“Food desert” has become a popular term to describe urban and rural areas where people don’t have access to fresh, nutritious food, rely heavily on fast food restaurants and convenience foods to feed themselves, and learn only bad eating habits. Isn’t that the very definition of a moden public school cafeteria in the United States today? [...]
Tags: food deserts·processed foods
Here’s something I’d never seen before in my daughter’s elementary school cafeteria: A burrito made out of a giant flour tortilla, “turkey ham” and processed cheese slices. Apparently there wasn’t enough starch in the burrito, so one of the sides is pasta noodles. The green stuff is Exhibit A explaining why kids in D.C. schools [...]
Tags: processed foods·turkey
I recently spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School here in the District of Columbia observing how food is prepared. This is the second in a six-part series of posts about what I saw. The first post is here. Tuesday morning I arrived in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School and was [...]
Tags: District of Columbia·processed foods·school food·Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen·USDA
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
What's in your turkey? We killed and butchered more than 80 birds on the farm of Mike and Michelle Klein in Prince George's County. Thankfully, Michelle did the gutting. Unfortunately, Mike bought his turkey chicks earlier than usual and they did not stop growing. Our prize for helping was a carcass that weighed nearly 40 pounds. It barely fit in the oven. Here, Mike is subjecting a slaughtered bird to the "magic fingers," a machine with a nubby, rotating barrel that removes most of the feathers. 
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