And the Razzie goes to Norman Lear's EMA for Exposing Kids to Sewage Sludge and Not Coming Clean

by: Jill Richardson

Sun May 08, 2011 at 21:51:12 PM PDT

I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

by: Jill Richardson

Tue May 03, 2011 at 12:26:09 PM PDT

In late March, the Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) wrote to EMA, alerting them that Kellogg products contain sludge, which may jeopardize the safety and the organic status of the gardens. As a result of the letter, John Stauber, founder of CMD, then met with Ed Begley, Jr., famous environmentalist and EMA board member, who was concerned about the possibility that sludge was used on the gardens.

Following that meeting, a reply came back from EMA's President, Debbie Levin, who has been called "Hollywood's Conscience," asking CMD to stop communicating with Ed Begley, Jr. and to call off its public campaign against the use of Kellogg products on the LA school gardens. She asserted that her organization never claimed the gardens were organic. Then, in the next week, EMA removed the word "organic" from its webpage about its school garden program... but left it in on some pages. (See screenshots here) EMA refers to the gardens as "organic" in a fundraising form, leading donors to believe they are contributing to organic school gardens. Ironically, in 2003, EMA gave an award to King of the Hill for its episode titled "I Never Promised You an Organic Garden." Talk about foreshadowing.

SFGate and Mother Jones each wrote articles on this story, published a few days after Levin's initial email reply. The Mother Jones piece features a picture of Rosario Dawson gardening with children, with a bag of Kellogg's Amend (made from sewage sludge and contaminated with dioxins and other hazardous material) behind them. The article says:

"This was one of those unfortunate weird things," says EMA president Debbie Levin, who hadn't known anything about Amend before the shoot. Amend, she later learned, is not approved for organic farming because it's made from municipal sewage sludge.

And

So what to do if you're a home gardener who wants compost without the sewage? Try checking the website of the Organic Materials Review Institute, which vets agricultural products used by certified organic farmers. That's the preferred approach of Levin, who stresses that no Kellogg Amend was ever actually applied to EMA's gardens (though one school may have inadvertently ordered a different sludge-based product). "Everything was according to what we asked for," she says. "We use the organic stuff."

That much is old news. According to Levin, she and EMA were unaware that Kellogg products contained sludge, but not to worry because the products in the photos were never used. (Does that mean the bags of Amend that appear in many pictures of the school gardens were brought in for use as props in photo ops and then removed? Even if that were the case, it's unfortunate that an environmental organization is giving that sort of free publicity to an environmentally unsound product like Amend.)

Here's the new part of the story. Mud Baron, a Master Gardener who worked for the LA Unified School District's garden program from 2006 to 2011, has come forward, with a signed, notarized affidavit, alleging that he informed Levin and others at EMA that some Kellogg products contained sewage sludge, which is not permissible on organic gardens, as early as summer 2009. (See his statement here.) Levin repeatedly assured him that all of the products donated from Kellogg would be organic.

Baron also says he questioned the appropriateness of an environmental group promoting a corporation that sold sewage sludge as "compost," and those concerns were ignored and overruled as well. (Kellogg products identify the sewage sludge only as "compost" on product labels. The packages use the word "organic," misleading some gardeners that they are appropriate to use on organic gardens.)

Baron says he continually raised the issue of sewage sludge in Kellogg products, but Levin responded "We've been doing our projects for 20 years, we know what we are doing." Yet order records from the schools betray that one high school ordered 192 bags of Gromulch, made with sludge, in 2010 alone. Baron adds that the resource-strapped schools shared the donations they received from Kellogg, so the 384 cubic feet of Gromulch may be split among several schools' gardens. And worse, a 2010 test by San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission found dangerously high levels of cancer-causing dioxins in Kellogg's Amend. (Gromulch was not tested.)

Thus far, the response to CMD's Food Rights Network) from EMA's Executive Director Greg Baldwin is that in the future, EMA will ensure that only organic (OMRI-listed) products are used in the school gardens. Furthermore, they will no longer refer to the gardens as organic.

