And these days we are always seeking environmentally friendly alternatives.  Back to school should be no different.  So, do your thing!  Get those supplies; the new backpack, the reusable water bottle, some new shoes and rejoice that your lunchbox doesn’t have to be a sack.

Laptop Lunches to the rescue. They have created a wonderful, washable, reusable bento-box style system that eliminates waste (plastic baggies, etc.).  We are in our second year of using ours.  We even used it daily during summer camp.  Coupled with our beautiful (and machine-washable) Happikins we feel like its been a fabulous solution for us. 

Obviously these are marvelous for adults in the workplace and picnics as well.  But don’t take our word for it.  If you are a Facebook user you can find over 6,000 folks sharing their experience, or visit the Laptop Lunches website or blog where you can join their RSS feed for weekly recipes.  Right now they are up for an award from SheKnows.com in the Best Lunch Box category – so vote if you love their lunch boxes! 

For those of you that would like to find the best deal on a Laptop Lunchbox, enter code SURFCITY to save 10%

The Collective Roots non-profit has two key initiatives: Garden Based Learning & Food System Change.  These missions enable them to educate and engage youth and communities through sustainable programs that impact health, education, and the environment. Since 2000 they have been working to provide these programs and curricula with a hands-on approach for kids from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Garden Based Learning

Collective Roots works with children, youth and adults to design and sustain organic gardens on school and community sites.  These sites are linked with kindergarten through twelfth grade curriculum that meets California state science standards as well as health and nutrition curriculum that promotes school, community and state health/nutrition goals.

• Creating and managing the one-acre flagship garden at East Palo Alto Charter School, including integrated garden-based education for students in grades kindergarten through eighth;
• Running afterschool garden programming at Girls 2 Women in East Palo Alto;
• Conducting in-school and afterschool garden-based programming at Clifford Elementary School in Redwood City; and
• Developing a garden and garden-based curriculum for in-school and afterschool programs at the 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto.

Food System Change

Collective Roots engages residents and stakeholders in a full-scale initiative to increase access to fresh, local, healthy and affordable produce. Some of their accomplishments include:

• Operating the East Palo Alto Community Farmers’ Market for two successful seasons;
• Creating EPA Fresh Checks, an innovative coupon incentive program that makes fresh fruits and vegetables affordable to low-income families; 
• Sponsoring the EPA Regional Backyard Gardener Network, a group that supports the capacity of local residents to grow their own food;
• Implementing the Fresh Fest (Festival Fresco), a traveling suite of educational activities around fitness and nutrition; and
• Offering free cooking and nutrition classes for adults and children in partnership with Operation Frontline.

Wolfram Anderson, Executive Director of Collective Roots, states that “the city of East Palo Alto has not had a Supermarket or Farmers Market for nearly 20 years.  This has forced the community to rely on small neighborhood markets, liquor stores, or to leave the community for their food”. The direct result of this more consumption of processed, ‘fast’ food.

The city of East Palo Alto has not had a Supermarket or Farmers Market for nearly 20 years.  This has forced the community to rely on small neighborhood markets, liquor stores, or to leave the community for their food.

A food desert in East Palo Alto?  I may be too far away to frequent the EPAC Farmers Market, but I am encouraged to stop by to see for myself how this community has embraced change, and to find a way to help in some small way.

For more information about Collective Roots, the East Palo Alto Community Farmers Market, or to make a donation, visit http://www.collectiveroots.org

Caryn received her My First Organics Classroom Bundle free as part of our recent launch of www.RealFoodAction.org and the Real Food Action Campaign. Real Food Action is a culmination of years of research that we did on the topics of nutrition, earth science education, school food, childhood obesity, local food systems and much more.  We found that they are all tied together, and that U.S. children are having a disconnect from the concept of where their food comes from.  Real Food Action is a resource derived from this extensive research, a resource for anyone seeking guidance on how to get involved, get educated, and get going!  It’s a wonderful springboard that points you in the direction of numerous other organizations and individuals that can help you make lasting healthy changes for our nation and our planet.

Are you looking for healthy activities to do with your kids this summer? Growing your own veggies is hot and healthy. It’s now also fun, easy AND charitable with a new line of products from My First Organics created for kids and classrooms.

My First Organics seed starter kits are just the ticket for tackling childhood obesity with an educational outdoor activity that enables better nutritional habits. Order now and take advantage of the Real Food Action Campaign, which applies 20% of your purchase toward giving a My First Organics Classroom Bundle to teachers who want them. Getting garden-based learning into homes and schools at the same time? That would fulfill Linda and Trent’s mission perfectly.

When company founders Linda and Trent McNair left tech jobs in Silicon Valley to start an organic nursery, Surf City Growers, they realized that teaching kids how to grow their own veggies was a big passion of theirs. Getting kids to eat their veggies can be a challenge, but research shows that when kids grow their own food, they will eat it.

