Reforming School Food Systems

  • USDA undersecretary of food and nutrition, Kevin Concannon, says today former military generals are concerned because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to qualify for military service. (Photo courtesy of the US Navy)

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

Transcript

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

The national school lunch program started after World War II because the military was concerned. Many young men had been rejected from the draft because of childhood malnutrition.

Kevin Concannon is undersecretary of food and nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He says today former military generals are getting concerned again. That’s because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to serve.

“Twenty-seven percent of them in that age group are so overweight, they don’t qualify for military service.”

And part of the reason so many have gone from being malnourished from not enough food, to malnourished from too much junk food, is the school meals program.

Everyone from first lady Michelle Obama to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is pushing for improvements in the foods served in schools. Chef Oliver spent three months in Huntington, West Virginia for his program Food Revolution – because it was dubbed the unhealthiest city in America.

In this scene, he started by working in an elementary school cafeteria – and goes with one of the workers to check out the freezer.

“The freezer was just an aladdin’s cave of processed crap….So this is pizza for breakfast, and then they have it for lunch tomorrow?”

“I would not ever feed that to my kids, ever.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this…”

“Do you honestly think that we could go from raw state every day?”

“Yes.”

In his efforts to improve the food in this one school district, we see how many barriers there are to doing something as simple as getting kids to eat vegetables and fruits.

There’s resistance from cafeteria workers, the school administrators, the parents, and the kids.

When Oliver serves roasted chicken instead of chicken nuggets, most of it ends up in the trash. And when the schools do start using his menus, more and more parents send their kids in with brown bag lunches – many filled with candy and potato chips.

Kevin Concannon at the USDA says the government cannot do anything about the lunches parents send with their kids. But it can do something about the food served by schools. And he says there is a big push right now to serve healthier foods.

“The direction we’re going in is more fruits, more vegetables, less fat, less sugar, less sodium.”

But, there’s a catch:

“Better, healthier foods cost more.”

So President Obama is proposing adding 10-billion dollars to school food programs over the next decade. The Senate is looking at adding a little less than half that – 4.5 billion. Either way, Concannon says it’s more money than has ever been added to the program.

“It’s no longer a political climate of ‘I’m OK, if you’re OK.’ I think it’s more a realization that this affects health costs, this affects national security, and many of these health conditions are preventable if we get people to eat healthier and to exercise.”

Chef Jamie Oliver agrees more money is needed to provide healthier foods in schools. But right now, he says the government is part of the problem. It offers schools cheap processed food for almost nothing.

“The donated food that you get that is so cheap that you can’t resist it. And it’s from the government. The government is saying ‘We want change.’ ‘Here, why don’t you have some really lovely, cheap processed food.”

The USDA says the government food being sold to schools has improved over the years. But many people say it hasn’t improved enough to ensure that most U.S. students are offered nutritious meals every day.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Home Weatherization Gets Snagged

  • It was thought that putting insulation in older homes was one way to help jump start the economy. (photo courtesy of the US Department of Energy)

The Recovery Act called for a multi-billion dollar home weatherization program. It was thought that putting insulation in older homes was the ultimate “shovel ready” project to help jump start the economy. But as Mark Brush reports, so far, it just hasn’t worked out:

Transcript

The Recovery Act called for a multi-billion dollar home weatherization program. It was thought that putting insulation in older homes was the ultimate “shovel ready” project to help jump start the economy. But as Mark Brush reports, so far, it just hasn’t worked out:

The Department of Energy’s Inspector General found the data alarming.

Of the ten states receiving the most money for home weatherization – eight of them weren’t even at two percent of their goal.

One reason for the hold-up is bureaucracy. There’s a law that says if you get federal money – you have to pay workers a “prevailing wage” or a fair wage. And there was confusion over how much to pay people.