There is no evidence that EMA has notified the LA Unified School District, the schools, the children, the children's parents, the celebrities who were promoting the school gardens, the donors who provided the funding for the gardens while believing they were organic, or all of EMA's board members that the school gardens are not organic and may contain sewage sludge from Kellogg Garden Products. When asked in an email, Levin refused to answer whether these steps were taken yet or not.

Lisa Graves, executive director of CMD, says, "We are demanding that EMA end the greenwashing now, and end its relationship with Kellogg and any other organization that refuses to clearly label its products as 'derived from sewage sludge.' We are also asking that EMA notify the children, the schools, and the donors who contributed money for the "organic" gardens. Last, EMA must remediate the gardens that have been contaminated."

Your move, EMA.

Disclosure: I am being paid for my work on this by the Center for Media & Democracy

What Does the Berkeley School Garden Study Really Mean?

by: euclidarms

Sat Sep 25, 2010 at 04:02:26 AM PDT

Supporters of school gardens were positively giddy this week over news that a three-year study of a garden and cooking initiative in Berkeley, Calif., schools had shown students more eager to eat vegetables and make healthy food choices. But a closer look at the study reveals that these positive results were attributed almost exclusively to fourth- and fifth-graders in two Berkeley elementary schools, and that students as they moved into middle school not only made little further progress, but actually regressed, even though they spent more time in gardening and cooking classes.

The message seems to be that unless your school has a highly structured program around a paid gardener, cooking instructor and nutrition curriculum, don't expect a garden to increase your child's appetite for vegetables.

Alice Waters, through her Chez Panisse Foundation, has done pioneering work and invested considerable resources to show that children exposed to gardening and cooking will develop healthier eating habits. According to reserchers from the University of California, fourth- and fifth-graders in a "highly developed" garden and culinary program increased their consumption of vegetables by nearly one serving per day. So why does this progress come to a screeching halt when they graduate to middle school?

Another question begging for an answer is why so many Berkeley schools, although they've been equipped with gardens and kitchens through the School Lunch Initiative Waters sponsored, apparently aren't using them. And even in schools with the most highly developed garden and cooking programs, only 35 percent of parents said they thought this had made a significant improvement in their child's eating habits.

The findings roughly confirm my own anecdotal experiences working for a week in the "dining commons" at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School as part of my reporting on school food issues. Despite being involved in Waters' flagship "Edible Schoolyard" gardening and cooking program, students displayed a conspicuous indifference to vegetables in the food line. The three-year evaluation seems to indicate that while pre-teens embrace the idea of eating more healthfully, they lapse into a sort of food funk as they enter puberty.

So, do memories of gardening and cooking lessons revive in high school or after adolescence and produce more food-conscious adults? That was the hope of Berkeley's food service team, who stressed to me repeatedly while I was there that kids must be exposed to healthier foods even if they don't eat them, that the lessons will inform their eating habits later in life.

"I think in middle school developmentally kids are all over the place.  It is really a tough stage and it is also reflected in their food choices," Bonnie Christenson, executive chef for Berkeley schools, said when asked about the evaluation's results. "In high school you see the kids starting to eat salad again. They are moving away from their parents' control but they are more mature and responsible. They eat a wider variety of foods including veggies."

But, as Christenson notes, "The study doesn't cover a long enough period to reflect this."

"I really do think it makes an impact for life-truly," said chef Ann Cooper, who was hired by Waters to reform the meal program at Berkeley and now runs food service for schools in Boulder, Co. "Middle School is tough no matter what. But in all other academic domains we continue to work with them and we need to in this area as well."

Waters, who was quoted celebrating the study's results in The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, did not respond to my query about the underwhelming middle school findings.

Berkeley schools are in the fifth year of a major food service overhaul instigated by parents with help from the Chez Panisse Foundation and the non-profit Center for Ecoliteracy. The schools eliminated processed, reheated meals and adopted food made from scratch. A local bond initiative helped pay for a new central kitchen. Meanwhile, the School Lunch Initiative, designed to teach children the connection between how food is grown and prepared and their own health, installed gardens in all 11 of the district's elementary schools and three middle schools. Thirteen instructional kitchens were built.

