Meatless Monday: It’s Food Day Today!

Happy Food Day! Yes, today, October 24th, is a very special Meatless Monday. The goal of this first annual Food Day, sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is “to bring together Americans from all walks of life to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.” Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) are the Honorary Co-Chairs for Food Day 2011. There are events large and small scheduled to take place around the country. Click here to find an event near you.  

In my city of New Haven, CT there will be lots of things happening over the course of the day. Here are some highlights:

• In a morning event, second graders from New Haven’s Columbus School will walk to the Chabaso Bakery Farm for a teach-in with New Haven Public Schools Food Director “Food Dude” Tim Cipriano and his colleague, dietitian Sarah Bourque. The students will be the first to taste Chabaso Bakery’s new “Ollie Bread,” made with all natural ingredients and whole grains such as wheat, honey, raisins, millet, flax, and rye. The bread will be served in New Haven public schools.

• At 5 pm on the Yale campus, Chef René Redzepi, owner of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, named the “world’s best restaurant” in both 2010 and 2011, will present a talk co-sponsored by the Yale Sustainable Food Project and the Yale Agrarian Studies Department. Redzepi goes beyond the usual farm to table route to source everything locally: he is a forager. The story goes that on one particular day during a very harsh winter, the only hyper-local ingredients he and his team could procure were some dark blue carrots which had wintered over in an icy field. Redzepi is reported to have turned the leathery carrots into a delicious dish after braising them for hours in goat’s butter and serving them with fresh chamomile tips and sorrel.  For more, check out Dishes from Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. 

• At 6 pm the public is invited to the City’s Barnard Environmental School for some healthy snacks and a screening of What’s On Your Plate?,  “a witty and provocative documentary produced and directed by award-winning Catherine Gund about kids and food politics.” Admission is free. There will be door prizes! City Seed’s New Haven Cooks will be available for purchase.

Even if there are no scheduled events in your area, you can still observe Food Day. Here is a link to send a message to Congress asking for support of Food Day's goals. Here is another to special Food Day recipes. 

Wherever you are, whatever you do today, be well and eat well. Happy Food Day. Have a great week.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

PS Please don’t forget about the frozen beans from China. The petition count is still rising, but at a slower rate than it has been, still going for 500. If you are interested in signing on, you will find my widget one post back. Thanks.