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I was so close. I thought this morning when I woke up and was staring into the writer’s abyss that we had gone a whole week with no bad news about our nutritional health or the commercial food industry’s lapses in judgment. But then I opened the Wall Street Journal and was reminded once again that we are not only losing the battle of the bulge, we are losing the war against the damage caused by our unhealthy eating habits. And as always in war, the children of the world suffer most from the collateral damage.

According to Ron Winslow’s April 29 story, children as young as 10 years old are contracting diabetes as a direct result of obesity, and recent studies have demonstrated that the drugs prescribed for the containment of the adult disease are not working in children. Early in the story, Winslow describes how this fact is “heightening worries about the fast-growing and largely preventable disease” — preventable being the key word here.

Stating the obvious, Dr. Phil Zeitler of Children’s Hospital Colorado said, “It would be much better if these kids didn’t get diabetes in the first place.” And Dr. David Allen at Wisconsin American Family Children’s Hospital also reminded us that “children 50 years ago did not avoid obesity and its complications by making healthy choices. They simply lived in a more active and less calorie-laden environment.” Surprise, surprise!

Even if you do not have children at home now, you may have grandchildren or see them on the horizon. You may know your neighbor’s children. You may at least be aware of children who are out there somewhere hopefully running around a little bit — all needing the grown-ups to change that environment for them. And we cannot blame just the parents; most of the choices out there are not good ones. It is harder and harder to find them in a grocery store crammed with prepackaged foods that are cost-attractive and nutrition-deprived.

Help is on the way, but only if we take on a little of the burden ourselves. Jamie Oliver is still going strong working to create and nurture the food revolution worldwide, and check out what the Senate did for the small farmer and farmers’ markets. But this is a project that needs a real grass-roots effort, kind of like the old No Littering campaign of the ’50s and ’60s. It needs a repetitive, persistent drumbeat, or we are going to get sicker and sicker as a nation and be paying more and more in health costs for a preventable condition.

I am beginning to think that apart from my doing more to make our markets available for education and exposure, we can all become more involved in changing the nutrition environment in our schools by advocating for school lunches that offer only good choices and only real foods, by using only healthy foods as rewards, and by teaching nutrition and its relationship to preventive health to young people in every grade. We can all do this because this is our dime — this is our money that is paying for those unhealthy choices, that unhealthy environment, and that instructional curriculum that ignores one of the biggest threats to our nation’s future health.

It’s time to get crackin’! I’m channeling my mother again, but I think it would amaze her that we have come to this. I will provide you with some local names and contacts soon for those who want to reach out and get involved.

In the meantime, continue to do the best for your own family, spend your $10 weekly on locally grown produce, and help keep our small farmers alive to sell more good choices to our school children, once we all figure out how to make that happen.

As we approach the opening of market season across Northern Virginia, I want to devote this post to issues that directly affect the success of farmers’ markets all over Virginia and the country, and that in a variety of ways also affect the farmers that come to our markets. There will be no test on this information, but I hope you will follow these links, read the material, and absorb what you feel you need to make you a better shopper. And of course, we always encourage grass-roots activism because we know it works and because it is good for the soul.

When I rant about something, which in my house we often refer to as “Nanna Losing her Mind,” I do try to inform myself from several sources about the topic at hand. I am less educated about the following topic than some others, mainly because there is a lot of science involved that is usually not explained well in alerts I receive or even in newspaper articles I read. This latest alert from the producers of the movie Fresh! is worrisome, though, for two reasons.

Dow Chemical is developing a new genetically modified seed because of problems with the previous one, and they seem to be putting the new seed on the market soon after those initial problems presented themselves. So how much could we possibly have learned from the initial failure? It also worries me in the same way that the original Roundup-resistant seed bothered me: No long-term studies have yet been released on the effects of these food crops on the animals and people that ingest them. We just need to know more.

Secondly, I want to refer you to the latest update from the Farmers’ Market Coalition, a great Virginia-based organization devoted to supporting farmers’ markets of all shapes and sizes across the country. Evidently, the grass-roots effort to influence the Farm Bill legislation has had an effect on the Senate, and I agree that we need to thank those Senators who led the charge for the small farmer. But we need to say and do more if we want more of our government’s resources to support sustainable farming. This is good information and a great summary of the bill, and FMC has made it easy for you to express your own feelings and opinions.

