France continues to be hallowed ground for lovers of healthy and delicious local foods. It is all too easy to daydream of France's famous bustling open-air markets, their stalls filled with some of the highest quality fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and meats available anywhere in the world. Yet, as this article from the New York Times points out, all is not well in the land of the "potager".

France Battles a Problem That Grows and Grows: Fat

By ELAINE SCIOLINO, The New York Times

ROUBAIX, France - In a cold, stark municipal hall, 8-year-old Hatim sat silently as the pediatrician passed judgment.

At about 4 feet 6 inches and 95 pounds, the boy was declared overweight and in danger of becoming obese.

The morning pastry would have to go. So would the Oasis soft drinks and the after-school Nutella-on-bread. Meat and potatoes would be allowed, but only once a day. A snack could include milk or cheese, but not both. Baguettes were fine, but where were the veggies?

"23.6 body mass index," Dr. Corinne Fassler announced. "You have to raise your consciousness. You have to find a sport you like. But if you go to the swimming pool, don't go to the vending machine for chips."

The French are getting fatter, and Jan. 7 was National Weighing Day for the country's children. A voluntary army of hundreds of pediatricians fanned out to more than 80 cities to weigh, measure, interrogate and enlighten.

Roubaix is an economically depressed industrial town in northern France, the fattest region in the country. Fifty-one percent of the population here is overweight or obese, compared with the national average of 42 percent, according to the most recent national figures in 2003.

The trend line is most significant among children. While adult obesity is rising about 6 percent annually, among children the national rate of growth is 17 percent. At that rate, the French could be - quelle horreur - as fat as Americans by 2020. (More than 65 percent of the population in the United States is considered overweight or obese.)

Just a few years ago, obesity in France was a subject relegated to morning television talk shows and women's magazines. Now the issue has become political.

When Jean-Marie Le Guen, a doctor and Socialist member of Parliament, began introducing bills on how to stop what he calls France's "epidemic," some of his colleagues dismissed him as a radical fringe nuisance. Now he is considered a pioneer.

"It used to be little talked about, and when it was, it was the domain of women complaining that they had put on a little weight," said Dr. Le Guen, who has written a book, "Obesity: The New French Sickness." The sickness, he predicted, will be "one of the important themes" of the Socialists in the campaign for president next year.

Last September, France banned soda-and-snack-selling vending machines from public schools. The law also banned misleading television and print food advertising and imposed a 1.5 percent tax on the advertising budgets of food companies that did not encourage healthy eating. Schools have been urged to provide students with a half-hour of physical exercise a day.

But the backlash from the food industry and a lack of political will has made it impossible to impose changes in advertising. More drastic legislation was rejected by Parliament, including health warnings on the packages of unhealthy foods, much like alcohol and cigarette warnings; a proposal to force restaurants to display nutrition and calorie information on their menus; and an outright ban on television advertisements for unhealthy products.

With its universal health care coverage, the French government is also interested in cutting medical costs associated with obesity and diabetes. A recent advertising campaign by the National Collective of Associations of the Obese, an educational and lobbying organization, shows a markedly obese nude woman under the headline "Obesity Kills." (An estimated 55,000 people in France die of obesity-related illnesses every year.)

Some of the reasons for the increase in obesity are those that plague the United States and much of Europe: the lure of fast food and prepared foods, the ubiquity of unhealthy snacks and sedentary lives.

McDonald's is more profitable in France than anywhere else in Europe. Sales have increased 42 percent over the past five years. Some 1.2 million French, or 2 percent of the population, eat there every day.

There has also been a breakdown in the classical French tradition of mealtime as a family ritual so disciplined and honored that opening the refrigerator between meals for a child was a crime worthy of punishment. A side effect is a blame-the-mom syndrome, as fewer mothers have time to shop at markets every day or two for fresh foods and instead put more prepared dishes on the table.

Findus, the frozen food giant best known for its breaded, frozen fish filets, filmed French people eating over a period of time and was shocked by the results.

Contrary to the myth that the French spend hours sitting around the table savoring small portions of several courses, the films showed them eating in front of their television sets, while on the telephone and even alone. In fact, the average French meal, which 25 years ago lasted 88 minutes, is just 38 minutes today.

With all the awareness of obesity, there is also a countertrend. The French may have begun to embrace the large woman.

