressed the link between breakfast and academic performance, reduced obesity rates and other benefits. Free breakfast is available to the 45,000 students in D.C. public schools and some of the 28,000 in public charter schools, and much of the cost is reimbursed by the federal government.
But a handful of D.C. schools looking to increase the number of children who eat breakfast are starting to serve it in classrooms, incorporating it into the first 15 minutes of the day.
Educators say that a classroom breakfast helps minimize two traditional obstacles to getting more kids to eat. Many students from low-income families who eat free and reduced-price lunches underwritten by the federal government don’t take advantage of breakfast. It often requires them to go early to the school cafeteria, and it can carry the stigma of a government program, experts say.
Jerry Haley, director of food and nutrition for Friendship’s eight schools in the District and Baltimore, said attendance at Southeast’s cafeteria breakfasts was so light that “we would end up throwing away more than we would serve.”
Other students arrive late. Having food for them in classrooms gives them a chance to put something in their stomachs before starting the day.
Southeast officials said that since launching classroom breakfasts two years ago, participation in the morning meal has dramatically increased at the K-6 school of more than 500 students, which is in a converted former Safeway off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Friendship’s Southeast is one of eight D.C. public charter schools that are trying the idea. D.C. public schools began it on a pilot basis this month at Garfield Elementary in Southeast.
“We intend to assess the results and determine next steps accordingly,” schools spokeswoman Jennifer Calloway said.
Maryland Meals for Achievement, a state project started in 1998, serves classroom breakfasts in 198 schools, including 48 in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. School systems in New York City, Newark, Minneapolis and Boston also are trying it.
The initiatives are part of a broader push to emphasize breakfast. Some school districts are experimenting with “grab and go” meals that allow students to pick up a boxed breakfast in the cafeteria and eat it in a classroom or elsewhere in the building. For middle and high school students, some districts are piloting “second-chance breakfasts,’ in which students are allowed time after their first-period classes to get food.
Haley said that principals and teachers initially resisted classroom breakfasts. There were concerns about trash disposal, increased janitorial costs and giving oversubscribed instructors another task.
But Marcella Windley, who teaches second and third grade at Friendship Southeast, said that the program “works perfectly” and that it has done away with many midmorning stomachaches and trips to the nurse’s office.
Friendship Southeast staff members also said they think it’s no coincidence that the school ranks in the top third of D.C. schools in reading and math proficiency, with significant growth in the last three years. “It’s been a substantial change,” Windley said.
As her 19 students walked in at 8 a.m., they quietly opened their boxes and tucked into the cereal, reading or talking quietly as classmates distributed cartons of milk. Windley uses the interval as “quiet time” and as a warm-up to a brief yoga session before class starts.
Third-grader Jayquan Byrd, 8, who said he’d had a Pop-Tart at home, said it was a good way to start the day.
“It helps me,” he said.
- November 16
Even More Americans Going Hungry -
The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track.
The Washington Post
Amy Goldstein
November 16, 2009The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.
In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.
Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.
Taken together, the findings provide the latest glimpse into the toll that the weak economy has taken on the well-being of the nation’s residents. The findings are from a snapshot of food in America that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued every year since 1995, based on Census Bureau surveys. It documents both Americans who are scrounging for adequate food — people living with some amount of “food insecurity” in the lexicon of experts — and those whose food shortages are so severe that they are hungry.
The report released Monday is the first produced during the tenure of President Obama, who pledged during his campaign for the White House last year to eliminate hunger among children by 2015, a goal that no previous president has set. The administration has not produced a full-fledged plan to meet that objective, but White House and Agriculture officials said in recent interviews that they are developing policies. Among the first is a decision to use $85 million freed up by Congress as part of a recent appropriations bill to experiment with ways to get food to more children during the summer, when subsidzed school breakfasts and lunches are unavailable. The government’s next significant forum for debating how to improve access to food is scheduled for the coming year, when Congress is to renew the country’s main law covering food and nutrition for children. Meantime, the White House has been convening frequent meetings with officials from several federal departments — including Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, in addition to Agriculture — that deal with youngsters’ well-being.
