Army Wife, Dietitian Urges Healthy Food for Kids

By SUSANNE M. SCHAFER - Associated Press

FORT JACKSON, S.C. -- Kim Milano is the wife of the general who runs the Army's largest training post, but she's also known on Fort Jackson as the woman who teaches second-graders how to cook "roasted monster brains."

"The kids just loved it," Milano said with a laugh, describing her cooking demonstration for roasting cauliflower.
The 53-year-old pediatric dietitian has spent two years at this military installation in South Carolina helping military families learn to cook and eat healthy food.

"I tell people that if they eat better, they will feel better, and they will be able to handle stress better," she said.
Milano has taken her passion around the globe while raising two boys and managing 17 moves during her husband's 33-year military career. Repeat moves, last-minute, no-notice deployments and life on military bases often far from large cities means many military spouses find it difficult to maintain any kind of full- or part-time job, let alone a career.

Milano said she has been able to work or volunteer at various military schools and local hospitals during their many moves, so she has kept abreast of research and trends in her field and maintained her accreditation.

"Parents are much more willing to change for their children than for themselves, so I've focused on kids as much as I could," she said.

Her message of proper nutrition and eating is timely, given the military's health issues and budget concerns.
The Department of Defense reports that nearly a quarter of entry-level candidates for military service are too overweight to serve or make it through their first enlistment. And medical care related to excess weight and obesity is costing the Defense Department $1.1 billion a year.

Earlier this month, first lady Michelle Obama joined Pentagon officials at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas to introduce a program to serve more fruits, vegetables and low-fat dishes in military dining halls. It is the military's first major attempt in 20 years to help its men and women, their families and retirees make better nutrition choices, said Jonathan Woodson, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.

Fort Jackson, located outside Columbia in central South Carolina, is the largest of the Army's basic training bases, with more than 60,000 soldiers annually attending its schools and courses. More than half the Army's female soldiers are trained there.

On the post, Milano holds cooking classes for spouses and helped develop the school course that introduces new fruits or vegetables to students over several months.

The children took a survey to find out which foods they didn't like or knew little about, so unfamiliar foods like cauliflower, beets, spinach, apricots and blueberries were chosen.

Milano said she talks about how each food is grown, why it has the name it does, and shows them how to cook or prepare various dishes. Recipes including the ingredient go home to parents, the commissary puts the ingredient on sale when it's being studied and it's served in the school cafeteria.

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Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/02/26/2682886/army-wife-dietitian-urges-healthy.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/02/26/2682886/army-wife-dietitian-urges-healthy.html#storylink=cpy

Hospital Chefs Cook From Scratch to Offer Wellness Meals

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Sous Chef Shelly Herndon pointed to a green plate holding grilled salmon topped with pineapple chutney, rice pilaf and mixed vegetables that she proudly put on display in the Bristol Regional Medical Center’s cafeteria line.

“Everything here is made from scratch,” the hospital’s assistant chef said before the lunch rush started pouring in. “We’re doing this so people can eat healthier.”

Herndon and her colleagues started preparing low-fat, low sodium entrées like the grilled salmon plate and serving them to the hospital’s 800 to 900 daily customers as part of a new wellness program the hospital launched Oct. 25.

“We are a hospital and we provide wellness,” said Carol Fleenor, the hospital’s director of food and nutrition services. “It just fits in with our mission to provide healthy options for our customers.”

The cafeteria’s staff cooks the wellness meals using special recipes developed by Sodexho, the hospital’s food services company, that contain less than 800 milligrams of sodium, 100 milligrams of cholesterol and almost no saturated or trans fats.

By meeting those nutrition goals, the wellness meals are designed to help people fight two major health problems – heart disease and obesity – that affect a rapidly growing segment of the population both in the region and across the country.

Fleenor said the hospital cafeteria started offering wellness meals six weeks ago because customers regularly asked for healthier menu options when they filled out surveys evaluating their dining experiences.

The cafeteria prepared only 30 to 40 wellness meals each day when the program started, she said, but quickly increased to 80 meals a day. Now, she said, the cafeteria is serving the special menu items to about 10 percent of its daily customers.

“We still have French fries and other things like that available,” Fleenor said.

She also said many customers are picking the wellness menu items over the hospital’s regular menu items, which might not be as healthy as the special meals.

Still, Fleenor said, the cafeteria has no plans to do away with any of its regular menu items and is instead relying on an aggressive marketing campaign and pricing structure to get its customers to pick the wellness items.

When the hospital signed up for the wellness program, Fleenor said, staff decorated the facility’s hallways with signs and posters that provide information on healthy eating and a link to a Sodexho-managed website that gives them more information about nutrition.

They also sell the wellness meals, such as Herndon’s salmon plate, for prices that are about 10 to 20 cents cheaper than regular menu items: The new grilled chicken meal costs less than fried chicken and turkey burgers are sold for less than hamburgers.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle the hospital faced when rolling out the new menu was retraining its cafeteria staff to follow the recipes to the letter and not add things here or there as they cooked the food, Chef John McGiboney said.

Read the complete story here.

Children, Meet Your Vegetables

Baltimore chefs donate their time to program that introduces kids to the joys of healthful eating

By Jacques Kelly

May 26, 2009 - The third-graders at a Catonsville elementary school recently took a break from the usual cafeteria fare of corn dogs and pizza to sample organic, field-grown salad greens mixed with black olives, apple cider vinegar and oil, Maryland strawberries and honey.

