Save the World.

(pic via living nature grove)

It's Earth Day on Thursday.  And thankfully there are enough wonderful eco friendly products that we could spend weeks posting on them all. This week we will bring you some of our favorites.
 We know this week will be full of people preaching. 
But during this week, we seem to be even more aware of the way we use the world. More aware of the waste we produce, the choices we make, ways that we can improve on our carbon footprint.  We keep coming back to education and food.
Food is such an important part of childhood. It shares space in our memories for most of our favorite times, birthdays, holidays, seasonal events....The lessons we take from childhood into adulthood about food creates our desire to honor and respect the nutrients we eat or unconsciously consume calories.

Changing the school lunch program in the United States seems vital to the survival of our nation.
Yep, we said it. Here's why.  Take away the fact that 1 in 2 children born after 2000 who are from low socioeconomic status will have Type 2 Diabetes before adulthood and that this is the first generation of children who will live shorter lives than their parents. Or the fact that there are kindergarteners in this country that weigh more than most of us did in junior high.
The way the food is processed is an energy sucking force of Jabba the Hut proportions. Did anyone else see the freezer in last week's Food Revolution. We can't bear to think of how much coal that takes a year to run.

And it seems from the pics on the fabulous Fed Up With Lunch blog that all the food we serve is in disposable containers.

But what seems the greatest tragedy is that we are compartmentialzing our food. Even with a change is the quality of food (which is fantastic and we want want want this!), children are still not being taught where their food comes from or how to cook it. 

Alice Waters, the Mother of the Organic Food Movement and the Slow Food Movement, has seen this need and has been chipping away at our nations stubborn (and horribly misguided) belief that children can only learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, sitting in a desk indoors. Her Edible Schoolyard program works with classroom teachers to integrate the garden into the core curriculum. The children help in the growing, harvesting, and preparing of the food grown.
How much better for our world if we all were ushered into adulthood knowing how to grow, harvest, preserve, and prepare our food?