When I was a kid, I hated buying lunches at school. They were never particularly tasty, you had to waste valuable socializing time waiting in the lunch line and I liked the attention I got for being the kid who brought "weird" combinations to school (like yogurt and granola).
However, I know that for some of my classmates, those lunches that I turned my nose up at were the best thing they had to eat all day. In recent years, many school districts have worked hard at making their lunch offerings increasingly delicious and healthy, to the point where they probably would have tempted a snot like me. Now, with rising food costs, school cafeterias are having to find ways to cut back in order to keep serving up healthy meals, especially since government subsidies for school meals aren't covering the costs.
Some districts are cutting staff in order to make ends meet and others are foregoing pricey items like the ever-popular baby carrots and replacing fresh veggies with frozen. This July, the Congressional committee that determines the federal reimbursement rate to school lunch programs will meet to decide the amount that schools will get for the following year. Schools are hoping that they take rising prices into account and give them the 12% to 15% bump they need to maintain their level of service and nutrition.
Think you can tell a Yodel from a Ho Ho from a Swiss Roll by sight alone? If so, you're a savvier snacker than we are. Take the quiz, then come back to brag (or sulk) in the comments.
Our colleague Neil Goldstein works up a powerful hunger while he's trekking through the wilds of Upstate New York. Follow him as he forages for wild edibles.
I don't know how old I was when I started having a fascination with wild foods, but I can point to a few family activities that sparked it. As far back as I remember we used to go pick apples every year at an orchard near Stone Ridge, New York. Always fun, except of course for the inevitable case of poison ivy that followed a few days later. The apples weren't wild, but still the idea of picking something from a tree, and eating it right there got to me.
Another major influence were the wild strawberries and blueberries we picked as kids. The strawberries grew near our home in Woodstock. There were several places where you could pick a dozen or two small wild strawberries quickly with little effort, but a short bike ride away was a meadow that my older brothers Lee and Paul called Sergeant's Field. You could pick a few quarts of the local delicacy there.
Know your fusilli from your farfalle? Campanelle from cavatelli? Put your pasta savvy to the test with this photo ID quiz, then come back and share your score.
And you thought the green-beret'd Girl Scouts and their cookies were enterprising little kids?
In Victorville, CA, the latest trend at schools is an underground sugar trade. With candy and other "bad" snacks banned from school campuses, kids are selling contraband Snickers and Twinkies right out of their backpacks.
According to Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville, it's become quite a lucrative business for the dealers. Kids bring things like candy bars, soda, and even energy drinks from home in their "sack lunch" and turn around and sell them for a healthy profit, with some kids walking around school with upwards of $40 in cash.
While I understand this is a bit of a problem for the schools and parents, I have to hand it to the kids -- at least we can count on them to be very good businesspeople when they grow up.
During the years when I was going to school in Walla Walla, there wasn't much in the way of good food in town. Our options were the standard fast food fare, some greasy diners and a few taco trucks scattered around town (it was before the food and wine revolution that they've had over the last few years). However, the taco trucks offered some really fantastic fare, making me forever a fan of fresh tortillas wrapped around spicy beef, chicken or pork.
What got me thinking about taco trucks was this post on Serious Eats by Matthew Amster-Burton, in which he takes his four-year-old daughter to Tacos El Asadero, Seattle's best known taco truck that actually serves their grub on a bus instead of from a truck window. He got her a lengua taco, which impressed me, because I don't know any other kids who would willingly eat tongue. Apparently it made an impression on the little Amster-Burton, because when it was all over, she asked for a taco truck to be parked in front of their house. Don't we all wish for that?
Okay kids, it's time to dish. I know that there have got to be bunches of you who have taco truck stories. Let's hear them!
Childhood obesity isn't just a US problem -- it's a global epidemic.
In Australia, children are so fat that they don't fit into their car seats (the source article calls them "booster seats"). Researchers in Melbourne found that of the children who meet the height requirement (i.e. are short enough to sit in a car seat), 40% of them are too heavy.
Yikes.
And what's even more alarming is that parents are putting their kids in the car anyway using the regular seatbelts, which could do more harm to kids than good. For now, Australian researchers are calling for bigger seats to accommodate the bigger children, but how about Australia, and the US, work on getting kids to a healthy weight that fits?
When it comes to packing up a sandwich, what do you use to keep that sandwich fresh and unscathed until lunchtime? I imagine that the majority of you use some sort of disposable plastic bag (whether it be zip or fold top). Assuming that you toss those plastic bags at the end of your lunch hour (or that your kid tosses it out when it's time to head out to recess) it begins to amount to quite a few plastic bags. There are reusable plastic container options out there, but what about checking out a reusable sandwich wrap?
