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- Please reconsider your statement that Alice Walker has done more to change the way we eat than anyone, ...
Dr. Vandana Shiva, former nuclear physicist, environmentalist, ecologist, author, speaker, and winner of the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), has done more. - Reply to this comment
- Leslie, come on, you were looking at Alice like she was a freak, like she was the only person in the world who actually cooked, and the only person in America who did not have a mircrowave oven! I work a 40 hour week and travel to and from work about an hour a day, and manage to go home, feed the dogs, put the horses up and feed them, feed the wild deer, water the garden and then cook dinner for my husband and myself, with fresh veggies that are mostly organic or grown locally. It is the price you pay for being healthy, give up your big S.U.V's and start eating right to save this planet or the planet will evict us from inhabiting it. Everyone should start out making small changes to their eating habits and go from there, I'm telling you it will work.
Good Luck! - Reply to this comment
- Bravo, Alice Waters and "60 Minutes". If we eat fresh fruit,vegetables, meat, chicken and pork in season, ther is less need for chemicals to grow and transport them. Think of all the people we could put to work regionally as well in preserved open space in our cities and towns, growing, transporting and selling healthy food with less of a carbon foot print. This is a win-win program for our health, our wealth and our environment. We need more success stories like this one. The West Coast has Alice Waters, but on the East Coast, in Philadelphia, PA we have Judy Wick, of the White Dog Cafe, a nice counterpart to Alice Waters.
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- The goal isn't to get schools to grow all of their own food - there's neither the time nor the space for that to be practical. One of the goal is to properly orient kids to make good choices about food and get them acquainted with preparing food.
The other goal is educate everyone - which, judging from the comments is clearly needed.
If you stop and think - what does Alice Waters have to gain by making organic food more popular? Presumably both her and her clientele aren't effected by the cost and pushing organics to the mass market diminishes any perceived "exclusivity". Clearly her advocacy is not for her own personal gain but rather for basic social justice.
as for the comment about Mr. Norman Borlaug. Great work in it's time but the evidence is pretty well documented that a lot of those techniques - genetic manipulation and synthetic fertilizers have adverse effects. Pretty easy to dismiss the links to cancer when you're in bed with the chemical companies. - Reply to this comment
- I wonder why Leslie thought that dicing some tomatoes and veggies and cooking in olive oil was so esoteric. People eat every day, so its not such a wild idea that everyone should know something about cooking. Lots of people have scrapped their microwaves, too.
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- Broadcasting this piece of nonsense once was bad enough, but why twice? Nothing of significance was added. How about a segment from someone with a different view, like Norman Borlaug? From now on I'm turning on Dateline on Sunday evening.
Leslie called her a steamroller--and a pudgy one at that I might add! - Reply to this comment
- Just a quick follow up to rusty's post - though that may work (schools growing their own "organic" food) for feeding the students for some schools, it most likely wouldn't for most schools in the US. First - organic farming can be very labor intensive - where are the students going to get that kind of time during an already very busy school day and life? Second - where would the schools get the land? Many schools in suburban/urban areas have limited space as it is, and some have hardly any open space available. Third - and this is related to number 2 - do you know how much land and how much it would take to feed all students in a school every day? Not the space, time, or practicality to it. Schools would be better off getting "fresh" or "fresh/frozen" food from any wholesale source that is cheap with a minimum standard of quality - and "organic" not being a requirement - , and push healthy choices in their selections, whether it be "organic" or not. The health issues among children are more related to general food choices ("junk food" vs "good/wholesome" food choices) and lack of exercise rather than organic vs non-organic. And as an Extension Director had posted earlier somewhere in all the comments, Extension nationallly has been teaching kids about food production and healthy eating for many years. 15 years ago I was in the schools as an Extension agent teaching kids about healthy food choices and food preperations (where they ....wow....actually prepared and tried new foods and liked them - and...surprise...it wasn't organic!) AND proper food HANDLING techniques (cause I hate to break the scoop, but "organic" , if not handled properly, has potential to be harmful also!) ..... so - it isn't anything new. .
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- Wake up folks! You've been drinking the coolade for so long you've forgot that it's synthetic!
Instead of criticizing Alice Waters ( and many others) for advocating the benefits organic and "clean, un processed foods" as being elitist you should be screaming at the food industry and the FDA for permitting and promoting the sale of low grade food.
It's true that the ambition was to increase food production however the reality is that many of those measures have had significant adverse effects on us, the general population that consumes that food. In the US, beef is pumped up on hormones - the results of which can be seen in girls developing into women at age 13. The use of antibiotics is so prevalent that when we have to take them for an ailment we and what we're treating have both become resistant to the antibiotics effect. Pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers all reduce the nutritional content of fruits and vegetables as well as bring about a host of reactions including allergies, asthma, attention deficit syndrome, and a variety of cognitive disfunctions.
Research conducted in the past few years has shown the advantages of organic and natural produce and meats including higher nutritional content.
Why do you think we're the most obese nation on earth? as a population we eat junk
In Europe, where hormones not used in beef production and where corn isn't the major feed many of the health problems we face here in the US occur at a much lower rate - diabetes, cholesterol and fat related issues.
Again, wake up! What we think is the great American food pantry is really low grade dog food. Don't get mad at the people who are trying to make things better for everyone and hold the large agribusinesses accountable for their quest for profitability.
- a 3rd generation supermarket owner
- and many others including many independent nutritional scientists advocate which is simply eating wholesome, unprocessed foods - Reply to this comment
- I loved the segment on Alice Waters and wanted to comment on Lesley Stahl's remark about it not being feasible to have organic food in schools. Wouldn't it save money if the schools grew their own food? The gym class could plant and tend a large garden (gardening is great exercise), the Home Ec class could prepare the food and serve it in the cafeteria. They could start during the growing season and can and freeze (for class credit) what couldn't be eaten immediately. Maybe they could even sell some of their bounty at a local farmer's market to buy seeds for the next year. Not only would the students eat healthier foods, they would hand down their knowledge to the next generation. To paraphrase an old saying: "Give a man vegetables and he'll eat healthy for a day. Teach a man to garden and he'll eat healthy for a lifetime." Isn't it time we got back to basics?
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- This morning I had breakfast a la Alice Waters. An egg frittata made with last night's roasted asparagus and well, fake, tomatoes. My toast was from the grocery store too, although it was whole grain. It was good, and I only barely thought of the kids running off to school at 6:30AM with pop-tarts in hand!
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