"Support the Real Food Action Campaign today and start an organic veggie garden with your kids for under $20!"

www.aptoscommunitygarden.org
By Melanie Larson

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day to celebrate the Grand Opening of the Aptos Community Garden!  Close to 100 people turned out to meet their new neighbors, share some food, enjoy the music by Guy Routley and plant their gardens.  Surf City Growers provided organic seedlings for the garden launch.  Several gardeners worked until closing time (8:00 p.m.) and helped me secure the main gates.  The party was so successful we are getting requests for another one.  Tarmo Hannula from the Register-Pajaronian wrote and photographed a wonderful front-page story covering the event. 

We had a large turnout of CLC members, including Janet Blomquist and her daughter, Lisa, who came from Isle of Wight, VA to present us with a scrapbook from her fellow Master Gardeners.  Our local Master Gardeners of the Monterey Bay set up a display of helpful materials, thanks to the efforts of Cathy Baker.  And Pastor Dale blessed the garden after all of the words of thanks, signaling it was time for the gardeners to begin.

The weeks leading up to this were busy getting the beds, paths, and irrigation ready for the opening.  We got support from workers provided by Mark Zabel: Juan Bolanos, Jose Robel, and Salvador Rodriguez.  Fred Lopez and gardener Roy Vigliecca have been a great help as well.  They were joined by another workday with Rotary members from Santa Cruz, Aptos/Capitola, and Watsonville.  CLC members Warren Gilbert, Mark Zabel, Austin Pruitt, Tom and Melanie Larson, Jan Sollom-Brotherton, and Garden Supervisor, Gene Sanden pitched in as well.

We are very grateful for the latest donations from local businesses. Far West Design and Landscaping and Ewing Irrigation teamed up to help us get the irrigation installed. Thanks to Ecology by Design, Nature First provided wood chips for the paths. Warren Knox donated two elevated beds called Knox Boxes, and we are waiting for a delivery of lumber from Big Creek Lumber to build the remaining raised beds. We have also had anonymous donations of materials (gopher wire and cutters), sponsors for very low-income gardeners, and cash for garden materials.

At the suggestion of Lisa Joseph, we would like to start a collection of donated garden tools for people who cannot afford them.  If you have some extra tools, just let us know.  And, equally important, if you have an extra garden shed, please donate that, too!

In closing, I would like to share this conversation I had with a La Selva Beach gardener.  He commented to me that he has belonged to lots of community gardens over the years and that gardeners are nice people, but this has to be one of the nicest group of gardeners he has ever met. He went on to say over three-fourths of the gardeners are from the church.  I suppressed my laugh and clarified that only one plot went to a CLC Renovare group.  He said that just about everyone he talked to at the Grand Opening was from the church.  I explained that they were my helpers, and they were here to make sure everyone had a good time.  I also told him this is a community garden, and we want to make sure the community has first choice.

I drop in daily and chat with the gardeners, while checking on the CASA plot (#42).  I, too, am meeting the nicest people and feel that we have a new extended family.  If you haven’t had a chance to visit, swing by, and meet our new neighbors.

More importantly, residents of Santa Cruz County who saw the article and would love to have a small plot of land to call their own and grow on have been seeking out the website to apply for a plot.  For more information about the Aptos Community Garden, or to get an application, visit www.aptoscommunitygarden.org

Save the Date:  Grand Opening Sunday, April 18th at noon.

This is an update for the Aptos Community Garden

Please join us for a blessing of the garden by Pastor Dale Sollum-Brotherton.  Come and meet our donors, Board Members, local officials, and the people who have signed up to have garden plots.  Guy Routley will be providing music and there will be light refreshments.  Trent and Linda McNair will be providing free organic starts for the plots grown at their business Surf City Growers. Thanks to Board Member Michael Olson, Pastor Dale and Trent did a live interview with him at the KSCO radio station. Linda McNair prepared a news release for local papers, with a very fine article appearing in the March 15, 2010 Aptos Times.
Progress is being made on the layout of the garden.  The donated pump from Capitola Pump is now hooked up to the cistern. Under the direction of CLC member Austin Pruitt and electrician Dan Bronson from A-Plus Electric, we are in the process of running power from the gazebo down to the garden to power the pump.    CLC members Gene Sanden and Mark Zabel have also provided support for this project. Gene has collected over a dozen 55-gallon barrels donated by Smith and Vandiver.  We will be using these for additional water collection and distribution in the garden.  Smith and Vandiver are located at 480 Airport Blvd. in Watsonville.  The barrels are provided to the public for free, and they qualify you for a $25.00 rebate if your water is provided by Soquel Creek Water District.
We are so thankful to the businesses and individuals who have donated to make this project a success.  We look forward to thanking you in person April 18th at the Grand Opening.  This is truly a community garden project. 