Waters' vision of children growing and cooking their own food has inspired school gardens across the country. The perceived benefits have been the subject of sometimes furious debate.

In their report, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, said there was wide variation in how Berkeley schools rolled out the School Lunch Initiative. They also said it was difficult to establish a control group for their study with which to measure results. So what they did was divide Berkeley schools into two groups, one described as having a "highly developed" garden, cooking and nutrition education program, the other having a "less developed" program. They selected two elementary schools from each group and began tracking the progress of fourth- and fifth-graders using questionnaires and photographs of what the kids chose for lunch.

The two "less developed" schools, represented by 193 fourth- and fifth-graders, were distinguished by having no paid garden staff, little to no garden programming, and students who spent little or no time  in the garden. In addition, these two schools had no paid cooking staff and no cooking classroom, and teachers in the school had done little to integrate nutrition lessons into the curriculum. These schools tended to have larger proportions of higher-income students and were thus ineligible for outside funding to pay for enhanced programs.

In contrast, the two "highly developed" elementary schools, represented by 134 fourth- and fifth-graders, had paid garden and cooking staff and the students spent 22 to 56 hours in garden and cooking classes each year. In addition, some teachers had integrated nutrition into the curriculum. These schools tended to have higher enrollment of low-income students and were thus eligible for outside funding to pay for enhanced programs.

All three of the middle schools that these students eventually attended had garden and cooking programs in place, although some programs were more advanced than others. At the "Edible Schoolyard" run by the Chez Pannisse Foundation at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, for instance, several people are employed to maintain and give instruction in the garden, and a kitchen is lavishly equipped with an instructor and volunteers, individual workstations with a full complement of cooking tools, four cooktops with sinks, a free-standing convection oven and a commercial-grade dishwashing system.

Following the students from these four schools over a three-year period yielded these results:

* In year one, fourth- and fifth-grade students in schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components and those in schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components all ate about the same amount of fruit and vegetable servings per day (about 4 servings, or 2 cups). In year two, the younger students (fourth graders who had moved into fifth grade) attending the schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components had increased their consumption of vegetables by nearly 1 serving (0.4 cups), and for both fruits and vegetables by about 1.5 servings (0.7 cups), while those attending schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components had decreased their consumption of both fruits and vegetables by nearly 0.4 servings.

* As they became fifth-grade students in year two, fourth-grade students from schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components showed upward trends in family dinner prepared from scratch, eating family dinner nearly every day, using recipes from school at home and helping prepare dinner. In contrast, fourth-grade students from schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components did not show increasing trends in these behaviors from the fourth to fifth grade, although more students from these schools said they ate family dinner nearly every day and this remained consistent from  year one to year two.

* Fourth-grade students from schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components showed significantly greater increases in preference for green leafy vegetables in particular as they moved into fifth grade, compared to fourth grade students from schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components. By seventh grade, preference for fruits and vegetables was similar among the various exposure groups, except preference for green leafy vegetables was associated with higher exposure to School Lunch Initiative components.

* Sixth-grade students showed no significant increase in fruit and vegetable consumption compared to the previous year, but seventh-grade students in the middle school with the most highly developed School Lunch Initiative components [presumably Martin Luther King Jr.] showed small increases in total fruit and vegetable consumption, putting them at a consumption level of about 4.5 servings of fruit and vegetables daily. Seventh grade students in the other middle school, where there was less exposure to School Lunch Initiative components, showed a mean decrease in both fruit and vegetable consumption of about one serving per day.

* By Year Three, seventh-grade students attending the middle school with the most highly developed School Lunch Initiative program [presumably Marin Luther King Jr.] had increased their nutrition knowledge scores by 5% over the previous year, while students attending the other two middle schools, which had lesser-developed components, had decreased their knowledge scores by 6% in one school and 14% in the other.