The report suggests that the main federal programs intended to help people struggling to get adequate food are only partly fulfilling their purpose. Slightly more than half the people surveyed who reported they had food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government’s main anti-hunger and nutrition programs: food stamps, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.
Last year, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared to 3.9 million in 2007, while people in about 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the year before.
Food shortages, the report shows, are particularly pronounced among women raising children alone. Last year, more than one in three single mothers reported that they struggled for food and more than one in seven said someone in their home had been hungry — far eclipsing the food problem in any other kind of household. The report also found that people who are black or Hispanic were more than twice as likely as whites to report that food in their home was scarce.
Poverty and food shortages are linked but not the same thing, according to the report. Just half the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, the data show, while most of the rest have slightly less than twice the poverty level.
In the Washington area, the extent of food shortages varies significantly. In the District, an average of 13.7 percent of households between 2006 and 2008 have had at least some problems getting enough food, although the problem in D.C. has declined slightly from a three-year period a decade earlier, according to the report. In Virginia, the prevalence of food shortages also has fallen in the past year to less than 9 percent. In Maryland, the problem has grown slightly worse, increasing to an average of 9.6 percent the past three years from 8.7 percent a decade before.
Overall, the data show that people who do not consistently have enough food experience the problem repeatedly, but not all the time. On average, households with such scarcity had the problem seven months out of the year, while about one-fourth said the problem occurred almost every month.
In the survey used to measure food shortages, people were considered to have food insecurity if they said that answered “yes” to several of a series of questions. Among the questions were whether, in the past year, their food sometimes ran out before they had money to buy more, whether they could not afford to eat nutritionally balanced meals, and whether adults in the family sometimes cut the size of their meals — or skipped them — because they lacked enough money for food. The report defined the degree of their food insecurity by the number of the questions that they answered yes.
What You Can Do
- November 14
100-City Food Drive -
AT&T, AT&T Pioneers and Share Our Strength Hold 100-City Food Drive to Fight Childhood Hunger This Holiday Season
This holiday season, residents in 100 cities across the U.S will have the opportunity to answer a “holiday call to service” to fight childhood hunger. The nationwide initiative is led by the AT&T and the AT&T Pioneers, the industry’s largest employee and retiree volunteer organization, who have teamed up with Share Our Strength, a leading national organization working to end childhood hunger in America. The initiative also supports the goals of “United We Serve,” a nationwide service initiative dedicated to inspiring volunteerism.
The 100-city food drive will be held from November 12 to December 18, and will focus on collecting non-perishable goods that will go directly to support local food banks. In addition to the holiday food drives, AT&T will contribute $50,000 to Share Our Strength to support its mission of ending childhood hunger in America by 2015.
“Childhood hunger is tragic. But as American citizens and American businesses, we can have impact,” said Charlene Lake, AT&T Chief Sustainability Officer. “Our contributions will help a child. But they also strengthen our communities — and the health of our communities impacts us all. We’re proud to partner with Share our Strength and to support United We Serve in this holiday call to service to fellow businesses and residents in 100 cities across the nation.”
The nationwide holiday food drive is part of AT&T Cares, a community-focused, volunteerism initiative for the company’s nearly 300,000 employees. Launched this summer and backed by the AT&T Pioneers, the comprehensive volunteer initiative gets employees engaged in community service that is meaningful to them and their communities, to create change, and to stay engaged.
“We are very excited to see this large-scale volunteer effort by AT&T and want to encourage more companies and organizations to get involved,” said Nicola Goren, acting CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency leading the Administration’s United We Serve initiative. “This effort will give vital support to children and families facing hunger and is an excellent example of people coming together to tackle a serious community problem. We hope it inspires other Americans to visit www.Serve.gov to find other volunteer opportunities in their communities.”