Our business donors include:

Capitola Pump
Central Home Supply
Dirt Works Earth Engineering
Earth Works
Ecology by Design
Hoge, Fenton, Jones, and Appel, Inc.
Jeff Taldmadge Construction
Lakeside Organic Gardens
Las Animas Concrete
Monument Lumber
Rotary Club of Aptos/Capitola
Rotary Club of Santa Cruz, Sunrise
Sand Channel Greens
Smith and Vandiver
Surf City Growers
Warren Gilbert, Architect

Jamie Oliver

Our recent post on Jamie Oliver covered his acceptance speech for the prestigious TED prize.  The speech says volumes about Mr. Oliver and his dream.  Today we cover just a few of his achievements to date.  Let’s take a look at what motivates this young chef to help so many people.

James Trevor Oliver, born May 27 1975, was born into kitchen life.  His parents Essex pub (which you can visit today) was his playground and at age 16 he left school to attend Westminster Catering College.  After working several outstanding restaurants in England and the rest of Europe he was discovered by TV producer Pat Llewellyn and “The Naked Chef” was born.  The show was a hit.

Now a celebrity, he was asked by Tony Blair to become Britain’s ‘Food Tsar’, and approached by Nestle and Coca-Cola to endorse their products -- all declined in favor of loftier ambitions.  But he wasn’t waiting for a bigger deal.  He wanted to cook up his own destiny.  Jamie decided to instead create a new TV show and a charity.  The show, Jamie’s Kitchen, opened a new restaurant called Fifteen and a new commercial business with a purpose.  The shows premise was to follow the training of 15 disadvantaged youth in the field of catering.  The show was another hit, and there are now 4 Fifteen location: Amsterdam, Cornwall, London, and Melbourne.  The work continues to aid the youth in the employ of these restaurants under the arm of the Jamie Oliver Foundation, and profits feed their apprenticeships.

From here Jamie Oliver moved into a more public arena, launching into a new endeavor.  Creating a new show, Jamie’s School Dinners takes a step into the schoolyards of Greenwich Village to address childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes.  He simply showed how easily we could get the processed junk food out of schools and feed kids REAL food again.  The success of this show led to the acquisition of a 300,000 signature petition, numerous headlines and the eventual agreement of Tony Blair to allocated $1 Billon in government cash to equip and train Britain’s schools to wean themselves off of junk food.

Which brings us to the here and now.  www.jamieoliver.com averages about 70k hits per day from U.S. traffic alone. Americans have been watching his shows, reading his books and downloading recipes for years.  But what prompts this high profile Chef to care about us yanks?

Simple really.  Americans are sick.  And getting worse by the day.  ABC television has teamed up with Jamie and will be airing a show that they filmed in Huntington, WV.  At the time of shooting, Huntington was named “the unhealthiest city in America”.  Premiering Friday, March 29th at 8/9pm CST we’ll see first hand how this man is on a quest to eradicate obesity and help humanity reclaim it’s dignity and health.  I’ll be taking notes to see how he does it.  The resistance to change is powerful and everyone here in California has a tendency to announce our common defense:  It’s too expensive and too difficult to change.  Often we agree that something should be done.   But our fiscal crisis seems to always paralyze us.  So, how do we do it?

Community.  Local family support.  Parent volunteers.  Donations.  These are OUR kids.  Not the Federal Governments, or the States, or the School Districts.  We need to realize just how much power we have to change the system.  Once we get this epiphany, we need to ACT, and follow through.  We cannot rely on support from government.  There is just too much at stake.

Linda and I struggle with this every day.  Just like everyone else, todays food system has fueled a lifestyle on the run -- we are just as trapped by the simplicity of it, blinded by it.  We grew up straddling 2 worlds.  One foot in childhood memory of home-cooked meals and lunchboxes and cafeteria’s that had real kitchens, and the other foot in today’s food system:  One of fast, corporate junk food, extraneous packaging, and failed labeling.  And my opinion is that our generation, Jamie’s generation, is the only one that can stop it before the art of growing, cooking and eating whole food is a lost art.

I believe that food education, as Jamie puts it, does need to be brought back into the school system.  I also believe that growing food is an integral part of food education.  Creating a sustainable, local food system so that we feel empowered when it comes to nutrition, not shackled by cheap (or rather, expensive…) ‘food’.

Our 1st grader eats government issue twice a week.  He likes it.  Then again, it’s engineered to taste good.  So it’s not a shock.  For weeks we have been on a quest to bring a true, healthy lunch into his school.  It’s hard work.  But we have angels coming out of the woodwork, joining us along our journey.  We are gathering strength, ideas, and momentum!  And you realize you are on the right track when someone sends you the news that Jamie Oliver wins the TED prize -- and it’s right in line with our quest.