* Students attending the middle school with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components [presumably Martin Luther King Jr.] in year three showed more positive attitudes toward eating the food served at school, liking the cafeteria, agreeing that produce tastes better in-season, and agreeing that eating choices can help or hurt the environment compared to students attending the other two middle schools, which had lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components.

* There were no consistent differences in attitudes about food, health, the environment or school between students attending schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components and students attending schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components over the three years of the evaluation. However, proportionately more students attending the middle school with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components [presumably Martin Luther King Jr.] in year three tended to show positive attitudes toward eating the food served at school and liking the cafeteria at school, as well as agreeing that produce tastes better in-season and that eating choices can help or hurt the environment.

* The need for continued exposure to the School Lunch Initiative into middle school is further supported by the observation that at the one middle school where seventh-grade students showed a mean decrease in fruit and vegetable consumption of about one serving per day, the cooking and garden programming was offered only as an elective.

* Parents with children in schools with highly developed School Lunch Initiative components were more likely than parents with children in schools with lesser-developed School Lunch Initiative components to agree that school had changed their child's knowledge about making healthy food choices (60%versus 36%) and their child's attitudes about food (42% versus 19%), and had improved their child's eating habits (35% versus 16%).

Clearly, exposure at the elementary school level to garden and cooking programs with paid staff can improve children's eating habits. So how to account for the fact that progress comes to a virtual standstill in middle school, even where sixth- and seventh-graders spend many hours in the garden and in cooking classes and teachers have integrated nutrition into their lesson plans?

"Middle school is often a time when eating habits worsen as children move into adolescence," is as close to an explanation as the authors of this report offer. "To sustain gains in healthy eating made by program exposure in the younger grades," they conclude, "continued learning and availability of healthy food options can help overcome the pull toward poor habits."

In other words, carry on.

D.C. School Gardens Linking with Alice Waters

by: euclidarms

Tue Feb 23, 2010 at 07:27:14 AM PST

When Alice Waters came to Washington last month she met with D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the schools' new food service director, Jeffrey Mills, to talk about building a model school garden program in the District. Mills was already keen on the idea, so in very short order he asked Sarah Bernardi at Bancroft  Elementary School to write up a proposal and send it to Waters' office in Berkeley, California, to be vetted. All of this was done in a great rush in anticipation of public hearings on the "Healthy Schools" legislation pending before the D.C. Council. As it turned out, the hearings were postponed until March. But the proposal marches on.

A comment posted at The Slow Cook blog yesterday, attached to an interview with Anthony Tata, the school system's chief operating officer, apparently caused a stir because it questioned the experience level of those involved in drafting the model school garden proposal. First, Bancroft Elementary, having one of the most mature school gardening program in the city, along with Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill, is a logical place to look for know-how.  Second, since the ink isn't even dry on this proposal, it does seem a bit premature to be holding it up for scrutiny.

In their follow-up comments, longtime Bancroft gardener Iris Rothman and Sarah Bernardi give plenty of assurance that the process for developing the model garden proposal is not only in very capable hands, but will be shared with everyone in the city who embraces the notion that food gardens--as envisioned in the "Healthy Schools" act--are an important piece of the solution to food illiteracy. What's more, Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard team have enough expertise to put to rest any concerns there might be about the adequacy of this proposal.

Bernardi recently published here an impassioned essay about the need for full-time staff to oversee school gardens, rather than relying on volunteers and overburdened teachers. This evolving proposal apparently includes precisely that.

Now, perhaps we can tempt Iris and Sarah to catch us up on what's happening with this project by way of a post of their own?

Behind the White House Photo Ops, School Gardens in Desperate Need of Help

by: euclidarms

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 16:47:59 PM PST

By Sarah Bernardi

As one of the teachers involved with Michelle Obama and the White House vegetable garden, I've been impressed with the sudden surge of public interest in the simple act of children planting seeds. At Bancroft Elementary School, where I work first and foremost as an art teacher, we know only too well the benefits children get from growing their own food.

