Category — Nutrition

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

TED Talk
February 2010

Transcript:

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

My name’s Jamie Oliver. I’m 34 years old. I’m from Essex in England and for the last seven years I’ve worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef; I don’t have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you’re at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.

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Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl’s Interview with Urban Ag High School Student, Ana Araujo

Center for Livable Future
Dec 18, 2009

Excerpt:

In October 2009, Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl sat down with Ana Araujo to discuss the Urban Agriculture and Food Systems class she participated in at Richmond High School in 2008/2009. The class was a pilot program, which gave the students graduation credit and was centered around the creation of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and direct sale of produce from a middle school farm and the school garden at Richmond High. 10 families received a bi-weekly box of produce for $5, which was planted, tended and grown completely by Richmond High students.

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See larger photo here. Photo by Michael Levenston

Our garden veggies and fruit go to West Side Family Place

Head gardener Sharon Slack drives five minutes from the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to donate freshly harvested organic food to Family Place.

West Side Family Place in Kitsilano is a resource centre dedicated to supporting families with young children. It is a place to meet new friends, gain a sense of community, and to receive ongoing assistance that helps families to raise healthy, happy children.

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Watch higher quality video by clicking on the YouTube icon.

Bronwyn picks some Russian kale leaves at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden and walks us through the steps to make her unique muffins. She created this recipe last summer while working on an organic farm where there was nothing to eat but kale.

Kale-Carrot Muffins

Ingredients:
½ cup vegetable or grape seed oil
½ cup honey
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ cup milk
1 tsp almond flavouring
½ cup carrots, shredded
1 cup young kale leaves, (when steamed and pureed with 1-2 tbsp of milk, it produces approximately ½ cup of puree)

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Click on the YouTube icon to get a higher quality video.

We grow lots of garlic at the Vancouver Compost Garden. But not many people know about scapes, the flowering stems that appear in June about three weeks before the bulbs are harvested.

Maria picked some of our scapes and prepared a quick and easy recipe for delicious pesto sauce.

Photo: “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner
Both the white and blue flowers in the photo above are camas. The white one will kill you, but the blue one is food. The native people of the Portland area considered blue camas root a staple. It took three days of cooking in underground fire pits to make it edible. The bulb is said to taste like a sugary, sweet potato.

From May 24 through May 30, local “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner will be eating an entirely wild diet as she forages from sidewalks, parks, wilderness areas and yards in Portland. There will be no dumpster diving or mooching off gardens – Lerner will be surviving on wild edibles only.

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PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe (See next page.)

Sri Lanka National Agriculture Policy Documents

Statement – 29 (2003)
Implement a special urban agriculture promotion
program designed to ensure supply of home
consumption needs and environmental protection.

Statement – 17 (2007)
17.1 Promote home-gardening and urban agriculture
to enhance household nutrition and income
17.2 Promote women’s participation in home-gardening.

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Photo: Nyandarva boarding primary school in Kenya, Rift Valley Province.
© 2004 Didier Ruef

“Over 20,000 children and young people, 400 teachers, with many families and communities (we estimate about 50,000 people in total) in four continents in four continents have participated in garden-based teaching and learning and community action and have come to generate new ways of learning about, and living in, an uncertain modern world.”

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Harvesting Satina Potatoes at City Farmer from Mike Levenston on Vimeo. You can follow the links above and watch this video in HD (High Definition).
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria pulls up a large harvest of delicious Satina potatoes at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’ve boiled and baked these and made potato salad – all delicious dishes.

Video: Lina speaks about her school’s food garden. She’s in Grade 5.

What a great thrill to revisit the school garden we (City Farmer) helped create back in 1986 in the West End of Vancouver. Twenty-two years later and the excitement is still present. Young children pick and wash lettuce, radishes and onions, cut them up carefully into small pieces before placing the vegetables in a large salad bowl. Their teacher mixes the spring harvest with dressing and serves the enthusiastic children who come back for seconds. When does that happen at home?

For a city farmer like me, this is “headline” news – kids growing and eating their food amongst the high-rises of inner city Vancouver where they live – parents watching, sometimes taking a nibble themselves, happy to see their children so focused.

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“The garden offers a great many solutions, practical as well as philosophical, to the whole problem of eating well. My own vegetable garden is modest in scale – a densely planted patch in the front yard only about twenty feet by ten – but it yields an astonishing cornucopia of produce, so much so that during the summer months we discontinue our CSA box and buy little but fruit from the farmers’ market. And though we live on a postage-stamp city lot, there’s room enough for a couple of fruit trees too: a lemon, a fig and a persimmon. To the problem of being able to afford high-quality organic produce the garden offers the most straightforward solution: The food you grow yourself is fresher than any you can buy, and it costs nothing but an hour or two of work each week plus the price of a few packets of seed.”

Link to Michael Pollan’s website and book.