Six years ago, the French government declared the model and actress Laetitia Casta (5 feet 7, 120 pounds) the new "Marianne," the symbol of the republic on statues and public buildings.

But in his fashion show last October, the designer John Galliano stunned the audience by putting fat women on the runway alongside string-bean-thin models.

And last month, millions of television viewers voted and chose Magalie Bonneau, a 19-year-old student who is 5 feet 1 inch and weighs 165 pounds, as the winner of the hit talent and reality show "Star Academy." Libération called her the "icon of 'real people.' " A cover story in the magazine Télé Cable Satellite referred to her as the new "heavyweight" of the channel TF1.

She managed to lose 29 pounds during the rigors of the competition, and attributes her victory to her big voice, not her big build. Not that she thinks her size hurt. "Audiences are getting used to seeing plump girls," she said. "A barrier has been crossed."

Source: The New York Times

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Posted by at 8:04 AM | Permalink

Getting up close and personal with a homegrown tomato could help combat the high incidence of childhood diabetes and obesity nationwide. So says Dan Desmond, an advocate for garden-based education, a growing national movement to teach children healthier eating habits by exposing them to fresh fruits and vegetables.

By Walter Yost -- Sacramento Bee Staff Writer

"There is a crisis in childhood health, and it's focused on a lack of nutrition," said Desmond, an adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension.

While Desmond credits nutritionists and teachers with providing students with an "intellectual knowledge" of nutrition, he maintains that improving young people's eating habits requires something more hands-on.
"I think this problem will demand radical solutions," he said.

Working under a Food & Society Policy Fellowship from the Kellogg Foundation, Desmond is taking his campaign for more school gardens and farm-to-school programs to school food service directors.

Such strategies could play a larger role in schools with this week's release of the federal government's new Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005. The guidelines, which recommend 2 1/2 cups of fruits and vegetables daily, form the basis for the federal school lunch program, which subsidizes most school cafe terias.

Although some food service professionals are skeptical about the practicality of his ideas, Desmond points to successful real-life examples, such as an edible schoolyard in Berkeley and farm-to-school salad bars in the Ventura Unified School District.

Closer to home, Desmond mentions the Davis Farm to School Connection, which in the past few years has helped bring farm-fresh vegetables and fruits to eight elementary schools in the Davis Joint Unified School District.

"There is no question that the farm-to-school design is a challenging one that will require hard work and, in some cases, additional resources," Desmond said. "But the cost to continue with a food system that doesn't encourage healthy dietary habits will be much more in the long run."

Last year, state schools chief Jack O'Connell held a press conference about what is being served in California's school cafeterias.

O'Connell said that children who eat school lunches are healthier than children who don't. But he added, "Too many students are still eating fast food, too many students are eating highly processed foods, and the fat content of too many meals is simply too high."

Last week, Desmond pitched his ideas to several El Dorado County food services directors gathered in the faculty lunchroom at Ponderosa High School in Shingle Springs.

While they said they agreed with his ideas in theory, they pointed out the financial realities of running a school cafeteria.

Purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables from small farmers or growing them in a school garden for use in a cafeteria costs more than purchasing them as bulk commodities.

"A cafeteria is a different animal than a restaurant, said Lorrie Griffin, food services supervisor at Ponderosa High. "It's got to be cost-effective."

In the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, food services director Al Schieder has been lauded for eliminating the sales of all foods having little or no nutritional value - including junk food, sodas and a la carte items such as french fries and chips - and implementing Nutrient-Based Menu Planning at all grade levels.

Schieder, a former restaurateur, said cafeteria sales have increased, and his department is making a profit instead of losing money.

Schieder said edible gardens and farm-to-school programs may be good teaching tools, but their use is limited by geography and financial concerns.

"I'd ask: What would kids in Lake Tahoe do?" Schieder said. And most schools, he added, can't afford to buy fresh fruits and vegetables from small farms.

Schieder's food service program, like many across the country, is regulated and subsidized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The majority of lunches in the district's cafeterias, he said, are served to needy students, and the federal reimbursement rate is slightly over $2 per meal.

Desmond and his supporters, however, aren't about to concede Schieder's points without rebuttal.

