From the category archives:

kids & food

Berkeley Votes to Fund At-risk Edible School Programs

April 17, 2012 berkeley bites

The Berkeley Unified School District School Board recently voted to authorize funding up to $350,000 for three elementary schools that were in danger of losing their gardening and cooking programs for the next school year. The move came as welcome news for all those involved in the programs and anyone who champions teaching children to eat, grow, and cook their greens.

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Berkeley School Gardening, Cooking Programs Face Cuts

March 26, 2012 berkeley bites

Berkeley has an international reputation for its edible schoolyards, where public school children of all economic means learn what it takes to grow a radish and sauté some chard. Potential funding cuts to the program would represent a significant setback in the city’s pioneering efforts to date.

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Dealing with a Discerning Diner

February 27, 2012 great schools site

Revisiting that evergreen “problem” for many parents: How to handle a so-called picky eater?

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Phyllis Grant: Not Your Typical Mommy Food Blogger

January 31, 2012 berkeley bites

Phyllis Grant cooks a whole cow, drops f-bombs, and has many grateful fans who have young children. Find out why her blog dash and bella resonates with readers.

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School Lunch Without the Stress

January 23, 2012 global cuisine

Find tried-and-true tips from the trenches to help stave off the lunch box blues.

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Learning on the Half-Shell: Community Supported Oysters

November 30, 2011 civil eats

Pickleweed Point Community Oyster Farm aims to educate members about the benefits of the briny bivalve.

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CANFIT Wants to Improve the Health of all America’s Youth

October 20, 2011 berkeley bites

Arnell Hinkle, the founder of CANFIT in Berkeley, works to prevent obesity and other chronic lifestyle diseases in low-income youth of color around the country.

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Hungry for Better Food at Berkeley’s Echo Lake Camp

September 2, 2011 berkeley bites

A chronicle of this reporter’s recent edible misadventures at Berkeley’s Echo Lake Camp.

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Cooking Camps for Kids: Top Chefs and Solar Ovens

July 31, 2011 berkeley bites

Summer cooking camps teach young food lovers how to make pasta from scratch, what happens when you don’t follow a recipe, and the value in working as a team in the kitchen.

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Michelle Obama and Alice Waters: Let’s Do Breakfast

June 13, 2011 berkeley bites

Alice Waters feeds First Lady Michelle Obama at the fancy pants Claremont Hotel. What happened to plans to for a downhome breakfast in Oakland?

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Urban Youth on Growing and Selling Good Food

February 1, 2011 bay area bites

Teens in Berkeley, Oakland, and New Orleans on getting good grub in their communities.

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Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow

January 21, 2011 bay citizen

Garden teacher Kim Allen offers youth space to grow.

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New School Food Study: Victory for Alice Waters

September 24, 2010 food research

Take that Caitlin Flanagan. Finally, some academic research to support what people like Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, who have watched kids pick spinach, cook kale, and chew on chard, have known all along: Children who grow their own food (and prepare it and eat it too) make healthier food choices. Read all about the [...]

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School Food: Japanese Style

July 13, 2010 kids & food

Look what’s for lunch at school in Japan. It’s enough to whet anyone’s appetite.

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Ten Teens Rocking the Food Revolution Scene

July 7, 2010 food films

Ten teens rocking the Food Revolution scene, making a difference on the food front in schools and communities around the country.

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Operation Frontline: Teaching the Needy to Cook

June 22, 2010 civil eats

A couple of Saturdays ago, on a gorgeous sunny day when many Berkeleysiders were likely heading out for a hike, contemplating another coffee, or barely out of bed, I stopped by a cooking class taught at Ursula Sherman Village on Harrison Street, a transitional living facility for the  homeless in West Berkeley. Sponsored by Operation [...]

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Inside Berkeley’s School Kitchen

May 10, 2010 civil eats

An ex-Washington Post reporter, who now blogs about school food, recently spent a week embedded in the central kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District, in my hometown.
Ed Bruske’s mission: To find out how one school community manages to cook food from scratch for its students.

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What's On Your Plate? Food for Thought for All Ages

March 31, 2010 civil eats

Review of What’s on Your Plate? cool food documentary for kids of all ages.

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Jamie Oliver: School Food Revolution or Reality TV Rubbish?

March 29, 2010 food politics

It’s time to talk about the Limey lad’s Appalachian invasion. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

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An Edible Education in Thailand

March 3, 2010 civil eats

Edible Schoolyard’s Kyle Cornforth takes her edible education to Thailand.

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Fed Up with School Lunch: The Feds Join The Fray

February 9, 2010 civil eats

Many kids in the U.S. eat half their daily calories at school. And what a sad, super-size me state of affairs that is in most parts of the country. Highly processed and packaged food laden with sugar, fat, and salt fill in for whole grains, fruit & veg, and protein — you know, the kind [...]

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Sprouts Cooking Club: Growing the Next Generation of Chefs

February 1, 2010 baking

It took a teenager from Wyomissing, PA who had never heard of Alice Waters to figure out what was missing on the culinary scene in Berkeley. When Karen Rogers landed at UC Berkeley in 2005 she couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a cooking club on campus.  So she started one. But the Cal Cooking Club [...]

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Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education

January 18, 2010 food politics

I was so royally peeved by Caitlin Flanagan’s hatchet job on Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard in her Atlantic piece “Cultivating Failure” that it’s taken me a week to simmer down enough to write about the matter with some decorum. The snarky article takes a swing at public school gardens everywhere and it made [...]

