Archives for the 'california' tag
Quick Bites
Four people die during Jamie Oliver’s TED Award acceptance speech (honest!). Was it the fact that he paced around the stage like a frenetic Frankenstein, or that his cadence often devolved into something you might see at an especially bad poetry slam? [TED Blog]
The Cal State Fullerton Daily Titan editorial board writes like they’ve been eating too much seitan. There’s “no possible way” they’d write something this dumb about the Olympics and food sponsors if they were eating better food. Like McDonald’s. [Daily Titan]
A public school teacher is braving a school year of cafeteria food and blogging it. [Fed Up with School Lunch, via Mark Bittman's Twitter feed]
The excellent HumaneWatch, keeping an eye on the very non-excellent Humane Society of the United States, debuted yesterday. [HumaneWatch]
Nice profile of D’Artagnan head Ariane Daguin. [NJ.com]
Restaurant freeloaders eat up. Then they screw the restaurant. [The Big Money, via The Food Economy Twitter feed.]
The road to café standards
This is California, of course:
The Assembly has passed a bill to set minimum standards for food in licensed child-care centers, requiring a vegetable to be part of lunch and supper and forbidding whole milk for children 2 or older.
The food children eat in kindergarten through 12th grade in public school is regulated for fat and salt content, among other things. But for many preschool children, there have been no such dietary rules.
“California enjoys a worldwide reputation for its sunny, healthy lifestyle,” said the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica). “Childhood obesity rates threaten to steal this enviable position.”
The bill, which passed the Assembly on Wednesday by a 48-27 vote, now heads to the Senate.
If it becomes law, AB 627 would require low-fat or skim milk to be served to children 2 years old and older. It would limit sugar in cereals and eliminate deep frying and sweetened drinks. It also would establish an 18-month pilot project to evaluate stronger nutrition and physical activities standards.
In Los Angeles County, 350,000 children 5 and younger spend at least a part of their day in child care. The county licenses 2,230 child-care centers and about 7,800 family child-care homes.
Food served at child-care centers based in homes, community centers, churches and other locations is one key to a lifetime of healthy eating, said Matthew Sharp, senior advocate with the California Food Policy Advocates, which sponsored the bill.
“We can’t possibly solve the healthcare crisis” without nutritional improvements, Sharp said. “We’re paying one way or another.”
California Menu-Labeling Law Looms
Bay Area restaurants targeted in a slew of robberies. Crazies trying to amputate their own limbs with a butter knife in a Modesto Denny’s.
Apparently California is confident these restaurant-related problems are under wraps, and so it’s moved on to what really matters: mandatory calorie labeling, reports the LA Times:
Some 17,000 chain restaurants around California would have to give patrons calorie information under a measure given final approval Sunday by the state Senate.
If signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bill by Sen. Alex Padilla, a Pacoima Democrat, would make California the first state to require restaurants to display the calorie counts of their menu offerings.
Senators voted 24-13 for the menu labeling measure, SB 1420, which would take full effect in 2011. Padilla said he believes diners will make healthier food choices if they know how many calories they may consume.
Even if I were to concede that is true–a leap I’m not prepared to make, even if The Economist seems to offer tepid support for its legitimacy–menu labeling is not a question of health. The issue is whether a restaurant and its customers or a government should decide what and how people eat. I’ll take the former. Every time.
Still, I get no say, and the bill looks set to pass. Sensing this, I assume, the state restaurant association is no longer publicly opposing the measure.
California Says Farewell to Freedom Fries, Bans Trans Fats
California on Friday became the worst first state to completely ban trans fats from state restaurants. That sucks.
…Tammy Perez, owner of the Pizza Club restaurant in La Habra (Orange County), says the transition is not so easy. She switched to oil free of trans fat 18 months ago – and paid twice as much, she said. The bad economy is making it hard enough for restaurants to survive, she added, and now the new law is “pushing some of us over the edge,”
The law requires professional cooks to purge their kitchens of all ingredients containing more than half a gram per serving of artificial trans fat by Jan. 1, 2010. Inspectors could impose fines of $25 to $1,000 for violations.
Bakers have an extra year to adhere to the ban because pastries are the most difficult products to make without trans fat-laden oils and shortenings. Packaged foods are not affected by the law.
[...]
“As a former fourth-grade schoolteacher in East L.A., I saw firsthand the problems of obesity,” [Assemblyman Tony] Mendoza said Friday. “AB97 is a culmination of these concerns and works to benefit the well-being of kids and California.”
More politicians pretending to do stuff for kids here in the SF Chronicle.
Of course, until California’s overlords are nannying vegans–a distinct possibility in that state if any, frankly—it will be impossible to completely banish trans fats, since about 20% of the trans fats we eat occurs naturally in beef and the meat of other tasty ruminant animals. Though that 20% figure will rise as restaurants (but not, yet, grocers) are forced to cook how the state wants them to.
Venezuelan Food Policy is to Whine About Shortages it Creates
It’s difficult being a food blogger these days without becoming a food crisis blogger, frankly. I’m doing my best to avoid that. Still, the burgeoning food problems here and abroad are worth pointing out from time to time. And I think this comparative note illustrates how free societies handle rising food prices compared with how the same problems have such greater impact less free and unfree societies:
“This food crisis is the biggest demonstration of the historic failure of the capitalist model,” Chavez told Bolivian President Evo Morales, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage during a summit in Caracas.
[...]
Venezuela has struggled with sporadic shortages that often make it difficult to find staples such as milk, sugar and beef. Chavez has blamed local businesses, saying they hoard products. But critics blame government-imposed price controls, which they say make it difficult for some businesses to turn a profit.
Venezuela continues to import most of the food it consumes despite a nationwide agrarian reform initiative launched by Chavez more than six years ago.
Communist Cuba also imports most of its food — much of it coming from the United States.
So much for the “historic failure of the capitalist model,” eh?
And so while I can mock a place like California–which claims to be the Land of Wine and Food at precisely the time when various levels of government in the state seem to be doing their best to outlaw both food and alcohol–I’m also damn happy I live in a country that generally recognizes my right to grow, buy, and sell all sorts of good food. Not that things here don’t need fixing.