But I don't think the public has any inkling how hard it is for teachers to maintain school gardens like the one we have at Bancroft. Despite all the hoopla over school gardening, the truth is teachers engage in these activities at risk of their jobs. You see, gardening is not part of the mandated school curriculum. We are supposed to be teaching reading and math. As much as we believe school gardens offer a multitude of teaching opportunities, schools do very little to support us. Principals and teachers have been bluntly told that they will lose their jobs if math and reading scores don't improve. We desperately need help. We need someone to take charge of our school gardens.

The kids you see in all the photos working with the First Lady in the White House garden, or making breakfast on the Today Show with the Obamas' chef, Sam Kass, are fifth graders from my school. One of the reasons I chose to work at Bancroft two years ago was its garden. I had just moved back to the Washington area from South Carolina where I grew things pretty much all year round in my own yard. With visions of sunflowers and big tomato plants dancing in my head, I signed up for a community garden plot in D.C. But the waiting list was long. The idea of living without a patch of dirt to play in was hard to swallow.

Then I arrived at Bancroft. The assistant principal toured me around the school. As we walked through the playground, she casually remarked, "Oh, and that's the garden."  We passed four herb boxes and nine raised beds overflowing with giant sunflowers, with tomato plants heavy with fruit, with squash spilling out over the sides. There was even corn! Truthfully, up until that point I had no idea schools had gardens. Planter boxes with a few basil plants, maybe, but nothing like this.

As I soon discovered, these remarkable gardens were entirely the result of volunteer efforts. Ten years earlier, neighborhood resident Iris Rothman and her partner-in-crime, Nancy Huvendick, along with fifth grade teacher Toni Conklin, had begun acting on a shared vision of the school as a gardener's Eden. Iris and Toni fought tooth and nail-cut through government red tape, jumped through every bureaucratic hoop--to make way for outside agencies such as the U.S. Botanical Garden to come in and construct the bones of our garden. Casey Trees, a non-profit groups, planted some 40 trees on school grounds. Last year, Iris had the brilliant idea to start a community garden on school property. We now have at least 30 people on the waiting list for plots.

All of this was accomplished by concerned neighbors and teachers during their free hours. I don't think the school system ever spent a dime.

I met Iris when she approached me about collaborating on some art projects in the garden. Up to that point, I had assumed the garden was part of the daily school curriculum. It soon became clear that the work Iris was doing with the kids happened after school or in the summer. Iris worked hard to create opportunities for learning in the garden. But she did not have support from the school administration. They saw gardening as an extra-curricular activity. Disrupting the daily schedule was not an option.

The garden at Bancroft Elementary evolved on its own over the years. It was never officially introduced to the school's staff. No system was ever put in place to utilize it within the curriculum. When I arrived, I brought something new: A passion for gardens and a creative mind. Not only was my schedule more flexible than other teachers', I did not have test scores to worry about. I was able to weave the garden into my own arts curriculum. And since I teach every student in the school, I was able to expose all of them to the joys of horticulture.

Then came the day when some of my students helped Michelle Obama and Sam Kass break ground for the new kitchen garden at the White House. I returned to Bancroft and told the administration we needed to get our own school garden ready because the First Lady planned to visit. They laughed and told me that while she may have said that, what she actually did was something else. I called Iris.

As in the past, there was no plan for spring planting at Bancroft. No money had been set aside for seeds. No teachers had garden projects in mind. I approached some local businesses and asked for donations of plants. Whole Foods gave us enough cabbage, broccoli and lettuce seedlings to fill five beds. But how would I get students to plant our garden beds during the school day? Each day Iris and I took art classes to the garden to plant seedlings. We weeded and mulched. By the time Michelle Obama strolled through our garden with a beaming Toni Conklin on her arm, things looked pretty lush.