If you want to make your own, check out out how this Australian mom made a sandwich wrapper for her daughter out of some fabric, a zip top bag and some old velcro (via Green Daily).
Last year at the Vegan Lunch Box, Jennifer posted instructions from a reader on how to make a reusable sandwich wrapper out of polyurethane laminate coated fabric.
If you're not feeling crafty, you can buy a ready-to-go wrapper at Wrap-n-Mat.
When I was growing up, nearly every night my family ate dinner together. No matter what else was for dinner, there was always a green vegetable. On the rare occasion that we'd have breakfast for dinner, my mom would serve apple slices and tell us to pretend that they were green (cauliflower and all squashes counted as green). Because of this early conditioning, I have a very hard time feeling like my dinner experience has been complete if there wasn't a green vegetable on my plate.
I realized that this wasn't the norm about a week ago when I was making dinner. Scott wandered into the kitchen and asked what we were having. I replied, "Turkey burgers and baby bok choy, gotta have a green veggie." He looked at me strangely and so I explained my mom's rule of dinner. He said that wasn't the rule in his house when he was growing up, but that he could see how it made some sense.
So now I'm curious. What were the food rules in your house growing up? What are the rules that you've made for your own kids? I've got a couple of others that were also the law in my house growing up, but before I share those, I want to hear yours.
We all know that the best way to create healthy habits is to teach them to kids while they're young. Amanda Rose of the Ethicurean has taken that wisdom to heart. She's been reading Michael Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemma and as she has worked her way through each chapter, she has told her 5-year-old son Frederick about the book. He, in turn, has taken the ideas Amanda shared with him and made paintings for each chapter. And they are awesome! There is nothing like a complex idea distilled by an innocent brain and rendered in tempera paint. Or is that water colors?
While I'm not a parent myself, I've spent quite a lot of time in my life providing child care, and so I know that entertaining kids can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. One surefire way to keep the younger set happy is to give them either an art project or a cooking project. When you can combine the two and give them an artistic project that then turns into something they can eat, all the better!
Marie at Make and Takes did a really fun activity with her kids recently, in which she added food coloring to bowls of milk and used them as edible paint that they then used to color bread. The bread got toasted and eaten. They ate their painted toast dry, but you could butter it or give it a glaze with a bit of honey.
As part of a project about cats, a teacher in Alingsås, Sweden gave her students cat food to try. According a Swedish new site (in English), this was not the first time this teacher had fed cat food to her charges. This time, though, one of the parents complained and the teacher was reprimanded.
I absolutely cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Of course, I can't really imagine it in Sweden either. I personally don't think it's wrong to try pet food (as long as it wasn't made in China). I can see, though, where other people might.
I wonder what other experiments this teacher has tried out on the kids?
We've already heard all the reasons why soda is bad for kids, so we won't go into them. Again.
However, we will say that just as bad as soda is the thing that makes kids thirsty for soda in the first place: salt. According to a British study published in an American Heart Association journal, kids who eat salty snacks and meals get thirsty and often turn to sodas to quench their thirst. Researchers go on to say that the salt isn't coming from the salt shaker, but from manufactured food.
The solution? Cut back on salty, processed snacks.
The idea of worms is not something I'd normally want to bring up on a food blog, but in the case of mega-ginormous food conglomerate Kraft, worms are driving the development of a new food line.
Wait...what?!?!
Yes, worms, but don't worry about finding the creepy crawly things in your next blue box of macaroni and cheese. Kraft is developing a new food that is supposed to taste good, and also kill intestinal worms, which is a major problem in in rural Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The food is still in the early stages of development, so there's no word on what the food will be, but one of the ingredients in it will be a de-worming pesticide. It sounds horrible to put something called a "pesticide" in food, but let's just think of it as a chemical that will help millions of children get rid of those nasty intestinal worms.
It sits alone and untouched at the end of a long buffet table -- a bowl full of apples and bananas, maybe a seedy orange tossed in as an afterthought. Don't let your fruit salad meet this awful fate, spruce it up instead!
Childhood obesity isn't just a US problem -- it's a global epidemic.
As part of a project about cats, a teacher in 
We've already heard all the reasons why soda is bad for kids, so we won't go into them. Again.
The idea of worms is not something I'd normally want to bring up on a food blog, but in the case of mega-ginormous food conglomerate Kraft, worms are driving the development of a new food line.
Creating the ultimate Mother's Day gift for the carnivorous mom
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Gifts for the vegetarian (or vegetable-loving) mom