Thirdly, I invite you to visit the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution website, especially if you are concerned about what children are being fed at school. You can learn everything you need to know about putting together a successful campaign to change the menu. You can also sign up to receive a regular newsletter. If you really want to be inspired, watch Jamie’s speech at the 2010 TED awards.

I take this approach because I realize how much these resources that come to me almost every week keep me motivated and inform not just what I say and write but what I do through our markets to pass along what I learn. And they often provide information that can lead to better farming practices or access to financial help or expertise for our vendors. Just today I sent Max Tyson of Tyson Farms and Orchards an alert about money to help farmers who want to begin using more sustainable and organic farming methods. I do not expect you to find all of this information inspiring or even helpful, but I hope that you will blaze a trail of your own — in your own kitchen, in your child’s school, or in a political campaign.

Photo by really short

Dear Shopper,

This week I am going to talk about greens about three weeks earlier than I would normally be able to talk about them. But then I will probably spend the entire growing season catching up — thank goodness my food magazines all arrive about a month early, or I would really miss out on the timely new recipes.

We provide a handout at our markets in the spring and fall that provides basic instructions for cooking greens simply and quickly, and now I have another good one clipped and copied from the April Eating Well magazine that has good pictures and short descriptions of the different varieties. This page about kale has links to pages about chard and other greens.

I can wax eloquently about greens. I spent several years of my youth in South Georgia, where greens were treated with reverence — even if that did mean cooking the flavor out of them and substituting the smoky flavor of a ham hock. That was still good, but not nearly so fresh-tasting and flavorful as the greens cooked the way I and others now recommend.

We now have examples at the market of those early greens and some of the best baby kale I have ever eaten. A package that will easily serve three people costs $2.75; it has been prewashed and is so easy to prepare.

We also have chard, which has many uses in sides, salads and soups. Here is a good spring recipe for young chard. Don’t worry about separating the stems in young chard, though — just treat the soft stems as part of the leaves.

I want you to hear from an expert on the nutritional benefits of greens, which make them one of the most effective products in your preventive medicine pantry. Greens are essentially medicine on the plate, which of course is the case with all healthily prepared vegetables. Please learn from our friend and occasional speaker at our markets, Debra Dennis of Indigo Lifestyle Solutions, who works with clients who want to adopt healthier lifestyles, including changes in diet.

Green vegetables are the foods most missing in modern diets. Learning to cook and eat greens is essential to creating health. When you nourish yourself with greens, you will naturally crowd out the foods that make you sick. Greens help build your internal rainforest and strengthen the blood and respiratory system. They are especially good for city people who rarely see fields of green in open countryside. Green is associated with spring, the time of renewal, refreshment and vital energy. In Asian medicine, green is related to the liver, emotional stability and creativity.

Nutritionally, greens are very high in calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, zinc and vitamins A, C, E and K. They are crammed with fiber, folic acid, chlorophyll and many other micronutrients and phytochemicals. Whenever possible, choose organic. But eating non-organic greens is much better than not eating any greens at all!

There are so many greens to choose from. Find greens that you love and eat them often. When you get bored with your favorites, be adventurous and try greens that you’ve never heard of before. Broccoli is very popular among adults and children. Each stem is like a tree trunk, giving you strong, grounding energy. Rotate among bok choy, napa cabbage, kale, collards, watercress, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, dandelion and other leafy greens.

I hope that you will seek out greens to brighten your Easter feast this week and learn to eat them more often as part of a seasonal diet. They really are tasty!

See you at the market!

You are probably aware by this time of the “pink slime” scandal that was first exposed by Jamie Oliver last year and then picked up by ABC Evening News a few weeks ago. I remember thinking that it would be a story with legs when I first saw just the end of it on the news. I figured that this would be something that at least a vocal minority would see through to a conclusion. There are enough of us now who will react when we feel that our food supply is threatened.

More often than not, the threat comes the food industry itself, and probably more often than we would like, the governmental institutions that are in place to keep us safe and healthy fail to do that until after the facts have been revealed. In this case, we did not even know what we were eating.

This time, the backlash was enough to initiate a grass-roots check on the pink slime. The story did have legs; it moved to the Web and a petition drive begun by a mom in Texas also kept the story alive. And it worked. Almost all of the major food chains have announced that they are no longer selling beef with the additive or that they are letting us know which beef in their stores includes it. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stepped up big time and announced that school systems who buy beef from the government will now have the option to buy “pink slime-free” beef for our children.

