CT Green Scene

Finally, a good school lunch

We've talked about school lunch before on this site. We feel strongly about what our kids eat, what we eat, and the quality of sustainable foods and farming. This site also reported on the topic a couple of months ago when lawmakers considered pizza a vegetable serving because of its two tablespoons of tomato paste per serving. 

Reuters reported today that the USDA has done a small overhaul of school nutrition to include more fruits and vegetables and skim milk. They have also mandated a child-size portion and lower sodium, among other things.

About time, isn't it? See the excerpt below.

More fruits, veggies in school lunch rules
By Ian Simpson and Lisa Baertlein | Reuters – 59 mins ago

WASHINGTON/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. school children, accustomed to a steady diet of pizza and French fries, will find more fruits, vegetables and whole grains on their trays under new government rules announced on Wednesday.

The new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules aim to boost the nutritional quality of the federally funded meals consumed by roughly 32 million U.S. school children.

The rules represent the first major revision of school meal standards in more than 15 years and are intended to combat the nation's childhood obesity crisis -- nearly one in three children in America is overweight or obese.

The revamp comes just months after U.S. lawmakers protected pizza's status as a vegetable and killed proposed limits on weekly servings of starchy vegetables like potatoes.

A Little Green Peace in Vermont

By Eileen Weber



For ten days in July, a peace camp in Vermont will bring a dozen American, Israeli, and Palestinian teens together to laugh, play, and learn about each other. The 16-year-olds will be a mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. And all of the effort to get this project off the ground came from one man: The Reverend Nicholas T. Porter.

As a small child watching his family’s black and white TV, Porter watched the images of the Arab invasion on Israeli soil in October, 1973. It left a lasting impression that led to a lifetime dream that peace in the Middle East might one day become a reality.

As the rector of Southport’s Trinity Episcopal Church, Porter and his wife Dorothy had long discussed an opportunity to host a peace camp. Having spent time in Jerusalem during his career, they felt a strong desire to stop the violence and hatred that occurs between the two groups that actually have more in common than they wish to admit. One way to do that is to teach the young about tolerance so that they grow to spread peace.