After that I began taking my art classes frequently to work in the garden-- planting, harvesting, drawing. The White House dropped off tomato plants and we had fifth-graders show 3-year-olds how to plant them. We don't have a kitchen at school so anytime we wanted to use the produce from the garden in a cooking lesson we had to convert the art room into a kitchen. When the lettuce was ready to eat we got an after-school group to harvest, wash and prepare it for salads. We set out salad toppings--dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, croutons--so kids could create three-dimensional, edible art projects. We picked herbs from the garden to make vinaigrette from scratch. The students were shocked to learn that salad dressing could be "made," it did not have to be bought at a store.

Last Spring I signed up for a workshop at the Washington Youth Garden-- part of the National Arboretum--to learn how gardens can be used as teaching tools. My classmates were teachers who already had gardens, along with many others who wanted to start gardens at their own schools. Our common bond: a shared desire to get kids busy in the soil. For the first time, I saw just how many people are working hard to create a consistent, citywide school garden program.

Then in the fall, a new D.C. Farm to School Network sponsored a "Local Flavor Week" to encourage school activities around the idea of fresh, local produce. My principal allowed me to put the rest of my schedule on hold to plan numerous events-cooking demonstrations, a trip to a farm, building cold frames. Most were linked to teaching standards. Every one of our 450 kids participated.

Many things became clear after that week. The most important and surprising was that every teacher in my school was excited about students having garden experiences like the ones I organized. Most were even willing to sacrifice precious hours to help. I also learned that there are so many dynamic people eager to work with kids on gardening, cooking and nutrition education. Finally, it became plainly evident that while it is possible to tap into this wealth of resources to build a school garden program, it is a FULL- TIME JOB.

During Local Flavor Week, I still had to teach my full load of art classes even though there were 16 trips and in-school workshops scheduled. Everywhere I went I was actually jogging, not walking. I had to be in at least three places at once on more than one occasion. I had not asked any other staff members to help me coordinate this because none of them had the time. They had their kids all day long. So I was a one-woman show. And I remember thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if every week could be like this week?" If we had a full-time garden coordinator, that is.

I had so many teachers after that week thank me and tell me that anytime I want to set up something like that again they would love to participate. I wanted to say, "If I can do it, you can do it." But the truth is they can't.

It's not that classroom teachers aren't interested. They just have too much  on their plate. And without gardening experience, they just won't use the school garden.

For all her great work and effort, Iris Rothman lacks an inside connection to the school, involvement in the schedule, familiarity with the curriculum. She has no power to create or change the curriculum, to implement standards-based activities, train teachers. She even has a hard time convincing the administration to allow her to bring in others who could do all of these things. Fitting it into the schedule would mean more work for administrators who are already overloaded.

"Healthy Schools' legislation pending before the D.C. Council would require the city's schools to create a garden program for the first time, to provide training, planning and technical assistance for existing gardens as well as new ones. The one thing clear to everyone involved in this legislation is that, more than anything, what school gardens need is someone to be in charge, someone to take on this job full-time.

School gardens illuminate the connections between food, nutrition and our physical and mental well-being. They can change the lives of impressionable children. A resource this valuable should not have to depend on unpaid volunteers or teachers who fear for their jobs.

Empirical Proof School Gardens Work

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Jan 14, 2010 at 22:32:12 PM PST

The Atlantic Slams School Gardens

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Jan 11, 2010 at 18:49:21 PM PST

The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).

I'm sorry but you cannot get it any more wrong than that. I've been gardening with my boyfriend's kids for a few months now and the amount of science (not to mention language, history, and math) they have learned from our adventures in the garden is unbelievable. The potential for future learning is even more incredible.  

School Lunch Sampler Platter

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Mar 10, 2009 at 13:51:44 PM PDT

Local Food in Schools

• IATP has posted what MN school lunch directors think about school food. The good news? 35% said they bought some local food!

• Civil Eats reports that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is off to a good start - she's already advocating for the USDA to ease up its rules in order to allow more local food into schools.

• Some schools see a disconnect between the food in the school garden and the crap served in the cafeteria. The result? Revising the school district's "Wellness Policy" to advocate for serving locally grown food.