There are a lot of well-meaning people like us out there who are Certified Organic because we believe in what Organic was originally meant to portray.  Before we even went through the expense of organic certification, we were practicing organic principals. But now, an industry has been created to police what we naturally should be doing in the first place — growing and raising whole, healthy food in a humane way that is good for us and the planet.

Since the days of J.I. Rodale, Lady Eve Balfour, and Sir Albert Howard, we’ve come a long way—deviating from a path so simple, and turning it on its head.  Organic, as a way of life and a way of growing, was born out of an idea that we could not continue to deplete our natural resources and still produce healthy food.  That pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and monoculture were NOT the new and improved agriculture, but just shortcuts to profits for an industrial complex that wants us to consume, consume, consume.

So what happens when the term ‘Organic’ starts to take hold in the minds and hearts of millions of Americans (and the world)?  What is a giant food processor like Dean Foods, Kelloggs, or General Mills to do when this movement starts to slowly eat at their profits faster than you can gobble up a bag of Cheetos?  Well, they gobble up small farms and organic businesses, of course.  Acquisition.

I recently discoverd an article at The Cornucopia Institute that shows who owns what, and it’s changing all the time.  Dr. Phil Howard, an Assistant Professor at Michigan State, creates and updates his organic food business chart and tracks the big box corporations acquisitions of organic business, as well as our food chain overall.

Notice any familiar names?

The type is too small to read so here is a link to a PDF version.

In essence you are looking at a small snapshot of a much bigger picture of the ‘industry of organic’.  Not only is acquisition part of the process, but it is the deceptive pastoral image that is being sold to you. The notion that you are buying from a small, family farm business is all part of the game. Pictures of a farmhouse, an old lady with a pitchfork, cows walking gracefully through verdant, lush grasslands?  All part of the show folks.  But it is what’s behind the curtain that counts.

Do you notice any familiar names in the chart that end up in your shopping cart? Cascadian Farm, one of the founders of organic agriculture, is now owned by General Mills.  Horizon Milk – Dean Foods.  Bear Naked and Kashi – Kelloggs.  Odwalla…none other than Coca-Cola.

But these corporations have not just stopped at acquisition.  Since the USDA got involved a few years ago, and decided to turn the USDA ORGANIC label into a icon of superiority, these corporations have petitioned hard that certain ‘restricted’ elements be allowed under the label since they ‘can’t find a suitable substitute’.  I guess ‘organic’ things don’t hold up as well in a TV dinner.

And here’s a scathing little video that shows the utter failure of the Organic Certification process in arguably the largest purveyor of organic products:  Whole Foods.  Whole Foods supplies 175 stores nationwide with natural and organic products.  Unfortunately, these products and their certifiers are dubious at best.  Especially when items are coming from other countries such as China.

So, what can we do?

Buy Local
When I say buy local I mean really local.  Know your grower.  Even join a CSA.  Visit their farm, take the kids, work with them picking snap peas for a couple hours.  Shop at a farmers market nearby.  When you go there, ask the farmer where his farm is.  Sometimes farmers markets have vendors from over 100 miles away.  Depending on your taste, this might exceed your idea of ‘local’.

Grow Your Own
Even if it’s in a couple pots on the back porch, it’s really amazing how much food you can produce with a little water and a couple of bucks in seeds.  The kids love to get involved and it’s been shown that when they grow veggies, they are more likely to eat them. Since none of the states in our union are meeting the daily requirements of fruits and vegetables, and one of three of our children are obese due to the processed foods we are feeding them, it’s an easy way to educate them and introduce healthy produce into their diets.

Be Vigilant
Read labels.  Where is it from?  Is it 100% organic?  Made with some organic ingredients? Is it in season (if not, it’s probably coming from a country far away from the organic ideals)?  Don’t necessarily trust the pictures and graphics you see on the label?  If it looks too good to be true…it probably is.

Personally I would love to see a label and certification system for Locally Grown or Local.  A small badge that would, for instance, say “Locally Grown 25″ (meaning that it comes from within 25 miles of where you are purchasing it), etc.  Why the need for a badge?  I believe that the term ‘local’ is becoming the new ‘Organic’.

The not-so-distant future

My fear is that it’s already being abused.

If someone were to ask you what you thought local meant when it came to your food, most people would probably say within 100 miles or less.  The word local and locally grown is already being used in supermarkets across the U.S.  for food that is coming to one central distribution center supplied by several nearby states or even further.  It has no true definition. Local to your supermarket might even mean grown in the USA.  Most likely at a great (and unnecessary) distance.

Most importantly, we need to start realizing that we are dependent on a food chain that is connected by thousands of miles.  What if you were cut off from this source of food by a union strike or natural disaster?  What would you do?  How would you feed your family when everyone around you, thousands of people, are all cut off and seeking food as well?

Do you think I’m crazy? Check out my Transition Town post from a year ago for a reality check!