Schools in harsher climates, like Lake Tahoe, can utilize indoor grow-labs and greenhouses during the winter, Desmond said.

As for the cost issue, Jeri Ohmart with the UC Davis Children's Garden program said funding for salad bars that serve farm-fresh fruits and vegetables can be a problem.

"The biggest cost is the food preparation, not the food itself," she said. But Ohmart said numerous grants are available to schools from sources such as the Kellogg Foundation, the California Nutrition Network and the USDA itself.

Sandy Van Houten, director of child nutrition services with the Ventura Unified School District, has developed a successful "farm-to-school salad bar" program in just three years.

It started with one farmer selling tangerines and avocados to one school. Now 30 local farmers and 18 schools take part.

"We have farmers growing crops just for us," Van Houten said.

She contends the best way to get students interested in fruits and vegetables is to provide the freshest foods possible, "not the stuff in shrink-wrapped packages," Van Houten said.

Source: The Sacramento Bee

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, health, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. If you are the copyright holder and feel that this use does not fit under the clause mentioned above, then please let us know and we will remove this from our site. Thank you.

Posted by at 3:51 PM | Permalink

by Dorothy M. Nichols. Used with author's permission.

Are you an adventurous gardener who likes a challenge? The pawpaw is a little-known native fruit that thrives with little or no care, is rarely bothered by pests or diseases, and bears delicious fruit in a wide variety of soils and climates.

Asimina Triloba, the “custard apple,” bears the largest fruit native to North America, and its flavor has been described as a banana-strawberry-custard blend. The fruits aren’t pretty; they look like fat ugly bananas, but some weigh as much as one pound!

Why isn’t this desirable fruit more popular? It doesn’t store or ship well, so commercial producers aren’t interested in it. Home orchardists didn’t grow pawpaws much because they were hard to establish and difficult to pollinate. But dedicated pawpaw growers have developed improved strains by selective breeding, and the tree is becoming more widely grown.

Requirements for establishment
Another nickname of the pawpaw is “the captive tree,” because its seedlings need shade to establish, but prefer full sunlight to fruit. The best way to satisfy these needs is to plant seedlings in full sun but shaded by shrubs, or to put a barrel that’s open on both ends over them to shade them for the first year or two. Their taproots reach down to China, and it’s said that the only way to kill a pawpaw is to transplant it. (It’s rumored that when the roots come out in China, the residents use them for fence posts. For that reason, they’d appreciate it if you grew your pawpaws in rows.)

The trees are happiest in rich, humus soil with good drainage and an organic mulch. They need about 30 inches of water per year and a long, warm summer to ripen (150 frost-free days.) For this reason they bear better in areas with this length of growing season, although they’re rated hardy in USDA Zones 5 to 8.

Seedlings grow slowly into attractive pyramid-shaped trees about 20 feet tall, with large, tropical looking foliage which turns tawny yellow in fall. Robert Kurle in northern Illinois told me, “My trees grew about 15 ft. tall in 10 years from seed. They started bearing when they were about four years old.”

Pollination – doing what comes un-naturally
In spring the trees bloom with two-inch wide dark maroon flowers. Native pawpaws are shy bearing because bees don’t pollinate them. Corwin Davis in Michigan watched his flowering trees day and night to find out how they were pollinated, and found that green bottle flies were the main pollinators. These flies are called “carrion flies” and he had to hang spoiled meat in the trees to attract them. (Of course this could attract buzzards, too.) Fortunately a man in Kansas used a different approach. He collected pawpaw pollen from several trees, mixed honey with it, and put a little dab of the mixture on pawpaw blossoms. Bees in the area discovered them and pollinated the trees like crazy, which gave him a fantastic crop. He’d bribed the bees to work trees they wouldn’t touch ordinarily.

You can also hand-pollinate the trees. Take an artist’s brush or a Q-tip and wiggle it around in one flower after another on at least two varieties of pawpaws.

New strains developed by Davis and other growers improved pollination. They may not have achieved self-fruitful strains combined with delicious flavor yet, however.

After the blossoms appear in mid-spring, clusters of three- to six inch long fruit develop and ripen in September-October. (Their two rows of large bean-like seeds are a minor disadvantage.) Pawpaws are credited with saving Lewis and Clark from starvation in their explorations. Some old timers say that the riper the fruit, the better the flavor, and they won’t eat it until the skin is black. The clusters led to the nicknames, “Indiana banana” and “Poor man’s banana.” (This fruit sure has a lot of nicknames!).

