Going to the White House!

  

This Friday I will be standing on the White House lawn together with a few hundred other chefs from around the country who have helped to improve school food in their communities. We will be helping to launch Michelle Obama's new initiative, "Chefs Move to Schools". Yay!

In 2007 I joined the New Haven Food Policy Council of which I am now the Chair, and we joined forces with many community groups to help bring about major changes to our city's school food program. I'll get into more details in a later post, but for now, if you want to check out the policy primer the council put together in 2008 with the Yale Law Clinic and CitySeed on local state and federal policy and it's impact on school food, click here.

Thanks to Share our Strength, White House Chef Sam Kass, and SO many others, who have helped to bring school food to the forefront of the discussion on obesity and nutrition in our country. Thanks also to local food dude and New Haven Public Schools food service director who helped to plan this event and invited me to attend!

I am bringing my camera and my chef coat, so stay tuned to the blog for news on this exciting trip. Let's hope for pictures of the white house vegetable garden, Michelle Obama, a brief encounter with White House Chef Sam Kass, and lots of cool and engaged Chefs! Also hoping that there will be some discussion of the childhood nutrition act which is up for re-authorization and affects the nutrition standards and reimbursement rates for school food and WIC. I'm not holding my breath, but still hoping for some mention of the problems with our Farm Bill (government subsidies and corporate controls among other things) which enable highly processed and unhealthy foods to be cheaper than fresh healthy foods. 


should be a long and exciting day! check back soon.