viz. - education

Cook Something (for School Kids)!

fc — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:31:12 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from JamieOliver.com

In last week's post, I introduced chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for real ("proper") food in the US (complete with its own ABC television reality show), and I discussed Oliver's plea that we, as a country, begin cooking real food (as opposed to eating industrial food) in our kitchens at home. For many Americans, busy schedules and limited cooking experience make this call for planning, buying, prepping and cooking scratch food at home a rather tall order, but even this potentially daunting lifestyle change looks like (forgive the pun) a piece of cake compared with the second half of Oliver's initiative: providing scratch meals twice daily in public schools. More on Oliver, Chef Ann Cooper, mind-boggling bureaucracy, and hurculean tasks after the break.

If you've been watching Oliver's Food Revolution or if you've ever heard Ann Cooper talk about anything anywhere, you know that school lunches in America must follow nutritional guidelines set by the USDA and that, according to those guidelines, chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk and canned fruit salad constitute a healthy meal while Oliver's baked chicken does not. If you haven't heard Ann Cooper (former chef for, among other people, Hillary Clinton, former head of the school food program in Berkley, California, and interim nutrition director for the Boulder Valley school district in Colorado), her 2007 talk posted on TED.com is a good representative piece.

Cooper brings up two points in this talk that are crucial for rethinking and reforming our school lunch programs: first, the role of USDA and food subsidies in determining what we feed school children, and, two, the importance of what children learn about food every day they step into the school cafeteria.

Chef Cooper is not alone in her concern about the USDA's role in the federal school lunch program. White House chef Sam Kass has also become well known for criticizing a system that puts the Agriculture Department (whose chief priority is providing markets for American agricultural goods) in charge of such an important aspect of childhood nutrition. Before being lured to D.C. by the Obama administration, Kass ran a private chef business in Chicago and held regular meetings at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museaum. Addams was, of course, a Progressive Era reformer who ran Hull-House in the midst of Chicago's sprawling slums and tenements and advocated for (among other reforms that underly what we now consider basic human rights in this country) food and water purity laws; Kass used the dining room at Hull House (a space with historical connections not only to Addams but also Upton Sinclair and other reformers) as a theatrical setting for open discussions about reforming the food system of the United States. A New York Times column from last January quoted Chef Kass from one of his "Rethinking Soup" meetings in which he accuses the USDA of using school children as a market for dumping surplus production: "The National School Lunch program also serves another vital role in our agricultural system. The government subsidizes various agricultural industries, creating overproduction in commodities such as beef, pork and dairy. This overproduction depresses prices, endangering the vitality of producers. The U.S. government purchases the overproduction it has stimulated and then disposes of the excess by giving it to schools." The National School Lunch program, he argues, is more concerned with disposing of commodities than it is with feeding children. If we don't start investing money to feed kids nutritious food, then we're going to end up spending more on their diabetes- and obesity-related illnesses (CDC predicts that, given today's food environment, 1 in 3 children born in 2000 will develop diabetes).

Whether or not we accept the sinister pictures of USDA program offered by Kass and Cooper, the fact is that most food provided through the Federal commodity program is industrial processed food high in fats and high-fructose corn syrup (and, like most of the dietary landscape of America, monstrously shaped by federal subsidies of corn and soy). Given the federal governments new vested interest in the long-term health of the American people, we can hope that it will give a higher priority to the nutritional value of the National School Lunch program. The most recent version of the Child Nutrition Act gives us some reasons to hope for a positive change even while falling far short of what child nutrition activists say we need to fix the system.

I have not seen Jamie Oliver directly address issues of subsidized non-nutrient food and the influence of the USDA. Given that he is not a US citizen and is running his advocacy campaign largely within unspoken rules of naitonal hospitality, that is probably a good rhetorical decision. American's probably would not enjoy listening to Oliver bash USDA any more than Brits wanted to hear American pundits lob accusatiosn at NHS. He does, however, provide plenty of links from his website to Cooper's, and it is hard to click a mouse on her page without coming across a critique of USDA in one form or another.

Oliver does explicitly share Cooper's concern with what we might call the "hidden curriculum" of school lunches. Near the beginning of her TED talk, Cooper points out that we send our kids off to school and tell them to pay attention and learn something. Their education does not stop at the lunch room door, and, in Cooper's words, "When you feed kids bad food, that's what they're learning." If we continue treating food the way we treat it in schools, we can't expect kids to know anything about a healthy, sustainable (in that it can sustain their lives) diet. We teach them to be dependent on non-nutrient, fat- salt- and sugar-laden industrial foods.

