I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
When the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company, the second-largest supplier of beef to the USDA’s National School Lunch program, responded to revelations of cow mistreatment at its California facility by recalling 143 million pounds of beef this week, the nation got a lesson in the degree to which the American food system is centralized.
Now, as school cafeterias everywhere destroy what remains of the recalled meat and rearrange their menus, a growing farm-to-school movement seeks to restore the regional agricultural bonds that once linked consumers to farmers in their local communities.
In over a thousand programs in more than half of the states, school food-service programs are trying to help kids learn to make healthy food choices by purchasing and serving local foods.
“Kids and most adults are a couple generations away from knowing the people who grow our food,” said Patty Cantrell, of the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Agriculture program. “Setting up more local options, it is a way to add safety to the system.”
Continued -The safety factor of being in touch with where your food comes from is a benefit of eating local, but the main goal of the farm-to-school program is to open up kids to the taste of fresh foods.
“A lot of kids today, for example, don’t like strawberries because all they know are the strawberries that are industrially produced,” Cantrell said.
When kids experience the flavor of a fresh, locally grown strawberry, they recognize a difference and begin to understand they have choices in their food and that those choices relate to their communities and the health of local farms, Cantrell added.
Thirty schools in Northwestern Lower Michigan now buy some portion of their foods locally. Last spring a fresh foods pilot program introduced fresh asparagus to students at Traverse City West Junior High where 22 percent of involved students tasted the vegetable for the first time, and some lobbied for it to be included on the cafeteria menu.
The Michigan Land Use Institute, together with four public school districts and four private schools, is organizing a regional Farm-to-School conference in Traverse City on March 12 .
The daylong event, aimed at schools, camps, parents, students and farms, will focus on connecting food-service directors with farmers. It will also present information on how some schools are replacing “candy sales” fundraisers with fresh food marketing as well as information on how schools can affordably transition to from-scratch cooking.
Presentations for teachers will show ways to incorporate gardening and agriculture into the curriculum, and school board members will learn how cafeteria buying choices can affect local farms and benefit the regional economy.
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