Don Skaggs is with Ohio’s Office of Community Services. He says most states waited until the issue was resolved – but Ohio didn’t wait:

“So we decided to go ahead and do production. And then once we understood what the requirements were, we would go back and retroactively adjust those wages for those staff, which is what we did.”

So Ohio’s on track – but most states are not. The Department of Energy said it’s working on these problems – and expects things to ramp up soon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Billions for Better Rail Service

  • High speed trains may be sprouting up across the country in light of the recent initiative. (Photo courtesy of Black Leon)

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

New investments in higher-speed rail are making passenger rail supporters almost giddy. Eight billion dollars from the Recovery Act is seed money for new high-speed routes in California and Florida and improvements for existing routes in other regions.

At a recent National Press Club panel discussion, Amtrak’s Joseph McHugh said Amtrak is not getting any of that money… but it’ll improve the freight railroads on which Amtrak operates its trains.

McHugh: And that means higher speeds, reduced trip time, additional frequencies, improved facilities, and a higher level of reliability for our services all around the country.

Beyond that first eight-billion dollars, the Department of Transportation’s so-called TIGER grants mean a few billion dollars more for further upgrades railroads and depots that tie into commuter rail, light rail and other mass transit.

Supporters of rail are expecting big things from the investments.

But others see spending billions upon billions of dollars on passenger rail as wasted money. They don’t see the utopia of transportation in better, faster trains. Many online comments from readers of stories on higher-speed rail indicate they don’t want the government to subsidize rail projects. They see it as stealing from necessary highway and bridge improvements. Others are more political, saying the government is trying to imitate the high-speed rail of Europe when –they feel– Americans are more independent and prefer cars.

So the debate sometimes devolves into — car versus train. Or individuality versus socialism.

Susan Zielinksi heads up the Universtiy of Michigan’s SMART transit project. She says that’s the wrong way to view it.

Zielinski:I think we get ourselves stuck in the polarization and this isn’t about getting rid of cars.

She says better passenger rail and tying it in to better mass transit gives more people more choices. She notes not everyone has access to a reliable car.

Environmentalists add… the train is just more environmentally friendly. Howard Lerner is with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

Lerner: On a per-passenger-mile basis, rail is about three times as efficient as travel by car in terms of fuel efficiency, six times as efficient as travel by air. So, there are pretty substantial pollution reduction benefits, both in terms of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants when it comes to traveling by rail.

But the investment of billions of dollars during the Obama administration is generally considered just the down payment on the cost of bringing U.S. passenger rail service into the 21st century. Just a couple of years ago the Bush administration tried to zero-out the Amtrak budget. A future president might do the same.

Susan Zielinksi at the University of Michigan believes the improvements in rail service we’ll see in just the next several years will prove this investment is worth it.

Zielinski: Congress is not going to be able to go backwards on this. This is going to usher in a whole new set of industry opportunities, of economic development in communities, of new opportunities for jobs.

But even people who like the idea of improved passenger rail service say if this doesn’t result in the trains arriving on time… doesn’t fix the problem of having no transportation once they arrive at the depot… doesn’t spiff up the drab Amtrak train cars… and keep train ticket prices reasonable… it’ll be hard not to keep piling into the car or cramming themselves into an airline seat.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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No Tax Credit for Biomass

  • Biomass power is produced from organic waste such as wood chips or grass. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

When Congress approved production
tax credits for renewable energy,
not every industry got the same
treatment. Lester Graham reports
biomass power is not getting the
subsidies that other alternative
energy sources get:

Transcript

When Congress approved production
tax credits for renewable energy,
not every industry got the same
treatment. Lester Graham reports
biomass power is not getting the
subsidies that other alternative
energy sources get:

Biomass power – produced from organic waste such as wood chips, grass or stuff that would otherwise just be thrown away – got half the tax credit that wind and solar did. And, instead of the tax credit lasting ten years like the other renewable energy sectors, biomass power got five years.

Bob Cleaves is the president of the Biomass Power Association. He says that tax credit for biomass is now gone.

