Blog
June 30, 2009
I’m at the School Nutrition Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas this week, spreading the gospel of whole grains to school foodservice directors from around the country. I mentioned to a friend that I was coming here to speak, and he said, “Isn’t school nutrition an oxymoron?”
But the fact is, many schools are working hard to serve better-tasting, healthier food to their kids. The WGC is currently conducting a survey of “lunch ladies” and our preliminary results show that 56% serve whole grains at every meal, 33% serve them at least three times per week, and 9% serve them about once a week.
June 26, 2009
Today's blog entry is from Guest Writer Jeff Dahlberg, formerly Chairman of the Board of the Whole Grains Council. Jeff served in the Peace Corps in Niger in the 1980s, where he first became familiar with the importance of improving access to nutritional foods. Here's Jeff, telling us about an amazing team of teens helping others:
We at the Sorghum Checkoff Program get phone calls all the time from people interested in sorghum. Some of the common questions that come across my desk range from the practical – “Can I eat the grain?” or “What store in Boston carries sorghum?” – to the downright offbeat – “Can I grow it in my backyard here in New Jersey?”
June 23, 2009
Despite the fact that I’ve been with The Man for years and years, he still has the ability to take me completely by surprise. Before you go all gooey and starry-eyed, you might want to hear this story first ‘cause it actually resulted in a lot of work for me!
The Man travels often for work, and after one recent work trip while we were making dinner, he turned to me and out of the blue said “I want you to learn how to make rye bread.” There was a moment of blinking on my side, followed by a slow nod of acceptance, and then the most obvious question – “Where did this come from?” See, it wasn’t the baking request itself that surprised me. I love to bake cookies, bread, pies, muffins, you name it. It’s just that I’d never seen him eat rye bread. We’d never brought it home from the grocery store, and I’d never seen him order it from any menu when it was an option. His preference had always been for refined flour bread, so much so that it had been a bit of a challenge getting him to accept the half whole wheat flour, half refined flour bread I’d been baking over the last few months. Heck, he didn’t even like the whole white wheat bread from the grocery store the first few times around, saying the flavor was “off” though I thought it tasted just like refined flour bread! So where was this random rye request coming from?
June 16, 2009
Independent grocers who are part of the Supervalu "family" have a new way to find whole grains, with the new "Healthy Elements" labeling system now being tested by Supervalu in several locations.
Nine healthy elements are included in the system: gluten free; good source of calcium; food source of fiber; low calorie (under 40 calories per serving); low cholesterol; low fat; low sodium; organic; and whole grain (first ingredient is whole grain). Up to four of these nine elements will appear on a shelf-tag associated with a particular item.
We're often asked how the Whole Grain Stamp compares to supermarket-specific labeling systems like this. Here are just a few of the many reasons why we think the Whole Grain Stamp rocks:
June 11, 2009
Last month, I was in Arkansas speaking to a group of school foodservice professionals when “it” finally entered the discussion, just like I always knew it would. A question was asked, the audience laughed uncomfortably, and the moderator turned towards me and asked, “Kara, do you want to field this one?” It’s not like I wanted to talk about “it,” but there I was, in a room full of 100+ strangers, each and every one of them curious about the same thing. All I could do was laugh, take a deep breath, and take the microphone.
June 1, 2009
We introduced the bilingual Canadian version of the Whole Grain Stamp early last year. As often happens with new programs, a few nimble, smaller companies were able to jump on board right away, while several larger companies – which must plan farther ahead, as big ships are harder to turn – began checking out this new way to communicate with customers.
Now, a year after the first Whole Grain Stamps appeared in Canada, two big "ships" have turned in our direction. Today we're delighted to report that FritoLay Canada has reformulated their Tostitos line so that almost all varieties (like Hint of Lime and Spicy Quesadilla) are now made with 14g of delicious whole grains per serving.
May 28, 2009
Kara wrote a few months ago on the widespread confusion between whole grains and fiber. Now there may be new confusion on this topic, from a press release from Kellogg brought to our attention by an email from a confused consumer. The Kellogg release says, in part:
The importance of fiber to overall health is well documented, yet more than nine out of 10 American adults and children do not get enough fiber(1). Why? According to a recent Kellogg Company survey, the answer may be two-fold. Consumers don't know where to find fiber, and mistakenly believe products that tout "whole grain" provide it.
May 22, 2009
(And yes, that was an intentional pun!)
Take a look at the picture I’m including in this post. What do you see? Do you see the intended humor, that the zombie depicted is a vegetarian and is therefore moaning for grains, not brains? Do you see an unfair caricature of vegetarians, portraying them as mindless zombies, pursuing all things green or growing? Or are you missing the whole joke boat, having watched too few zombie flicks in your formative years to get the brains versus grains play?
I’m using this great cartoon to illustrate a point that the way we see the world isn’t always the way other people see it, but sometimes these two contrasting points of view are both correct in a way. Maybe the zombie cartoon doesn’t help you visualize this, so let me try another example. Say I’m sitting across from you at dinner, and there’s a glass of water on the table. From where I’m sitting, the glass is on the left-hand side of a table, but from your perspective, the glass of water is on the right. And we’d both be correct, in our own way.
As random as zombies and water glasses may seem at first, I’m actually going to a whole grain place with this post. Stay with me...
May 22, 2009
When was the last time you ate a school lunch? As someone who is (to be charitable) a few years out of public school, I was surprised to learn how much school lunch has changed since I started out in Mrs. Monroe's first grade.
To illustrate these changes, the WGC invited Chartwells, the school-food division of Compass Group, to serve lunch to the 150 government policymakers, health professionals, food marketing executives, and R&D specialists attending our Make (at least!) Half Your Grains Whole conference last month in Alexandria, VA. Our only rule: Chartwells could serve nothing other than foods that had already been used on one of their school menus somewhere in the U.S.
May 19, 2009
In honor of the fact that May is Celiac Awareness Month, I spent the past weekend in Chicago at the National Restaurant Association show becoming much more aware of the toll that celiac disease can take on the human body – and of the great strides that have been made in recent years in diagnosing this ailment and in creating gluten-free products.
It's estimated that about 1 in 133 Americans have celiac disease. For these people, eating the gluten protein found in wheat, barley, and rye causes the body to attack itself, with an auto-immune reaction that destroys the ability of the small intestine to absorb nutrients. Eventually, widespread malnutrition results, and manifests itself in so many ways that diagnosis of celiac disease takes, on average, eleven years. There is no cure for celiac disease; celiacs must follow a special gluten-free diet the rest of their lives.
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