A Tyson Food executive was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying that he expected this “fight” to affect short-term beef demand. In the same article, Cargill, Inc. indicated that “processors will have to secure other cuts of meat to replace the filler,” which hopefully would have to come from more of the meat in beef. Sounds to me as if those two predictions will create a zero-sum outcome. The best news is that Beef Products, one of the largest producers of the additive, is closing two of its three plants. And yes, the ground beef you buy at the grocery store may cost more, but at least you will be buying 100 percent meat this time around. You can always make up the increase in cost by eating ground meat one less meal a week.

Before I move on to my next point, let’s look at the last paragraph. First of all, in order to make myself clear I was forced to distinguish between beef and meat. We have been reduced to this parsing of terms because the beef industry wants us all to know that the pink slime is really beef. Hopefully that’s true, but the USDA scientists who named this “pink slime” make clear that it is not meat — it is not made from the parts of the cow that we would choose to chew if we saw these bits and pieces on the plate with our burger or steak. The industry spokespeople have yet to call it meat. And how many of you in your wildest food fantasies imagined eating beef with “additives” that our own government decided we did not need to know about?

According to an article by Jess Bidgood in the New York Times, larger school systems in the country are removing the ground beef they have on hand from their warehouses until they learn whether it contains the additive. As the Centreville Patch reported March 23, Fairfax County Public Schools has announced that it will switch to all-beef hamburger patties after it runs out of its current patties, which do contain the slime.

I will leave you with a quote from the New York Times article:

Even if removing pink slime quells the queasiness of some parents and school officials, it does not mean much to Fernando Castro, 14, who stood outside Brighton High School on Tuesday, waiting to leave school with some friends.

“I don’t eat school lunch anyway,” he said. “It looks weird.”

Some things never change. But we now know that we can change some things that alarm us, and in relatively short order, too.

See you at the market!

I have in front of me a clear and concise policy brief from the Union of Concerned Scientists titled “Toward Healthy Food and Farms.” It addresses the question of “how science-based policies can transform agriculture.” It contains straightforward analysis and specific recommendations for policies that could eventually shift our federal government’s support for “the wrong foods” through billions of dollars of subsidies each year to greater support for “healthy food and farming practices.” And it makes clear that healthy farming practices produce healthy food.

You may read the same piece and come away agreeing with the recommendations. But we all know that in this climate, science and logic will not win the argument or change the laws. On the other hand, we have also seen firsthand just this week that we the people still have a voice and can still make things happen. And having science on our side can only help.

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the ABC news story about “pink slime.” This food additive had previously received attention from the media, but not from a national news source such as ABC. ABC News did not let go of this story and continued to report almost daily about the reactions and responses to their original story. The petition they linked to on their own website garnered over 200,000 signatures in a few days. This attention eventually prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to decide not to automatically provide the product to schools across the country. From now on, individual states or school system must request the cheaper additive if in their wisdom they decide their kids should be eating this stuff.

I certainly hope that the outrage will filter down rather than dissipate and that the protests will focus on school systems around the country. The USDA has made a public-relations decision to diffuse the issue and reduce its national profile. In doing so, it has hopefully made it easer for us to rally, speak, act out and rid school lunches of this stuff.

I was particularly outraged by the spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, who kept reminding us that this stuff is “beef.” She said this over and over. Of course it is beef; it comes from the cow. But the argument is not whether it is beef, it is whether it is food and worthy of being served to our children as an additive to regular, unadulterated ground beef. If we need leadership on this, note that Whole Foods does not permit its use, and McDonald’s has recently decided to remove it from its products. Talk about strange bedfellows. We will be sure to notify you if and when a petition is made available for the Northern Virginia school systems.

Which brings me back to my point — even when the science is unassailable, it takes the passionate voice of the public that reverberates these days through the Internet to take that science and and bring it to bear on the discussion. Don’t count on the politicians doing it. It still helps to be informed, to act from fact rather than passion alone, and to be a true believer in logic. I am happy to see that it still works.

We provided earlier guidance on how to sign on to some of the reforms in the Farm Bill that will help support local agriculture. Feel free to use those same contacts to speak out again about the other suggestions in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ policy brief. Somebody out there may be listening — or at least recording our input.