“And our industry, frankly, is in crisis at the moment because Congress has let expire existing production tax credits we were only given five years for and if those are not brought back to life, then I’m afraid we’re not going to be growing the baseline, we’re going to be losing the baseline.”

Cleaves says without the tax credit, some states will be at a disadvantage in meeting the federal government’s requirments for more electricity to come from renewable energy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Geothermal Is Growing

  • This map shows the distribution of geothermal resources across the United States. (Photo courtesy of the US Department of Energy)

Geothermal power plants turn
heat from under the Earth into
electricity. It’s a way of
making power with practically
no pollution. And, according
to a new report, there are more
companies investing in this kind
of energy. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Geothermal power plants turn
heat from under the Earth into
electricity. It’s a way of
making power with practically
no pollution. And, according
to a new report, there are more
companies investing in this kind
of energy. Mark Brush has more:

The report was put out by the Geothermal Energy Association. They found the number of geothermal power plant projects being developed jumped by 46% compared to 2008.

They say the jump was driven by federal stimulus money. And some state laws that mandate that utilities provide a certain percentage of renewable power.

Karl Gawell is with the Geothermal Energy Association. He says, right now, there are specific places where these power plants work best.

“Well, the best reservoirs right now tend to be in the western United States. And in areas where the heat of the Earth actually comes closer to the surface of the Earth. But, you know, the potential is nationwide.”

Gawell says we don’t have good technology to find new heat reserves under the Earth. And, until we invest in better exploration technology, we won’t know where to find these hot spots.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Small Supply of Green Fuel

  • The smaller supply of cellulosic ethanol might mean the country uses less efficient ethanol from corn, or keeps using more gasoline. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Cellulosic ethanol is supposed to
be a green fuel for cars – greener
than conventional ethanol made from
corn. The government wanted industry
to create loads of cellulosic ethanol
next year. Shawn Allee reports
industry might provide just a trickle:

Transcript

Cellulosic ethanol is supposed to
be a green fuel for cars – greener
than conventional ethanol made from
corn. The government wanted industry
to create loads of cellulosic ethanol
next year. Shawn Allee reports
industry might provide just a trickle:

The fuel industry’s supposed to create 100 million gallons of cellulosic-ethanol next
year. But industry leaders say they might create just 12 million gallons.

Wes Bolsen is with Coskata. His company can create ethanol from wood chips and even
household trash. Bolsen says companies like his found some investment money – but the
financial crisis created delays.

“We’re building refineries – 300, 400 million dollar assets and that’s a lot of money
to come together. We’re two years delayed, the whole industry. We can’t open them
in 2010. Facilities will start opening in 2012.”

The federal government might have to shift mandates for cellulosic ethanol into the
future.

That could mean the country uses less efficient ethanol from corn, or keeps using more
gasoline.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Going ‘All-In’ on Goat Farming

  • Anderson and Abbe Turner are in the midst of adding a creamery to their goat farm so they can make cheeses. (Photo courtesy of Lucky Penny Farms)

A lot of companies have been slowing
down and cutting back because of the
economy. But tough times aren’t
stopping some new businesses in the
midst of the ‘local food movement’
from moving forward. More than a
year ago, Julie Grant spoke with the
owners of a goat cheese farm. She
visited them again this year. Now,
they’re opening a new creamery, despite
lots of economic obstacles:

Transcript

A lot of companies have been slowing
down and cutting back because of the
economy. But tough times aren’t
stopping some new businesses in the
midst of the ‘local food movement’
from moving forward. More than a
year ago, Julie Grant spoke with the
owners of a goat cheese farm. She
visited them again this year. Now,
they’re opening a new creamery, despite
lots of economic obstacles:

Abbe Turner just quit her day job. She’s had a good-paying
university job – with benefits – for many years. But today
she’s waiting for the delivery of a $5,000 dollar pasteurizer.