Two moments from the second installment of Oliver's program stood out to me in the context of food education. The first, a vegetable pop-quiz he gives to a group of first graders, is in the video below.

I could understand young kids not recognizing the whole beet or confusing cauliflower and broccoli, but it was shocking to see a roomful of six and seven year olds who couldn't identify tomatoes and potatoes (Dan Quayle couldn't SPELL potato, but at least he knew what one was). To the credit of the teacher, she took Oliver's visit as a teachable moment and, the next day, the kids had no problem recognizing eggplants, etc. (It doesn't seem to me that schools should need to teach kids "This is what tomatoes look like," but if kids don't see real food in the cafeteria, and if their kitchens at home are full of processed, industrial food, then where else will they learn it?)

The second food-education moment that stood out to me revolved around forks. Oliver prepares a meal for the students that can't be eaten with fingers or spoons, and the kitchen staff refuse to pull the knives and forks out of storage. While pleading with the administrator for cutlery, Oliver asks the school staff if they want to "bring up a nation of kids that only use thier fingers and a spoon." Some of the dispute has to do, of course, with American fears of litigation and weapons in schools, but, beyond the culture clash, Oliver has a tremendously important point. You can't eat real food with just your fingers and a spoon; you can, however, eat all varieties of industrial products and fast food with no utensils at all. What are we teaching children to eat, and how are we conditioning them to think about food if they go to school and eat all their meals with their hands? Oliver talks the school staff into at least trying out silverware as an experiment, and the segment ends in one of his first small victories of the series: he not only gets the kids proper utensils for proper food, he manages to get the principal and other school staff to interact with the kids during their lunch, encouraging them to try new foods and teaching them how to use their knife and fork. Lunch was, for a moment anyways, a positive, human, social interaction.

Significant change in the School Lunch Program will take much, much more than these token improvements. Federal beaurocracy, school district budgets, staffing shortages and equipment limitations present a daunting series of obstacles to feeding school kids real food for lunch. Oliver and Cooper have both created online tools to help. Cooper's TheLunchBox.org aims at being, eventually, a one-stop online toolkit for school lunch reform, and it houses resources for everyone from school administrators and kitchen staff to parents, students and concerned members of the community. Oliver's personal website hosts recipes for schools alongside those he provides for families to cook at home, and he also lists a number of other resources available to schools and parents (including, not surprisingly, Cooper's Lunch Box). Each site also encourages you to contact your elected officials (here and here) aiming to capitalize on the Child Nutrition Act's renewal this year (the law is reviewed every five years). Local schools and school districts will need governmental and community support if they are going to cook something for school kids.

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

Illustrating magnetic fields

John Jones — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:51:52 +0000

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I’m not sure how this video was made, but it is really amazing to look at.

As rhetoric instructors spend more and more time teaching new media like video, I think this genre—the instructional video—will become an important skill for students in their own fields.

Here’s a description of the video:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

via Make

You are your grades

LaurenMitchell — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:43:15 +0000

This New York Times article discusses the implications of new online systems that allow parents to monitor their children’s grades and attendance.

Titled “I know what you did last Math class,” the article explains that sometimes parents know the results of their children’s tests before they do. Many parents check the system on a daily basis, although some opt not to use the system at all. There are clearly some fantastic advantages to be had from such a system—for working or divorced parents, for students that need a lot of motivation, as well as for detecting warning signs of other problems that the child might be experiencing.

As a surveillance issue this is especially worrisome because these children are essentially becoming their grades. There is no contextual information for the grades. One mother commented that, “’There’s nothing telling you that your kid loves the class but isn’t a good test taker.’” And in a time when the preparation for and pressure surrounding college admissions is beyond ludicrous, it seems to me that creating this sort of relationship with learning and grades will only worsen the situation.

The article comes down with the conclusion that the systems can be very useful if used correctly, but it can be very damaging to the parent-child relationship as well as the learning atmosphere. I think this is a bit excessive for most students. But if you have a child that is deceiving you constantly, this clearly would be a helpful tool. I’m left wondering should we just get used to the advantages and disadvantages of having this much information about each other?