See you at the market!

Check out this print version of a story that was on the ABC Evening News last week. I only saw the very end of the story and heard maybe one sentence, but I knew I needed to learn more and after dinner (thank goodness I waited!) I found it on ABC’s website. The story highlights the use of an “additive” to ground meat in fast-food restaurants, and it will send me and hopefully lots of other people running quickly away from these establishments. But what really caught my attention was the intimation that this stuff is added to ground meat in grocery stores and other eateries that we all may frequent without even questioning that ground meat is just what it says it is and nothing more.

Then the story got worse. The Washington Post announced that even though several fast-food chains are no longer using the “pink slime,” “the US Department of Agriculture, schools and school districts plan to buy the treated meat from Beef Products, Inc. for the national school lunch program in coming months.” The mistake in that sentence is the use of the term “meat,” according to Gerald Zirnstein, a former microbiologist with the Food Safety Inspection Service who first called the stuff “pink slime.”

So what can you do about this? We have the answer: Change.org has a petition that you can sign, and you can email ABC News to comment, too — though they have not mentioned the school-lunch plan in their reporting. But they did do a follow-up to their first story, which you can read here.

The more I learn about what the food industry and our own government have decided to label as food, or in this case meat, the dumber I feel. I am becoming a little paranoid about what we don’t know about our food because everything we learn these days is revealed by reporters, documentary producers or advocacy organizations who must surreptitiously obtain the facts. Think about this: They have to go undercover or wait for a whistleblower to find out what is in our food. At this point, I no longer trust what is presented to me in the store or on the plate.

And yet regulators are spending our money running around the country busting small farmers who sell raw milk — this is real, unadulterated milk just like every one of our ancestors drank until the late 19th century. I know I drank it as a child and when it was just called milk. We ate meat that was just meat and we ate fruits and veggies that were just that. But I grew up in a small town surrounded by farmers, many of whom were my relatives who brought into town just about everything we ate. My grandfather also owned a lot in the middle of Harrisonburg, Va., where he grew enough to feed his children and grandchildren — and, knowing him, lots of other people too. I imagine that many of you reading this — whether you grew up in this country or elsewhere around the world — had a similar relationship with your food as a child.

We should be grateful that some of those same farming families are still tilling the soil, harvesting eggs, and raising cattle, pigs and chickens, doing the real work of bringing us real food. It’s news such as the ABC story that reminds us how far we have come and how far we need to go, back to the future where food was food and meat was meat.

It’s just another reason — and they seem to be bubbling to the surface fast and furiously these days — to step up your own support for your market vendors, spend a little more each week on locally produced food, bring a friend to the market or pass the word through your church, garden club or, even better, community groups organized around children. We need to get to them before the fake-food people do!

See you — and your entourage — at the market!

Did you see the report last week about trans fats and our national health? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented that trans fats in the blood of adult white males plunged from 2000 to 2008, dropping 58 percent over that time along with a decrease in LDL (“bad cholesterol”) and an increase in HDL (“good cholesterol”). According to a story in The Washington Post, “the decline, unusually big and abrupt, strongly suggests government regulation was effective in altering a risk factor for heart disease for a broad swath of the population.”

This improvement should eventually produce healthier families, lower health costs, and longer, more productive lives. Even better news in my mind is that we now know that improving the “nutritional profile” of processed and restaurant foods is possible and obviously cost-effective after all. In this case, the food industry simply substituted one or more healthy ingredients for highly unhealthy ones that had been developed and used solely for the sake of cost and convenience. This is also further proof that when our government does step in to “promote the general welfare,” it can reverse 50 years of a specific predictable and preventable assault on our health.

Within days of this report, I came across another column that derided the “food police” who stepped up to save us from trans fats. In her Washington Post column, Tracy Grant did not rail against all regulation. She did indicate that she agrees that “parents need to be educated about the importance of healthy eating for their children.” But at the same time she declared that as a parent, she should be the one to make the call on what her children eat, and she worried more about losing control over these decisions than the effects of childhood obesity.

That’s another curious aspect of this discussion about our food choices. Over those same 50 years, somehow the discussion has shifted. It is now cast as a battle for control over who makes choices rather than what our options should be. We are arguing over maintaining control to choose to eat “manufactured” food — food that has been so adulterated with additives and, in some cases, toxins that it threatens our good health. And those who rail against the food police actually want to be able to choose to feed their families something that is no longer food, as defined for centuries as what we ingest to stay alive and healthy.

