It’s been awhile since I’ve written here and if you look back, you’ll see multiple attempts to re-vive this blog like Knight Rider ( :
I had been inspired by my good friend, Aileen Suzara to start blogging again through her 26-Days, 26-Letter, 26-Kwentos Challenge. Check it out for she’s got lovely stories around food, memory and politics.
Day 1: A is for Araw (day)
Breakfasts are my most favorite meals of the day. Currently, I am balancing the commute to SF to work with making sure I am fueled for the day. This past week’s breakfasts have consisted of fruit & nut bar (bagel-like bar of bread) with peanut butter from Project Open Hand, blackberry jam from Julian, yogurt and granola with nectarines, and today, Yukon Gold home potatoes, heirloom tomato, caramelized onion and goat cheese omelet and a mug of Waialua coffee.
At The Bread Project, I’ve had the opportunity to help create a “super” muffin for a school district in Alameda County- a muffin that has all the required breakfast allowances of fruit/veg, protein and grains necessary for kids. Through this project, I’ve learned that school nutrition programs are some of the most important, yet under-resourced programs that exist in schools. The nutrition requirements are incredibly hard to understand and logic and reasoning fly out the window with a 300+ manual of recommendations and requirements breaking down the equivalencies of many ingredients. After hours upon hours of research and testing, calling the California State Department of Education for assistance in deciphering the manual, we finally produced a muffin that fit the requirements. The only other food that was considered a “super food” was a donut that was chalk full of nutritional supplements, another way that children could get their allowances. My resource at the CA State Dept. of Ed said that the school children in Southern California wholly rejected the donut.
We’ve had built a relationship with Berkeley Unified School District, providing 6,000 vegan applesauce muffins to the district every 2 weeks. Berkeley has revolutionized the school nutrition programs across the nation, providing a model that combines education with locally sourced and minimally processed food for growing minds and bellies. But let’s remember that the breakfast programs actually started as a part of a plan by the Black Panther Party:
It is a beautiful sight to see our children eat in the mornings after remembering the times when our stomachs were not full, and even the teachers in the schools say that there is a great improvement in the academic skills of the children that do get the breakfast. At one time there were children that passed out in class from hunger, or had to be sent home for something to eat. But our children shall be fed, and the Black Panther Party will not let the malady of hunger keep our children down any longer.
Even with the Berkeley program, children still are enduring being hungry in classes, because many kids who really need free lunches are stigmatized by having to show a card that they are on the program. How can we ensure that kids don’t have to learn while they are hungry??
More Reading:
Program secretly donates food to hungry schoolchildren
Watch It:
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
