"FoodCorps, which started last week, is symbolic of just what we need: a national service program that aims to improve nutrition education for children, develop school gardening projects and change what’s being served on school lunch trays.
I’ve been looking forward to this for months, because it’s such an up: 50 new foot soldiers in the war against ignorance in food. The service members, most of them in their 20s, just went to work at 41 sites in 10 states, from Maine to Oregon and Michigan to Mississippi. (FoodCorps concentrates on communities with high rates of childhood obesity or limited access to healthy food, though these days every state has communities like that.)
I’d be even more elated if there were 50 FoodCorps members in each state. Or 5,000 in each, which approaches the number we’re going to need to educate our kids so they can look forward to a lifetime of good health and good eating. But FoodCorps is a model we can use to build upon.
Curt Ellis, co-creator of the movie, “King Corn,” is running the show with Debra Eschmeyer, formerly of the National Farm to School Network, and Cecily Upton, formerly of Slow Food USA. FoodCorps is part of the AmeriCorps, from which it receives about a third of its budget. Most of the money comes from sources like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and individual donors.
Is FoodCorps necessary? The organizations that are fighting childhood obesity on the front lines seem to think so: 108 groups from 39 states and the District of Columbia applied to host FoodCorps, which chose to work at locations that had already begun to improve school food and needed help in expanding their work.
Potential participants were turned away at a crazy rate: More than 1,230 people applied for 50 positions. (It’s easier to get into Harvard.) Nor is this a program for the college grad who wants to do some soul-searching by playing in a garden for a year. “Many service members,” says Ellis, “have firsthand experience with the communities they’re serving. Some are going back to the towns they grew up in; others were raised on food stamps or overcame obesity. They understand these challenges from the inside.”
They’re also smart, well informed, and articulate; Ellis told me there wasn’t a day last week that he didn’t tear up from something that one of them said. (I’m going to post some of their initial sets of beliefs and, I hope, ongoing reports from the field on my blog.
FoodCorps members will be paid $15,000 for the year. On this they must find places to live and pay for food, though those without other sources of income are being encouraged to apply for help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (usually called SNAP, and formerly known as food stamps), so they’ll live like many of those they’re serving. (Those eligible will also receive a $5,550 federal education award to apply to their student loans when they finish.)
How, I asked Ellis, will we know if FoodCorps is successful? “This year we expect about 60,000 kids to benefit from improved food education,” he says. (This will be sadly easy to achieve: currently, elementary-age kids typically get less than five hours of nutrition education annually.) “Gardens will be begun or fortified to try to get kids more excited about fruits and vegetables; fresh food will be sourced from local farms; and parents and community members will be more invested in school food.”
FoodCorps will cost less than $2 million for the first year. Thus for less than a million bucks of our money we are getting a program that will start to roll back the $147 billion it costs us each year to deal with the health consequences of obesity, while changing the way thousands of young people grow up thinking about food.
Not to burst any bubbles, but let’s note that this in no way levels the playing field. That $2 million invested in FoodCorps — well conceived, raised with the best possible nonprofit intentions, and ultimately well spent (a bargain!) — was starkly contrasted last week with the $30 million that a new group of corporate farmers and ranchers intend to spend to promote the idea that they’re “committed to providing healthy choices.” As anyone who’s followed the news in recent years knows, agribusiness has done pretty much the opposite, relying on direct federal subsidies (also our money) to the tune of at least $5 billion annually to produce precisely the kind of junk food that is largely responsible for the tripling of childhood obesity in the last 30 years.
Here’s the problem: raising $30 million for a corporate public relations campaign to defend the rights of Big Food to continue to produce junk is easy; raising $2 million to promote healthy eating in our children is hard. Ellis says that his dream is to have 1,000 service members a year working in all 50 states by 2020. I say let’s have 10,000 by 2015.
But let’s end on a happy note: FoodCorps is up and running. Hallelujah!"
Did anybody ask the rich for money for this little project? Did anybody ask the PARENTS if they'd be willing to cede authority to these new foot soldiers (who know next to nothing about nutrition, I guarantee it, except the government line) when it comes to feeding their children?
This sounds like a failed plan much like the plan to deploy SWAT-like teams to neighborhoods to do home energy audits and make retrofits as necessary--all at government expense (Obama would keep your energy retrofit tax credit, and use that amount as each home's budget). Most homes would need vastly more than the $3000 allotted to each to make a dent in energy consumption! I know from personal experience that $3000 doesn't buy much--maybe a couple of Obama-grade windows (+ installation), a new front door(+ installation), and some caulk.
What stopped THAT program dead in it's tracks? Money--where's the money for this coming from? Tax credits are not actual tax dollars.
This new "food police" program is going to suffer the same fate. Any organization who asks for both donations AND volunteers is in jeopardy from the get-go. Ask entrepreneurs what happens when you have an idea or a goal, but no business plan and no funding.
If Obama wants to change the eating habits of America, he need only do two things, and neither requires leaving his desk to do them:
1. Change the farm subsidy program to subsidize fresh foods, and the foods HE wants us to eat, and quit subsidizing the stuff that's dissuading us from eating it due to costs. No more cheap Big Mac vs. expensive salad, no swat team food police, no begging for donations, and no more business without a business plan!
2. Change the food stamp program to take off the unhealthy foods like sodas. They can drink water like everybody else.
Michelle's food plate icon has already told him how to divvy up farm subsidies and food stamps.