“There we go. There’s my pasteurizer.” (cheering)

The truck arrives with a six foot round stainless steel tank.

“I never thought I’d be so excited by a 3,000 pound hunk of
metal in my entire life. But…” (laughter)

Abbe and her husband, Anderson Turner, started dreaming
of goat cheeses three years ago. This big hunk of steel will
help them finally to get their creamery off the ground.

“The pasteurizer will allow us to make cheese in small
batches, artisan cheeses. We’ll do some cheves in the
pasteurizer, some tommes and probably a goat gouda.”

The Turner’s dream started after they bought a few goats for
their hobby farm. They made a little cheese for the family.
And they liked it. So they kept getting more and more goats.

Now they have more than 160 Nubians, La Manchas, and
Alpines. Abbe and Anderson had been getting up before
dawn every morning to milk them. By hand. Then they
would get their 3 kids ready for school and head off to their
full-time day jobs.

The Turners wanted to automate milking, to make things
easier and faster. They even had a group of 23 investors
chipping in to renovate their barn into a milking parlor. But
that was last fall.

“Unfortunately, with the stock market crash, the calls kept
coming in. ‘Hi. We really believe in what you’re doing.
Unfortunately, I’m watching my investments tank and a goat
cheese operation is not something I can write a check for
right now.’”

Some people thought it would be smart to forget about
starting a new creamery in the midst of a recession. Matt
Ord used to sell the Turners feed for their goats. But he had
to shut down his family business when the economy
crashed. Now he’s working with Abbe to build her goat farm
and creamery – even though he’s not convinced it’s the right
time for this kind of venture.

“She’s nuts. But I hope everything goes good for her, I really
do. She’s got a lot of patience and a lot of nerve starting this
business right now. It’s a very scary time. And I know
things are very tough for everybody.”

Abbe likes to think of her family as bold, rather than nuts.
And most of her investors have come back on board since
last year.

Her husband Anderson Turner is glad she’s starting full-time
to get the creamery off the ground instead of waiting for the
economy to turn around.

“I can’t think negatively about opportunity. My time is now.
My opportunities are now, my life is now. So, this is the
cards I’m dealt with. I’ve got to deal. So, let’s go.”

The Turners believe that the local food trend is just getting
off the ground, and that support for local foods will more than
compensate for the tanked economy. They say restaurants
have already put in orders to buy their cheeses.

Now all they have to do is start making it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Citizen Scientists Help Uncle Sam

  • Citizen scientist divers brave the chilly waters of Washington State to count the marine life below. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

Transcript

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

It’s the kind of cloudy, wet day that most people spend indoors. But the cold and wet doesn’t matter as much when you’re planning to spend your day at the bottom of a Puget Sound fjord.

(sound of divers splashing into water)

About 75 miles from Seattle, these scuba divers are conducting volunteer surveys for REEF, an organization that monitors fish populations around the world. The data help researchers understand where fish live, and in what kind of numbers. It’s the kind of information governments need to understand how fishing and pollution are affecting waterways.

Back on the boat, surveyor Janna Nichols has just emerged from the 48-degree water. She pulls out her survey and goes down the list marking off what she’s just seen.

“Sunflower stars, definitely, many of those – saw a lot of those around. No sand dollars, no sea urchins. Ah! Ooh! Ah! Here’s an exciting one! I saw a giant nudibranch! A very small giant nudibranch. But those are very cool to see – a treat!”

Identifying fish can be tricky, because the same species can have different coloration depending on its age, gender, or even time of the year.

“Black-eyed gobies were everywhere. I would say under a hundred of them. And – they were mating! Because I don’t know if you noticed, they had black pelvic fins. And they kind of hover around and say “Hey, baby baby, look at me!”