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School Produce Stand Feeds Families in Oakland

January 12, 2010 civil eats

Care to sample a strawberry or scoop up salad greens for supper when you pick up your child from school? Since school went back last September you can do just that every Tuesday at Glenview Elementary School in Oakland, California. Led by garden coordinator and parent Delana Toler, a small core of volunteers — some [...]

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2010 Harvest Calendar

January 5, 2010 food flotsam & jetsam

Happy New Year! I wanted to share with my peeps one of my favorite holiday gifts (thanks again Marge), this lovely harvest calendar by artist and organic plant nursery co-owner Helen Krayenhoff.  It’s filled with photos of tempting produce and each month includes a recipe — Picante Cabbage Slaw for January, Bok Choy Sauteed with [...]

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Sam Siegel, 10, Seasoned Chef

December 22, 2009 kids & food

How many 5th graders do you know who wonder what to do with orange marmalade languishing in the refrigerator, decide to mix it with some brown sugar, soy sauce, olive oil, and garlic and use it as a sauce to accompany braised cod for the family dinner? Exactly. I bumped into Sam Siegel, a former [...]

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Mickey Murch and Gospel Flat Farm

December 14, 2009 growing greens

Photo: courtesy of Sarah Warnock It’s a great time to be a farmer. So says Mickey Murch, who tends his family’s farm in beautiful Bolinas, an eclectic coastal enclave in West Marin, California. He hasn’t always felt this way. Mickey grew up running bare foot through fields but he didn’t want to dig dirt to [...]

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Grow Your Own Row

December 2, 2009 fruit

Meet my friends Leigh Raiford and Michael Cohen, typical nomadic academics who put down roots in Berkeley six years ago with their children Maya and Maceo. (Maya is in the same class as my son.) These two transplants passed on their recipe for roasted kale and inspired me to start my own little backyard raised [...]

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Stuck in a Dinner Rut? You've Got Lots of Company

November 17, 2009 comfort food

Fascinated by a report out of the UK (thank you Food News Journal) that reveals the average mother rotates through just nine different meals to feed her family. (Ah, why weren’t the fathers polled as well?) And one in four make the same meals on the same day of the week. Wow. You’d think with [...]

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Warning: Food News Harms Your Child's Health

November 11, 2009 food research

Anyone else wonder how to handle scary food news consumed by our kids? I have an 11-year-old vegetarian, who loves tofu, dipping baguette into balsamic vinegar, and a few canned food products, such as coconut milk. His teacher is encouraging the class to track current events by tuning into the news. To date, all that’s [...]

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What's for Dinner? Find Answers on the Web

November 4, 2009 comfort food

How many of you have found those email chain letters in your inbox asking you to share a recipe with a dozen or so others? How many of you actually respond? I’m not entirely sure why, but I never seem to reply to these recipe requests (sorry Anne, Katherine, Ellen, et al.) and wind up [...]

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Cookbook Giveaway: The Gastrokid Cookbook

October 29, 2009 food book giveaways

This month’s book giveaway, The Gastrokid Cookbook: Feeding a Foodie Family in a Fast-Food World, comes to us from two dedicated foodie fathers who are determined to keep things interesting in the kitchen after children enter the dining picture. Hugh Garvey, features editor at Bon Appetit, and Matthew Yeomans, who writes about eating for a [...]

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Reassurance for Parents of Picky Eaters

September 25, 2009 food books

Time to debunk a few myths for those of us raising choosy chowhounds.  It’s not your fault. Except when it is. I’ll explain below.  Also, it’s not a problem. Unless, of course, you decide it is. More on that later too. I don’t mean to be cryptic or glib about something that many parents — [...]

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Recipe Guide Giveaway: My Lunch Box

September 21, 2009 food book giveaways

If you’re like many parents, a few weeks into the new school year you’re probably desperate to come up with some different lunch ideas that your kid will eat, don’t take too long to make, and cover the nutritional bases. Help is on its way. Check out my recent blog post which includes suggestions and [...]

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Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food

September 18, 2009 food politics

Photo of farmer Ramon Mojica taken by Brian Lee, courtesy of Riverdog Farm Finally, a government policy I can dig. And based on such a simple premise: Know where your food comes from and who produces it. This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, a new federal initiative [...]

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Beating the Brown Bag Blues a.k.a. Taking the Stress Out of School Lunch

September 10, 2009 food books

The new school year brings earlier mornings for some, the transition to different teachers, curriculum, or kids for most, and — the bane of many parents’ existence — packing a lunch every day. For those of you whose child’s school cranks out edible fare — and your kid willingly eats it — good luck to [...]

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School's in Session, Time for Lunch Lessons

September 8, 2009 food politics

Yesterday while loads of folks fronted for backyard barbecues, Slow Food USA sponsored more than 300 Eat-Ins around the country as part of their Labor Day potlucks with a purpose. The cause: Getting real food into schools. The organization’s Time for Lunch Campaign seeks to bring attention to the Child Nutrition Act, the bill that [...]

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Book Giveaway: Hungry Monkey

August 4, 2009 food book giveaways

Picky eater. I’m one. I’m raising one. Really dislike the term. Can’t we come up with a better way to describe ourselves? I sometimes say “particular” or “quirky” as an alternative to the cliche “picky.” Any ideas, dear readers? There’s a free, autographed copy of Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous [...]

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Kale Chips: Giving Thanks for Greens in a Snack Pack

July 30, 2009 food businesses

Last Friday was the day I was supposed to meet Blessing Horowytz, creator of Kale Chips, my current favorite snack food. Here’s what happened: Multi-tasking mama that I am, I decided to quell my cravings for Kale Chips (not to be confused with roasted kale) and satisfy my curiosity about the brand new Berkeley Bowl [...]

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