- Author: Chris M. Webb
At this time of year, many of us consume different foods than we normally do. As the year winds down, we begin to think of what we will do differently when we put up next year’s calendar.
The UC Davis Department of Nutrition is a great place to find science-based nutrition information. In addition to conducting research, they train new nutrition educators, and extend nutrition programs. You can read more about their mission here.
On the department’s nutrition information page, many links to great articles and publications can be found.
Highlighted subjects include:
- School gardens help teach nutrition and promote good eating habits
- Nutrition Info Sheets covering a variety of nutrition information
- Nutrition Perspectives, a publication providing researched-based information on ongoing nutrition subjects
- Maternal and Infant Nutrition Briefs
- Curriculum designed to help children form better food choices. The targeted ages vary depending on the curriculum.
Other great, science based nutrition information can be found using the Nutrition, Family and Consumer Science button on our homepage.
I will be out of the office the rest of this week and will post a new article when I return Monday.
- Author: Chris M. Webb
Last month, US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the creation of the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The institute will be the research arm of the USDA. Secretary Vilsack began his speech by saying,
"The opportunity to truly transform a field of science happens at best once a generation. Right now, I am convinced, is USDA's opportunity to work with the Congress, the other science agencies, and with our partners in industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector, to bring about transformative change. We can build on recent scientific discoveries - incredible advances in sequencing plant and animal genomes, for example. We have new and powerful tools -- biotechnology, nanotechnology, and large-scale computer simulations -- applicable to all types of agriculture.”
He outlined what the USDA focus of resources will be to accomplish the hoped for outcomes to improve human health and protecting the environment. They are:
- USDA science will support our ability to keep American agriculture competitive while ending world hunger. At a time when disruptive climate change threatens production of some of the world's staple foods, some of the biggest gains we can make in ending world hunger will involve development of stress-resistant crops.
- USDA science will support our ability to improve nutrition and end child obesity. At USDA we want to take the nutrition and food choice insights we have gained from our science to test out some new approaches to school lunches, breakfast and our other nutrition assistance and education programs.
- USDA science will support our efforts to radically improve food safety for all Americans. Each year in the U.S. alone, food-borne pathogens like E. coli kill 5,000 people and sicken 75 million more; the cost to the economy from these infections exceeds $35 billion.
- USDA science will secure America's energy future. President Obama has set ambitious but achievable goals for securing America's energy future from new domestic sources, including 60 billion gallons a year from biofuels by 2030. We plan to focus specifically on rapidly improving the amount and quality of plant-based feedstocks that will be the source of biofuels.
- USDA science will make us better stewards of America's environment and natural resources. We believe that research in this priority area will identify agricultural operations in the United States that, within 10 years, will be net carbon sinks.
Secretary Vilsack ended his speech by saying, "I am asking today for a commitment of will and energy to bring about our generation's new era of agricultural science. I look forward to charting a course together to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery in the agricultural sciences, speed the application of new knowledge to address challenges facing US and global food and agriculture, and translate new knowledge into tangible benefits for the American people and the world."
The speech can be read on the USDA’s website.
- Author: Chris M. Webb
This week Ventura County UCCE’s director, Rose Hayden-Smith travels to Washington DC! Rose is a W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food & Society Fellow and is in Washington this week to attend meetings on National Food and Ag Policy. She will be sharing with us on this important topic throughout the week.
This morning found me at the National Food Policy Conference. The keynote speaker was Kathleen Sebelius, former governor of Kansas, and now serving in the Obama administration as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
In her brief tenure, Sebelius has been busy framing a response to H1N1 influenza, and dealing with a host of food system issues for the new administration, an administration that is focusing seriously on food safety.
She got right to the point about childhood obesity. Sharing government statistics that medical treatment for all cancers in the U.S. tops $93 billion each year, she pointed out that the medical costs associated with treating obesity DOUBLE that, exceeding $186 billion per year. She indicated that chronic diseases cause 70% of deaths in America, and that their treatment represents 75% of all health care costs. She attributed much of America’s battle with obesity to poor childhood nutrition. Her conclusion? There will be huge benefits to both human health and the economy by addressing both childhood obesity and food safety.
Sebelius promised to “focus relentlessly on prevention,” viewing it as a “great investment.” There will be a national initiative, and American Recovery and Investment funds to support prevention efforts.
Sebelius is working closely on this effort with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. They served as governors together (Sebelius in Kansas, Vilsack in Iowa). The idea that DHHS and USDA will be working closely together – along with the Department of Education – is somewhat novel. This administration is emphasizing inter- and intra-agency cooperation to a degree seldom seen previously.
Food safety is a major area of focus for Sebelius. The national food safety workgroup she sits on has identified three core principles:
- Prioritizing food safety, not in response to specific crises, but to anticipate and prevent crises from occurring;
- Building partnerships and casting a wider net, sharing best practices across the nation, and building partnerships across agencies. Specifically, Secretary Sebelius spoke of the DHHS partnering with USDA on food safety, and with the Department of Education playing a role in childhood nutrition education.
- Being proactive.
