This is it – your last chance!

September is nearly over and with it our Membership Drive, where a gift of any amountrenews your membership to Slow Food USA.

This month we have waived our traditional $60 membership fee because we want to grow our movement, adding more voices to our powerful network of change makers demanding a just and healthy food system. We want you back!

With your help we can tell our elected officials they have a duty to look out for America’s children, and that right now they’re letting kids down. School lunch programs are so underfunded that most schools can only afford to serve fast food and junk food – setting kids up for a lifetime of bad eating and bad health.

We need a school lunch program that invests in our children’s welfare, protects kids from the foods that make them sick, and links local schools to their local communities and job force.

It’s up to us to give Congress a reality check, and that’s why we need your help. Stand with Slow Food USA – give what you can and renew today!

Title: Outstanding in the Field
Location: Peterbourough, NH
Description: Lisa Beaudoin, farmer, of Herban Living Farm, Temple, NH and Mike Webb, Chef at the Pearl Restaurant, Peterborough are hosting a special fundraising dinner Outstanding in the Field… great food, music and dance. Contact Lisa@herbanliving.org for more information.
Start Time: 15:00
Date: 2009-10-18
End Time: 18:00

Ever get the feeling that multinational food corporations are just trying to sell you a bunch of junk in a pretty package? Well, the new Smart Choices® Program proves that hunch to be true.

Recently, an alliance of over a dozen giant food conglomerates and some industry “experts” came up with a new nutrition labeling program meant to help consumers make “smarter food and beverage choices.”1 You might be surprised what they define as a “Smart Choice”: products like Froot Loops®, Keebler Cookie Crunch® and Lucky Charms®.

Are they serious? In an age when childhood obesity and type II diabetes has become an epidemic, labeling sugar cereals as smart choices is unacceptable. Please join us in telling the FDA and USDA to investigate the Smart Choices® Program and put an end to deceptive labeling.

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/39?akid=23.15803.IVSK5L&t=1

The new Smart Choices® label, a large, bright green checkmark, is starting to appear on packages of processed food across the country thanks to the help of major corporations like ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods and Unilever.2 For only $100,000, a company can join the Smart Choices® program3 and “recommend” products that contain as much as 44% sugar to your children4

This new label is a sign of everything that is wrong with food industry driven labeling programs.

According to Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the criteria for the new “smarter food” label is so low that: “You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria.”5

Jacobson, who was on the original panel of experts that worked to create the nutritional standards for the Smart Choices® program, resigned last September in disgust because the results were so far in favor of the industry.

Thankfully, the FDA and USDA have taken notice.  The agencies sent a joint letter saying they would “be concerned if any FOP (front of package) labeling systems…had the effect of encouraging consumers to choose highly processed foods…”6 The letter is a good start, but The FDA and USDA need to do more. The Smart Choices program will  encourage bad food choices if it’s allowed to proceed.  And the FDA and USDA have the ability to stop it.

Please sign this petition now and tell the FDA and the USDA that Froot Loops® is NOT a Smart Choice for our children.

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/39?akid=23.15803.IVSK5L&t=1

Thanks for all you do,

Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! Team

The Eat In/Potluck at Kin Schilling’s Cornucopia Garden in Hancock on Labor Day was a fun and well attended event. One of the highlights of the event, besides the great folks, food and music, was watching several children help Kin make pizzas which were baked in Kin’s on site wood-fired bread/pizza oven.

Thanks to Kin for all the work invovled in organizing this event. We gathered lots of signatures for the Slow Food School lunch program and signed up some new members.