And they became chefs for a day, mixing their own salads and making their own dressing.

Their experience last week was a culmination of a three-morning seminar, called "Days of Taste," which teaches children about what's produced on Maryland farms, tells them about non-processed foods and encourages them to grow a little more adventurous at mealtime.

The program is offered at 17 Baltimore city and county schools, and the instructors who donate their time are some of Baltimore's best-known chefs, including John Shields of Gertrude's, Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen, Galen Sampson and Christian DeLutis of Dogwood restaurant and local chef and baker Ned Atwater.

"You can really see the light bulbs go off when some of the city children have never eaten a fresh, raw vegetable and they taste it in a salad," said Atwater, who has been teaching the classes for nearly a decade.

"Over the years, we've probably been to half the public schools in Baltimore," he said.

Last week, he took his aluminum salad bowls and non-iceberg lettuce to the Westowne Elementary School on Harlem Lane in Catonsville.

"Our program is different because we have real professional chefs and professional farmers," said Riva Kahn, a cell biologist who lives in Timonium and helped develop the program. "It opens the eyes of these kids to different career possibilities. Our angle is to let them discover that healthy food and good food are not mutually exclusive."

While not every plate at Westowne was completely clean at the end of the lesson, most were fairly empty.

"I like olives," said Samuel Cushman, 9, who explained his grandmother likes to put them in salads.

JanayaWilson, who said she likes to cook - and makes her own salad dressing - is not a fan of red peppers. "I've never liked them," she said, leaving an unconsumed section of them of her paper plate.

As part of the experience, the students boarded buses for One Straw Farm in White Hall in northern Baltimore County. They saw lettuce being started in the greenhouse and the growing fields. (Other suppliers include Brad's Produce in Churchville and Calvert's Gift Farm in Sparks.)

"I learned that compost is banana peels and leftover foods," said Kye McMath, who also said he now knows what part of the tongue are associated with sweet and sour.

Atwater led a post-salad discussion on whether the foods tasted salty, sweet, bitter, sour or "umami" - a Japanese word meaning savory.

"We put in things you wouldn't think would go in a salad - like strawberries - and they tasted really good," said Vivian Montgomery-Walsh, a 9-year-old. "Going to the farm was really cool because we learned how a seed turns into veggies and fruit."

The Westowne food and cooking class attracted a number of parents as helpers and faculty members as observers.

"The math and the science are great, then you can ... look at it as a health class," said Westowne's principal, Patricia Vogel.

"Days of Taste" is a project of the American Institute of Wine and Food, a nonprofit educational organization founded by television chef Julia Child, wine maker Robert Mondavi and others.

"It was a program that originated in French schools," said Atwater, who worked with Kahn and food writer Cynthia Glover to tweak the mini-seminar for local school children.

Members of the Baltimore AIWF chapter gave $14,000 for the school events last year.

All the chefs donate their time to teach the students.

Other chefs in the program include Nona Nielson-Parker of Atwater's, Michael Marx of Rub Barbecue, Barry Fleischmann of Innovative Gourmet, Vicky Barkley from The Classic Catering People, John Walsh of Chef's Expressions and Marc Dixon of Bistro Blanc in Glenelg.

"Over the years, I've seen food become more and more processed commercially," Atwater said. "I want to teach kids about a balanced diet and where the food they eat comes from."

Alice Waters' Crusade for Better Food

(CBS) When it comes to food, Alice Waters is a legend.

At age 64, she has done more to change how we Americans eat, cook and think about food than anyone since Julia Child. Waters was only 27 years old in 1971 when she opened her French bistro Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., today considered one of the finest restaurants not just in the United States but in the world.

Waters has produced eight cookbooks, but she's more famous as the mother of a movement that preaches about fresh food grown in a way that's good for the environment. The movement, now called "slow food," is a healthy alternative to "fast food." You might think this appeals only to the Prius-driving, latte-sipping upper crust, but Waters' ideas have gone mainstream.

It all started at Waters' culinary temple, Chez Panisse. She still shows up almost every day, as she has for the last 37 years, to oversee the cooking with her exquisite, infallible taste buds. It's not just the cooking that has made her famous: it's the ingredients. She was one of the first to serve antibiotic and hormone free meats and insist on fresh, organic, locally-grown fruits and vegetables.

"You started a revolution in food. How we think about food. How we cook food. But do you think of yourself as a revolutionary?" correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Waters. "I guess I do now, but when I started Chez Panisse I wasn't thinking of a philosophy about organic and sustainable. I just was looking for flavor," Waters replied. It's flavor that comes from serving only seasonal food, one of her hallmarks; say "frozen" and Alice Waters shudders.

Because all her food has to be fresh, she buys only from local ranchers, fishermen and farmers. People who meet Waters are struck by how gentle and dreamy she seems to be, and they wonder how someone like that became so successful. Truth is, Alice Waters is a steamroller, relentlessly going after what she wants.

And now she wants everyone to cook the way she does. And that has put her in the spotlight "People have become aware that way that we've been eating is making us sick," she said. She has become the leader of a movement to change how we eat. And she's getting traction. Now you can go to your neighborhood grocery store - even Wal-Mart - and buy organic. But in the process, she's become a target.

"People say Alice Waters is self-righteous and elitist. And these are words I've heard over and over," Stahl pointed out. "I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist," Waters argued.

Read the complete Lesley Stahl interview with Ms. Waters here.