Eating healthy for many starts at the top. His troopies will find that out for themselves when they go to these obesity zones, and find most (if not all) the residents are already on some sort of government program, and the troopies get to join them (judging by the pay scheme). Congress is to blame, and sending out a bunch of semi-volunteer gardeners, who may end up becoming obese themselves, to fix the problem in the fall (when many gardens are winding down for the year) isn't going to have much of an impact.
Did Obama even take the seasons into account when he designed this folly? God knows the overly-jubilant author of this article didn't--he must think garden food is available year-round just like it is in stores!
Question: why does nearly every program idea out of the White House have to have a "corps" behind it? Not a coalition, not a league, not an acronymed group, but a corps, denoting army, military power (with the president at the helm), and community organizing gone wrong.
If you're going to launch a school garden program on a shoestring, why wouldn't you hit up the nationwide string of Master Gardeners through the network of Extension Office programs (who are already on the USDA payroll and work for the government)? If it were mine to do, I'd try to pair up Master Gardeners with schools. Let's at least get someone in there who knows about gardening, and is interested in it, rather than teens and college kids willing to sort-of-toil for less than minimum wage + food stamps, even if the gardens don't produce.
My plan: get a Master Gardener to pair up with a willing school in need, give him/her the $15k that now goes to the corps member, and he/she can use that annual budget + the school kids' labor to get gardens going on school grounds. The project can even be turned into a summer school program, since that's when most of the growing is going to take place.
Why? Would a snot-nosed kid know how to make a $15k budget stretch to pay for such a project, let alone his/her own living expenses, with or without food stamps? This is why I prefer experienced adults in the game--most Master Gardeners are retired, already have an income, and have no need of food stamps.
As far as bringing nutritional information to the game, why can't a school nurse do that? When the kids eat a more healthful diet, the school nurse would eventually become a useless relic, so why not make HER the nutrition teacher if she's really a registered, certified nurse? She's already on the school payroll, so it wouldn't cost anything extra. She could hold large rally-type assemblies in the gym, and teach most or all the kids in one or two groups, instead of having to go from classroom to classroom. Better still: have rallies or textbook reading sessions IN THE GARDEN AREA.
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This is a good program, but why does it need to be a Federal Program? All but one of the founding members started at the local or State level, and all have worked in non-profit in the past. It seems like this program would be better served on a local level with state chapters overseeing county offices similar to 4H or even the MS society as examples. Why muck it up with federal influence?
Schools run on local directives, not nationwide. Just as the food grown in Minnesota will be vastly different in Louisiana or Texas, the needs of the school children and their families will be different, state education laws vary, and the schools are run on the county level. The best laid plans of mice and men.
Please correct me if I'm reading this wrong.
It's also rather comical that the website goes out of the way to contribute Mr. Obama for the program, but Americorps was dreamed up by Clinton, implemented by Bush, and paid for by Obama.
I doubt this was ever intended to be a viable solution to childhood obesity. Fifty "instant experts" who haven't lived long enough to have more than minimal firsthand experience in money management, nutrition, gardening, but may have been obese in the past, lived in poverty or a neighbourhood without access to decent food? The ability to empathize does not compensate for the lack of other skills. The timing and funding also raise red flags.
I would like to know what the food industry has been promised as soon as this program can officially be declared a failure. This is going to be used to justify some stupid FDA approved way for industrial food to save us from ourselves, wanna bet?
I agree about the suspicious timing of this thing, and have to ask if THIS is what Obama means when he sets out to "create" jobs.
Remember when CETA was created in the 70's to get the hippies out of the woods, then it became JTPA to get the preppie kids working, and then it dissolved completely? Guess what's going to make it's way around again!
Obama had a round table discussion with business leaders (not his favored ones like G.E.), and he's supposed to make some major jobs speech in September--how much you wanna bet he's reinstating JTPA, or the Depression-era WPA, where the government BUYS jobs?
QE3 is already happening (with interest rates kept low until mid-2013), so why not? The longer rates are kept low, the longer commodity prices are going to be high in exchange for the POSSIBILITY of selling a mortgage that nobody qualifies for, so why maintain low rates?
Back to the federally-sanctioned snot-nosed food police--which nutrition are they going to teach: the Choose My Plate icon version, or the progressive vegan "soy will save the world, because it's saving Bill Clinton" version?
Knowing who Obama's intended demographic is in hiring food police officers, it will be the ones who think soy will save the world--do you want your kid to be taught that? What if your kid's allergic to it, or a Paleo eater?
With Kellogg as a major source of funding, the likelihood of the nutritional information favouring grain based products (as opposed to foods) is almost a certainty, is it not?
The Foundation may have the best intentions, but no business is going to cut its own throat in the name of public good. Quietly shut down, maybe, actively discourage consumption of its own product, never.
Ahhhh, Wenchypoo, you act as though the point of the program was to improve the kiddies' nutrition.
It's really to employ a large number of young people by the Federal government, who will be later used as the Nazis used their unemployed - to put down the dissenters and TP-types, and to give the Big O some muscle to impose his vision on the rest of us.
Of COURSE I know this is a job-creation scheme and next-to-final plan of complete corporeal takeover and domination by the Democrats, but honestly, some people are too stupid to know what to eat, let alone feed their children (which they shouldn't have has in the first place)!
Read my earlier comment.
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