- November 13
USDA and Massachusetts Work Together To End Childhood Hunger -
Vilsack Says Child Nutrition Reauthorization is Opportunity to Work Towards Goal of Ending Childhood Hunger
The Gov Monitor
November 13, 2009Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today visited Worchester, Mass., to help launch a hospital hunger initiative at UMass Memorial Health Care in Worchester aimed at eliminating hunger in our communities and reducing the barriers that keep families from receiving adequate nutrition.
Vilsack was joined by Congressman Jim McGovern and Governor Deval Patrick as part of his efforts to draw attention to the issues of food insecurity and hunger and promote the upcoming Child Nutrition Reauthorization.
“President Obama and I are committed to improving the nutrition and health of all Americans, which is why we look forward to working with Congress to improve the health and nutrition of America’s families through the Child Nutrition Reauthorization.” said Vilsack. “The reauthorization presents a significant opportunity to improve the quality of school meals served to more than 31 million children in more than 100,000 schools across the country and to reduce barriers to participation.
The collaborative effort we are celebrating at today’s event, and others like it, will play a key role in eliminating the barriers that keep families from participating in nutrition programs and reduce food insecurity in our communities.”
Vilsack was on hand with Congressman McGovern to unveil a new handbook that takes a practical, hands-on approach to combating food insecurity and hunger. The book, called “Hunger in the Community: Ways Hospitals Can Help,” provides hospitals workers with all the information they need to get a program started.
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), the Federal agency that administers the Nation’s domestic nutrition assistance programs, is the nation’s first line of defense against hunger and a critical safety net for the underserved Americans.
FNS administers the 15 domestic nutrition assistance programs which together comprise the Nation’s food safety net. They include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP (formerly the Food Stamp Program); National School Lunch Program (NSLP); Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program; and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), among others.
Nutrition education and outreach efforts to the underserved are top priorities in all FNS mission areas. By providing nutrition education, low-income individuals and families are better equipped to connect dietary choices and physical activity with overall wellbeing. To increase participation, FNS conducts outreach targeting eligible populations, such as Hispanics and the elderly.
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service supports individuals and families in need by putting healthy foods within reach. For more information on the SNAP and FNS, visit www.fns.usda.gov.
- November 4
A White House Chef Who Wears Two Hats -
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.
New York Times
Rachel W. Swarns
November 3, 2009Twice 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 “über-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.”
- November 3
Food Stamps Help Stave Off Hunger in Many U.S. Homes -
Over 30-year period, nearly half of American children received nutrition assistance, analysis shows
US News & World Report
November 2, 2009At some point, nearly half of all American children and teens will live in a home that receives food stamps, a new study shows.
Researchers analyzed 30 years (1968 to 1997) of national data collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and found that by the time they were 1 year old, 12.1 percent of U.S. children had lived in households receiving food stamps. That increased to 26.1 percent at 5 years of age; 35.9 percent at 10 years; 43.6 percent by age 15, and 49.2 percent by age 20.
The study also found that by age 20, about one-third of children had lived in households that received food stamps for two or more years, 28.1 percent for three or more years, 26.4 percent for four or more years, and 22.8 percent for five or more years.
Food stamp use was most likely among households with black children and those who lived in households headed by adults who were unmarried or had had less than 12 years of education, the researchers reported in the November issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
“American children are at a high risk of encountering a spell during which their families are in poverty and food insecurity as indicated through their use of food stamps. Such events have the potential to seriously jeopardize a child’s overall health,” wrote Mark R. Rank, of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, St. Louis, and Thomas A. Hirschl, of Cornell University.
Studies have “repeatedly demonstrated that two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health are poverty and food insecurity,” the researchers noted.
“Understanding the degree to which American children are exposed to the risks of poverty and food insecurity across the length of childhood would appear to be an essential component of pediatric knowledge, particularly in light of the growing emphasis on the importance of community pediatrics,” the study authors added.