I am not against the occasional meal as a treat, but I do not agree that we are better off having unhealthy choices. And those who argue for “control over what they eat” have simply been duped. We lost that control a long time ago, and it wasn’t because the government took it away. The government may have let it happen, but even the government has lost control in the last 50 years. The hapless family who wants to raise healthy children on real food is swimming against the red tide of an industry that has done a good job of restating the argument and dictating the rules of debate. If Nina Planck and Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and Joel Salatin have to write books to remind us what real food is — and they all did — then who is in control?

So all hail the news that at least in one case, and with all due credit to New York City and California, who led the way on the trans-fat crackdown, we now have some healthier choices, even when we choose to eat hamburgers that have five non-food ingredients in them. What we really need is a government that will stand up to those in control more often and help us to back into a future where even more of our choices are real food.

This time of year is always a mixed blessing for the farmers’ markets that are open all year long. On the downside, we are losing product and can only hope to have some winter vegetables each week — and we usually do. And we find ourselves competing each week of December with the hundreds of craft shows that dot the landscape like inflatables vying for attention throughout our communities. The upside is that we have a group of vendors who are working very hard to meet your needs and cater to your desires with specials, sales and new items designed to serve our regular customers and hopefully attract new customers too.

Our home bakers have developed party and gift items that combine great cooking skills with home-based creativity. They are adapting their art to the demands of the season — everything from offering mini-Celtic Pasties to filling gift boxes of cookies from around the world. They are bringing meat cuts for those celebratory meals and marking down those comfort-food cuts. And they are bringing items that look more like the season too — even the applesauce has a pretty bow on the jar!

These guys will be standing out in the cold every week this winter for you, and they will have these same items all winter for you. They will continue to farm and cook through snow and sleet and sub-freezing temperatures for you. So I am hoping that in this season where we express our gratitude to our own friends and neighbors who work for us and with us, you will not forget the little house with the welcoming wreath on the door all year long. These guys are working hard for your attention, and your holiday dollar of course. And whatever you spend at a market will stay right here in the U.S.A., mostly in this state, and in some cases in your own neighborhood.

I have been fascinated by the ABC “Made in America” Series which is focusing now on what we can buy that is made in this country for the holidays. The challenge to viewers is to spend a certain amount of money this Christmas on something made in this country, and through an economic formula called the “multiplication factor,” those purchases will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. I found myself actually paying attention to where things are made and trying to do my part. And then I remembered that I buy Made in the USA items every week at the farmers’ market. And so do many of you. I’d love to know how many jobs we have created this year already.

So keep up the good work or begin a new tradition this year — your locally grown vendors are always happy to be here for you.

See you at the market!

Dear Reader,

In spite of many market closings around the area, you still have local shopping opportunities available to you all winter long. We have three year-round markets in Oakton and Gainesville and at Fairfax Corner. And the City of Falls Church sponsors a year-round market also. You can check the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s listings for a full list of markets in your area.

In this area farmers can pick and store many winter vegetables and fall apples throughout the winter, and many of them have also ventured into what we call “value-added products” in the biz, which include pickles and relishes, applesauce and apple and other fruit butters, and even baked goods to extend their seasons and improve their cash flow.

These hearty souls come all winter in just about all weather conditions to bring you their personally grown or produced products. They know it is more convenient for you to buy everything in a nice warm store, but I urge you to consider that it would be even more convenient for them not to have to drive miles and miles to stand out in the cold to make a living. I believe that if we want them to be there with the tomatoes and peaches in the summer, we need also to recognize that they need us in the winter to get them through to the next planting season.

Over the coming cold winter months, when it is difficult to imagine that in this part of the country we can actually eat local when snow is on the ground and frost is on the windowpane, I am going to try to excite and engage your kitchen creativity by reminding you of just how easy it is. And, not coincidentally, to remind you to get out there in the cold and support your farmers and food purveyors who are standing in 10-degree weather to serve you.

Saturday night at my home, I managed to throw together a lovely local meal without really trying; in fact, two hours before we ate, I had no idea how to answer the daily inquiry, “What’s for dinner?” And boy, does it make certain people in my household nervous when I do not know the answer to that question!