As much fun as these “citizen scientists” have, professional scientists take the data these divers collect seriously. Last summer volunteer surveyor David Jennings went diving in Washington’s Olympic National Park Marine Sanctuary. He was excited to see the colorful tiger and china rockfish he’d heard were abundant at the park. But when he got there, he only saw a couple. So he looked at the past six years of REEF survey data to see how the rockfish populations had changed.

“One of the best sources was someone that wrote up a diving experience he had in 2002 where he saw dozens of tigers and many chinas. Whereas I in a week of diving saw two tigers and just three chinas. so it was a very big contrast to what people saw in the past.”

Jennings took the data to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. That’s the agency that decides fishing limits. Greg Bargmann is a department fisheries biologist who’s working on next year’s catch limits for rockfish. He says even though the REEF divers aren’t as highly-trained as the state biologists, the data they collect are more current and cover a wider area.

“The REEF survey shows a very dramatic decrease in abundance over the last five years. Our state surveys don’t show that, but we have a lot of imprecision in our surveys so we’re relying on the REEF surveys to look for changes in population.”

That’s because the state can’t afford to send its biologists out as often or to as many sites as the volunteers dive.

“We really appreciate the interest of our citizens to spend time going out there and using their own transportation costs and their own equipment to go out and collect data, and to listen to us and collect things that are not easy to do sometimes.”

You don’t have to dive to be a citizen scientist. In Ohio, citizens track everything from salamanders to spiders. In California, tighter budgets mean more poaching – and not enough game wardens. So states are training volunteers to do more work. And across the country, the Environmental Protection Agency relies on citizens to monitor water quality in lakes and streams.

Bargmann says while governments rely on citizen scientists more during budget crunches, he sees programs like these becoming increasingly important for keeping track of the health of the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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Who’s Monitoring Pollution?

  • The famous photo of the Cuyahoga River fire that appeared in Time Magazine. The photo is not of the 1969 blaze, but rather of another fire on the river in 1952. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Federal and state governments have cut
back on monitoring some big sources of
pollution, and small sources are rarely
monitored. Lester Graham reports it’s a
problem that’s even tougher when state
budgets are cut:

Transcript

Federal and state governments have cut
back on monitoring some big sources of
pollution, and small sources are rarely
monitored. Lester Graham reports it’s a
problem that’s even tougher when state
budgets are cut:

Industry does not pollute like it did in the 1960s or 70s. Today, regulators monitor most of those big factories.

Tom Lyon is the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

“Big smokestack industries we have a fairly good eye on, but there are a lot of areas that we still don’t have a good handle on.”

Like small businesses which collectively can release a lot of toxins, and farms that use pesticides and fertilizers on millions acres.

Jennifer Sass is a Scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She says, under the Bush Administration, pollution monitoring of big industry was cut back. Sass says that monitoring needs to be restored and expanded to smaller sources.

“If we quit our monitoring programs, then we don’t really know. It’s a lot like putting our head in the sand.”

But many state agencies say they don’t have the resources to keep track of all those sources of pollution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Green Jobs in the Golden State

  • California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the biggest state-funded green jobs training program in the nation. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

California is putting together
a huge green jobs training program.
Lester Graham reports it will mean
thousands of workers trained for a
growing part of the economy:

Transcript

California is putting together
a huge green jobs training program.
Lester Graham reports it will mean
thousands of workers trained for a
growing part of the economy:

Last week, lost in the news of wildfires and state budget problems, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the biggest state-funded green jobs training program in the nation. California is leveraging federal stimulus dollars with state money and public-private partnership matching funds.

“This $75-million program will train more than 20,000 workers for clean and green jobs in the future.”

Green jobs – such as repairing hybrid and electric cars, installing solar panels and building wind turbines.

Governor Schwarzenegger says this Clean Energy Workforce Training Program is where economic growth starts.

“There are still people out there who think that protecting the environment will slow the economy down, but it’s quite the opposite here in California and all over the United States.”

Some business leaders say the green sector likely will be the only growth sector in this economy for a while.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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