Michelle Obama, WH chef Sam Kaas, and Bancroft School students.

Michelle Obama helped with spring planting in the White House garden yesterday, along with some of the WH kitchen and grounds staff and students from Bancroft Elementary School in DC.

This is a great teaching moment on nutrition and activity in a nation where childhood obesity has become rampant.  More and more children are taking diabetes and blood pressure medications, and that costs us all.

As Michelle Obama said yesterday (via WH transcript):

This is one of the main reasons we’re doing this, is that what I’ve learned as a mom, in trying to feed my girls, is that it is so important for them to get regular fruits and vegetables in their diets, because it does have nutrients, it does make you strong, it is all brain food. And when you go to school, it is so important for you to have a good breakfast, to make sure in your lunches that you have an apple or an orange or a banana, that you have something green when you eat any meal, lunch or dinner.

And we’re looking to you guys to help educate the country, not just in your own homes, but other people as they think about how to plan their meals for their kids, to think about the importance of making sure that we have enough fruits and vegetables. And doing this garden is a really inexpensive way of making that happen.

This is fantastic and sorely needed.  Kudos to the WH and Michelle Obama for doing it, and for using the WH podium to promote healthy, sustainable gardening.  And, more important, healthier eating for the nation’s children. (more…)

Pistachios via ajh1963. Great shot.

This message brought to you by the "fergawdsakes, what food is scaring the bejeebers out of people this week" list.

Sadly, pistachios appear to have some risk for salmonella.  Maybe.  So, to be on the safe side, avoid them for now.  

And it isn’t just the nuts in the shells. According to the FDA, you should avoid all foods containing pistachios, too, until they pinpoint the source of this latest salmonella scare.

Sorry to put a crimp in your March Madness baklava and pistachio ice cream plans, but there you are.

FDA will make a list of products to avoid available here shortly. Just FYI…

There goes that new "eat beef until you almost barf" ad campaign for the beef lobby:

Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to the first large study to examine whether regularly eating beef or pork increases mortality.

The study of more than 500,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans found that those who consumed about four ounces of red meat a day (the equivalent of about a small hamburger) were more than 30 percent more likely to die during the 10 years they were followed, mostly from heart disease and cancer. Sausage, cold cuts and other processed meats also increased the risk.

Not that this is actually news. Back in the 1970s, a recommendation to reduce meat consumption in the national dietary guidelines got scuttled because the meat lobby…erm…had a cow.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” (more…)

The Obamas will plant a garden at the White House, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden during WWII. Now that is some change I can fully believe in…

On Sunday afternoon at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT, Marion Nestle will be here for Book Salon to discuss her book “What to Eat.” Marion’s work on food politics has been extraordinary, and she’s won numerous awards — including a prestigious James Beard — for her food and nutrition writing. What To Eat continues that tradition of muckraking on the intersection of food, science, politics and health with some intriguing tidbits on the politics and marketing strategery behind the food we buy.

Photo via Carol Esther.

Upton Sinclair would have had a field day: “The old man used to look for distressed situations: Someone over-inventoried or had peanuts from last year that they had to move,” said David Brooks, who was a buyer for a snack company that refused to purchase from Parnell because of concerns about sanitation and what he called the “culture” of the family business….

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has a doozy of a hearing scheduled for today beginning at 10 am ET on the “Salmonella Outbreak: The Continued Failure to Protect the Food Supply.”  

From the committee release yesterday, the following witnesses “have been invited”…