Secretary Sebelius stated that along with the USDA, the DHHS strongly supports the pending WIC and Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization and the pending Senate food safety bill.
Like yesterday, imports were referenced in terms of food safety. Per Sebelius, 20% of food is imported, and more than 1/3 of produce and ¾ of seafood are imported. She spoke of the need to develop a 21st century food policy that emphasizes safety.
The morning’s big announcement was the launching of www.foodsafety.gov This website represents a significant effort to better serve American consumers by serving as a clearinghouse for all food safety issues. Recall and safety information is provided here, and you may sign up for email updates and feeds. There is a widget that enables individuals and agencies to link the website to their own sites. Mobile phone alerts regarding important food safety information will soon be available.
I visited the site today, and noted something interesting: the collaboration. This site is a joint effort between the White House, the USDA, the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, DHHS, National Institutes of Health, and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Services Division. This site is truly a valuable resource, and I urge you to visit it.
Sebelius noted that the “highest mission of any government is keeping its citizens safe.” The government’s new food safety website will help accomplish this.
Around lunchtime, I went with four colleagues over to the USDA for a meeting about the People’s Garden Initiative. While walking by the garden – which looks very different from when I saw it in March, a scant five weeks after it was planted – I saw Bob Snieckus. Bob is a landscape designer with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which is one of seventeen USDA agencies. I met Bob last March at the People’s Garden Partnership Forum, when he shared design plans. Today, Bob was working in the garden on his lunch hour, doing some volunteer work to perfect what already looked wonderful in preparation for the USDA’s Harvest BBQ, an event for members of Congress that was being held tonight, before the President’s address on health care.
Our group of gardening advocates had a wonderful and productive meeting with USDA staff about national gardening efforts and the USDA’s work in this area. I’ll post tomorrow what I learned about the green and sustainable efforts being undertaken by the USDA. The great work being done there deserves its own blog posting!
Thursday’s schedule:
- Breakfast meeting with the Executive Director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to learn more about federal ag policy and legislation, including the Farm Bill.
- Meeting with Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of the USDA (gardening is one of three agenda items).
- Visit to the White House Garden. We have learned we will also be given a tour of the kitchen. New restrictions prevent us from taking any bags or cameras, but we believe that the White House staff will provide us with some pictures of our visit.
- Evening reception to present policy ideas to press and policy makers. Bet you can guess what my policy idea is….yes, a national gardening initiative like the WWI and WWII Victory Garden campaigns!
Random observations: High seventies today, scattered sprinkles. Warm and humid, but absolutely lovely this evening. We are staying at an historic hotel off of DuPont Circle, with a tiny lobby. As we crowded into the lobby this evening, preparing to walk to dinner, Madeline Albright and Tom Daschle came through the door, and headed up the flight of narrow stairs for a meeting. We ate dinner tonight at a restaurant called Founding Farmers. Founding Farmers is an unusual restaurant: it is owned by a collective of family farmers who are committed to serving sustainable food in a sustainable environment (the restaurant is LEEDS certified). The food was excellent, reflecting seasonal availability and a perfect mix of classic American dishes (cornbread and fried green tomatoes were appetizers we shared) and more eclectic offerings. The food is reasonably priced. I had a wonderful grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup, and coffee. Six of us shared an enormous slice of red velvet cake and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
My tablemates were Jim and Rebecca Goodman, Wisconsin dairy farmers; Lisa Kivirist, organic farmer/eco-preneur/writer/innkeeper from Wisconsin; Abigail Rogosheske, Institute of Ag and Trade Policy, Minnesota; Zoe Bradbury, young farmer/writer from Langlois, Oregon (and her husband, Danny, who is from Ventura!); and Roger Doiron, gardening hero and founder of Kitchen Gardeners International. Roger’s influence has made the White House visit
- Author: Chris M. Webb
This week Ventura County UCCE’s director, Rose Hayden-Smith travels to Washington DC! Rose is a W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food & Society Fellow and is in Washington this week to attend meetings on National Food and Ag Policy. She will be sharing with us on this important topic throughout the week.
(Please note: This post in a special bonus. Another article was posted earlier today.)
I have not posted since July on my Victory Grower blog. It’s been – at times - a difficult and disheartening summer. Like many Californians, I will remember this period as the “summer of our discontent” here, a period when we struggled with the realities of limitations. Limitations imposed by a crushing state budget deficit, a dysfunctional system of state governance, double digit unemployment, furloughs, and a lack of water to support California agriculture and residents. It’s been a surreal period when we’ve seen further erosion in public funding to things Californians have taken as a birthright, including one of the best systems of higher education in the world. It’s been a summer of strange weather, of wildfires, a period when the Golden State has seemed dusty, limp, directionless. Even some of the most optimistic people I know (myself included) have seemed tired, a bit jaded, and wondering where we will go from here. The budget die are cast: the game will be played out with new rules, new expectations, new outcomes.For me, the shoot of green poking through a parched landscape of uncertainty has been the amazing degree of interest in gardening. My phone is ringing off the hook, and my email inbox has been jammed with requests for support for home and community garden efforts. The UC Master Gardener helpline is reporting a high volume of calls from home gardeners and others seeking support for gardening projects. As Californians face hard times, they are responding creatively and innovatively.