Pawpaws grow wild from Florida north to southern Ontario, according to Horticulture Magazine. Their natural habitat is in the understory of hardwood forests, especially in rich, moist bottomlands, where they send up stolons to create a dense thicket. They are the only larval host of the fabulous Zebra Swallowtail butterfly.

The fruit is rich in nutrients. According to the owner of Oikos Tree Crops Nursery, “Pawpaws have 20 to 70 times as much iron, 10 times as much calcium, and four- to 20 times as much magnesium as do the banana, apple, or orange.” Other sources say pawpaws are higher in protein than other fruits, with elevated levels of amino acids, Vitamins A and C, and many minerals. (And they taste better than vitamin supplements, too.)

Sources
You can’t find pawpaw trees for sale everywhere. One source is Oikos Tree Crops, (269) 624-6233, www.oikostreecrops.com/ or e-mail: oak24@aol.com/

Another source is Larry Sibley, the son-in-law of Corwin Davis, who did many years of research in developing superior pawpaw strains. Sibley took over the Davis nursery and sells several varieties of grafted pawpaw trees: Tollgate Gardens & Nursery, (296) 781-5887, www.tollgategardens.com/ or e-mail tool3gate2@juno.com/ Other sources of information

The Pawpaw Foundation is dedicated to the development of pawpaws as a new fruit crop. For information contact Snake Jones, 147 Atwood Research Facility, Kentucky State Univ., Frankfort, KY 40601. Also at KSU is Dr.
Kirk Pomper, kpomper@gwmail.kysu.edu/ or www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/ who will answer your questions about pawpaws.

Waynesville, MO has a pawpaw festival, held in September. Contact denton@zigs.net for information. The annual pawpaw festival in Albany, Ohio is also held in September. Last year it had a “Best pawpaw contest,” a cookoff competition, and even a pawpaw beer garden. (Honest, I didn’t make it up.) For information contact pawpaw@frognet.net/ You’ll also find reams of information if you research pawpaws in a search engine on the Internet.

You probably won’t find any pawpaws in the wild, but it might intrigue you to grow this unique fruit-bearing tree and be able to serve homegrown “tropical” fruit far from the tropics.

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Dorothy Nichols has been nationally published in such magazines as Flower and Garden, Woman's Day, Organic Gardening, Woman's World, and .Successful Farming. She covers a wide variety of topics, taken from extensive research as well as experimentation in her own garden, giving sources of the plants, seeds, and products she mentions. She has been the Garden Columnist for the Lewiston Morning Tribune for 10 years. For more on Dorothy and her writing, please see her website: http://fun.to/plant

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The internet abounds with information, some of which is actually useful. We've brought together a number of links to short gardening and cooking videos that we hope will help you further develop your skills. You will need a high-speed internet connection and the appropriate media playing software in order to view the video.

Please let us know if there's a video availabe on the net that you feel we should add to this page or, similarly, if any of the links below have stopped working. Enjoy.

Gardening Techniques

Making Compost Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

Slugging Slugs Non-toxically Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

How to Select the Right Shovel Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

Using Beneficial Bugs to Your Benefit Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

 

Cooking and Food Preparation Techniques

Chopping and Slicing Fresh Herbs Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

Peel a Tomato Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Clean Leeks Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Wash Leafy Greens  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Prepare Asparagus  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Clean Artichokes  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Make Your Own Vinaigrette  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Epicurious

Easy Omelet Technique  Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

Make Your Own Mayonnaise  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Epicurious

Shape a Pizza  Format: RealPlayer, Source: Taunton Press

Filet a Fish  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Epicurious

Blanch, Parboil  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Braise  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Clarify Butter  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Deep-Fry  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Deglaze  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Dredge, Bread  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Emulsify  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Flambe  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Flip Crepes  Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Flip Food in Pan Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Fold Batter Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Fold Omelets Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Fold a Papillote Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Forming Gnocchi Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

French a Rack of Lamb Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Improvise Steamer Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Making Sushi Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Parchment Lids Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Pleating Dumplings Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Poaching an Egg Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Roll Eggrolls Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network

Saute Format: Windows Media Player, Source: Scripps Network