I knew what I had on hand — some of which I had bought just that morning at our Oakton market, some of which I had bought days or even weeks before. I had two lovely local pork chops thawing in the refrigerator, and I had quite a variety of local produce available, too. I had freshly shelled red kidney beans from our Mennonite co-op, Heritage Farm and Kitchen, and local onions and carrots.

I had store-bought fennel, which I always have in the refrigerator and which I still have not convinced any of our farmers to grow for us, but I refuse to give up. And I had canned tomatoes — which were my favorite Cento brand, but I could have bought fresh tomatoes that morning and used them if I had been planning ahead.

So I went to work. I ended up making red beans and rice very much like this recipe, but this is a dish that may very well be different in construction and taste every time you make it — and that’s fine with me and my family. My husband grilled the two pork chops, and we sliced them thinly in order to serve the pork as an accompaniment to the beans and rice to all four of us at the table.

I did also use a non-local product that I have recently discovered that gave the “rice” part of the recipe an extra nutritional boost and I am happy to recommend it to you: Rice Select Whole Grain Royal Blend Texmati brown rice and wild rice with wheat and rye berries. This great product is certainly pricier than white or even plain brown rice, but it goes further because it is more complex and filling. And if you cook more than you need for one meal, it keeps long enough to end up as part of a quick stir-fry later in the week.

For dessert we had a heritage recipe apple cake made by Marty Fetters, wife of Dave Fetters, who brings fruit and fruit products to both our Oakton and Gainesville winter markets. I used just one huge slice for four of us and two small cups of Trickling Springs ice cream divided four ways to serve with it, and we were all feelin’ fat and happy after that.

The really great ending here is that I still have lots of good local meat and produce for tomorrow night — and you can be so lucky too.

See you at the market!

Those of you who have been reading these newsletters for several years now know that I am an inveterate clipper of newspaper and magazine articles, which I eventually use to inform my writing or to give or send to others who might be interested in them. In order to make room for new files, I have been clearing out old ones, and this past weekend I went through a box of clippings from the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Boy is it amazing to see what was on our minds 10 years ago — especially since they were most often the same things that are on our minds now. The concerns seem to be the same; only the science has propelled the discussion in interesting directions, often leaving us only slightly ahead of where we were.

One article of interest that was not dated but quoted from a study done in 1999 was printed in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Cafeteria Food Fight.” It reported that school districts were moving toward hosting fast-food vendors and bringing vending machines into their school cafeterias because of the money it brought in.

A companion article titled “Schools Teach Kids to Give Peas a Chance” focused on programs that were teaching cooking and nutrition in school to help students learn on their own how to eat healthier.

It advised that “Making lunch part of the schools’ educational mission, instead of an ancillary service, could help remove the economic pressures that drive lunch programs to serve pizza and french fries.” In East Harlem, students were even visiting local farms, and the parents were given half-shares in CSAs for their volunteer time with a program called Cook Shop.

Then there was the article from Modern Maturity, November 1996, about two “recent” scientific discoveries that linked nutrition and overall health. “One is that many chronic degenerative diseases are largely caused or influenced by free radicals that are produced by tobacco smoke and other pollutants, as well as by normal body processes. The other factor giving nutrition a boost is that scientists now better understand how DNA becomes damaged and subsequently creates cancer cells.”

The study posited that “nutritional deficiencies are to blame for much of the damage.” The article then ends with recommendations for healthier eating — all of which except one are supported by more modern research.

We certainly have moved away from fast food in our school cafeterias but have not made many inroads when it comes to education about nutrition in the classroom. It seems to have taken way too long in the face of incredibly increasing childhood obesity statistics to introduce nutrition into the classroom.

Just think of the money we would have saved already in 10 years on health care if we had worked harder then ever to stabilize the rate. Instead, in 2208, 18 percent of children ages six to 11 were overweight, up from 13 percent in 1999. And while the science is now instructing us to get our nutrition from food rather than supplements, we are less healthy than we were when that Modern Maturity article was written.

How hard can it be to change the lunches served in our cafeterias? And how expensive can it be to introduce some basic instruction in nutrition and eating healthy at home into our classroom curricula? Whatever the cost in your time and mine — and in our tax money — would surely be worth every dime. And what an investment it would be in the collective personal and public health of our population.

My mother always said that we live and learn — I’m beginning to wonder about that. Let me know what you think.

Photo by NS Newsflash