What is remarkable to me is the nature of these gardening projects requesting support and assistance from UC. It has ranged from homeowners determined to rip out lawns and put in edible landscape to major public agencies. From a young graduate student sitting in my office seeking ideas on how to garden with schoolchildren in Ecuador (you'll be great, Megan!) to hearing Mayor Weir of Ventura share her vision for a gardening community. It has been a top-down and bottom-up movement, simultaneously. The world as Californians know it may be falling apart and changing, but many believe these gardening and civic agriculture projects will redeem the situation, will improve our communities, our world, our lives.
Here’s a short list of recent activity. The County Public Health Department requested a meeting to discuss a collaborative project with UCCE in Ventura County. This public agency views gardening as a tool, a vital component even, in chronic disease prevention, the fight against obesity, improving nutrition and other Public Health efforts. Could our Master Gardeners develop and deliver a gardening training for those engaged in community outreach? The county’s food bank, Food Share has also met with us. Food Share has started a Garden Share program, encouraging home gardeners to share excess produce with the county’s hungry, now estimated at 1 in 6 residents (this in one of the more affluent counties in California). Food Share is also encouraging backyard gleaning projects, and is working with the County Agency on Aging to promote a garden to supplement senior nutrition efforts; we’ve been asked to provide support there, as well.
A new community garden has started in Camarillo; this effort was led by citizens, one a Master Gardener. The Community Roots Garden, based at the North Oxnard United Methodist Church in – a full acre – is bringing farm workers into community with volunteers who are supporting the effort. Everyone is learning together. Another agency has recently contacted us to see about revitalizing an abandoned orchard to use it as a source of food for the hungry. A local group of volunteers, the Grow Food Party Crew, has provided free labor and expertise to plant numerous home gardens, home gardens that demonstrate organic gardening practices. The Ventura City Corps youth group, some trained by UC staff and Master Gardeners, has put a garden in the front of their building, where it can be easily viewed from City Hall. And at Ventura City Hall last Friday, the day before Labor Day weekend, about fifty people gathered and took the first steps to create a Ventura City chapter of a A LEAN VC. This will create a broad-based community coalition to support health and wellness in the city of Ventura, and one of the four pillars of activity will center on local food systems and gardening. To cap off last week, a terrific article in the Star, written by Lisa McKinnon talked about the growing CSA movement in the county.
Ventura is just one county in California, which is just one state in the Union. There are thousands of these efforts occurring across the United States, as a passion for gardening grips the nation. Much of this interest can be attributed to the White House vegetable garden planted by First Lady Michelle Obama, and the USDA’s People Garden, sited on the National Mall.
I’ve been invited to visit both of those gardens this week, and will be blogging daily from Washington, DC. (I’ve even brought plastic bags, hoping to snag some compost from the First Pile and also some of the compost at the USDA’s People’s Garden, which came from Rodale Farm in Pennsylvania, which has been so center in the modern sustainable farming and organic movement).
Whatever the problems facing residents of Ventura, Portland, Peoria, Lansing, or even Washington, DC, gardening certainly provides part of the solution.
More tomorrow. On Tuesday, I’ll be attending the National Food Policy Council Conference and also visiting the Congressional Hunger Center. There, I’ll have a chance to learn more about hunger and food policy in America from leading advocates, including one of my personal heroes, Ed Cooney, whom I met on a previous trip to Washington. Ed is an expert on food stamp and nutrition policy, and these are policies that have more impact on our children and communities than you can imagine. (BTW, Congress is currently discussing the Childhood Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004. This act encompasses all of the federal child nutrition programs, including the School Breakfast and the National School Lunch Programs, the Summer Food Service Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. This is American food and public policy, writ at its largest).
We’ll undoubtedly be talking some about how community gardening and urban agriculture efforts can help address food security issues, childhood nutrition and poverty.
See you tomorrow.
- Author: Chris M. Webb
Did you know that the Ventura County UCCE office has an advisor that works with local commercial fishermen? Her name is Carrie Culver, and she would like you to know our area is one of the top producing regions on the west coast!
The Santa Barbara Channel includes three ports in Ventura County and one in Santa Barbara County. The region is defined here as the ocean waters south of Point Conception to just south of Point Mugu, as well as the waters surrounding the four northern Channel Islands. This region is a unique place for California fisheries because it is the transition zone where both southern and northern species occur and there are natural conditions that typically provide an abundance of food for the fish.
So what are the top species caught by our local commercial fishermen? Halibut, rockfish, tuna, white seabass, squid, lobster, crab, sea urchin, and shrimp top the list. In addition abalone, oysters and mussels are locally farmed or cultured.
Research shows that including seafood in our diet is good for our health. If you enjoy eating seafood, please do what you can to support local fishermen by visiting fishermen’s market, or ask for it at stores and restaurants.
Great recipes, storage and handling information and much more can be found at these sites.
http://seafood.ucdavis.edu/consumer.html
Additional information about local fisheries, including availability, can be found in our Fish on Your Dish publication. Written by kids and for kids, there is much inside for all of us to learn.