Plea to raise awareness for Food education in schools

The Coffee Shop
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Hopefully this is appropriate for the lavender room. Sorry if it breaks the rules (wasn’t sure) . . . but since i figure most, if not all of us are health nuts and would wish to see others not like us get on this “wagon” (especialy kids), that this might be of some interest to many. The true scope of our social media project is to heighten awareness, spread word of mouth and raise engagement, however we added a philanthropic twist to this. We would love people to talk about this off line, online and “like” the facebook page etc. thanks
added the updated press release and our youtube videos: please share!

cute kids discussing lunch choices - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0ZyvexYIk0

and our facebook page: www.facebook.com/katzfoodrev

and another video about who we are: http://youtu.be/QGQCXo5mrg8

Pitt MBA Students Kickoff 10-Day Social Media & Fundraising Campaign to Benefit the Pittsburgh Food Revolution Cooking Club
Those who donate earn a chance to win a free iPad mini

April 8, 2013 – PITTSBURGH, PA – Today, a group of seven MBA students from the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz School of Business kicked off a 10-day social media campaign to raise awareness and funding for real-world food education through the Pittsburgh Food Revolution Cooking Club. The MBA team’s social media strategy includes a series of videos to generate excitement and encourage “viral” sharing. To make a donation or to follow the team’s 10-day campaign visit www.facebook.com/katzfoodrev.
The Cooking Club concept was developed by Bobby Fry, co-owner of Bar Marco in the Strip District, and Kelsey Weisgerber, Food Service Director, Environmental Charter School. The club seeks to change food behavior in Pittsburgh students by offering the tools for change at a time in a student’s life when they begin to make their own food choices.
Donations to support the Cooking Club will be accepted from April 8-17, 2013. By making a donation of $5.00 or more, donors’ names will automatically entered into a drawing to win a free iPad mini*. All donations will go directly to the Cooking Club and will be used to purchase utensils and food for the local students.
“By starting one high school cooking club at a time, we are attempting to change society’s relationship with food by empowering the next generation. We are arming them with knowledge, tools and experience, and allowing them to make their own decisions and start their own personal food revolutions,” said Bobby Fry, Co-founder, Bar Marco. He went on to say, “While it is a path to change that requires a lot of trust in human behavior, empowerment is also the most natural path to change. Thanks to Katz and several other community groups who have been excited to team up with us, progress is gaining momentum quickly and organically.”
“If we can promote collaboration between students, schools, chefs, parents, universities, and community organizations –think about the united movement that can arise surrounding healthy food choices,” says Kelsey Weisgerber, Food Service Director, Environmental Charter School. “By donating to this campaign, real resources end up in the hands of students, and our mission can spread to other schools and interested Food Revolution Cooking Club volunteers. The club started as a simple demonstration of the power of food education tied with invested community members and we want to share our work with everyone in the city and watch it grow.”
The MBA team is seeking support from the local community to disseminate the Food Revolution Cooking Club’s message and to help raise funds. Supporters are encouraged to reach out to the MBA team to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

About the Katz MBA Team
Leveraging the power of social media, the MBA team seeks to generate interest and awareness of proactive ways to improve school food and empower Pittsburgh youth to make healthy food decisions. The team is comprised of seven part-time students at the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz School of Business. Enrolled in Professor Andrew Stephen’s Marketing and Social Media Strategy class, the students have been assigned the task of increasing awareness of Food Revolution Pittsburgh and the Food Revolution Cooking Club. Team members include Josh Baker, Andrew Druckenbrod, Partha Ghosh, Katie Kirkpatrick, Angela Leshinski, Rachel Maceikis and Ariann Polasky.

**About Pittsburgh’s Food Revolution Cooking Club (FRCC) **
Pittsburgh-based organizations the Environmental Charter School and Bar Marco, are carrying out their pledge to promote health and well being in the Pittsburgh area through their Food Revolution Cooking Club (FRCC) partnership. The club is dedicated to working with high school students to provide them with education to make healthier food decisions and tools to learn cooking skills. The FRCC began its mission with the Barack Obama High School in East Liberty, and now has expanded to support Brashear High School in a weekly breakfast program. The long term vision of the Food Revolution Cooking Club include replicating the program in other schools, providing summer job opportunities for students and promoting a healthy school culture.

*About the iPad mini drawing:
· By making a donation of $5.00 or more, the donor’s name will be automatically entered into a random drawing for a free iPad mini. A donation of $10.00 earns the donor two (2) entries into the drawing. A donation of $15.00 earns the donor three (3) entries into the drawing for the iPad mini, and so on.
· If a donor chooses to make an anonymous donation, his/her name will not be entered into the drawing.
· A random drawing for the iPad mini will take place on April 17, 2013. The winner will be notified on April 17, 2013.

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If the parents are too stupid to teach their kids, they are doomed. If the parents are absent, the kids are doomed. You can’t fix these cultural problems. You’re just looking to keep yourself busy.

This mba school must not be too great. It took too long to get their message across. What marketing acuity are you talking about?

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If the parents are too stupid to teach their kids, they are doomed.

How do the parents teach something they’ve never been taught themselves? This is like you saying if the parents are too stupid to tech their kids how to rebuild a carburetor they are doomed. It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to rebuild a carburetor but if the parents have never been taught how to do it then they certainly can’t teach their kids how to do it.

This is exactly the problem we face with food. Many, many, MANY households have lost “Food knowledge”. They don’t know how to cook, what a balanced meal is or even where food comes from and or why that is important.

If the parents are absent, the kids are doomed.

Agreed here, but this is not what we are talking about. I know many households with horrible eating habits where the parents are present and very involved in their lives. In many cases the parents simply don’t have a clue how to cook, what to cook and or what nutritional values are and how it effects them and their children.** **These people aren’t stupid, just uneducated and often frustrated.

You can’t fix these cultural problems.

Sure you can. It’s not easy, but it can be fixed.

~Matt

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Blablablabla. If I had the time you had to post, I’d beat Lance Armstrong at Kona.

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i think the the lead chef and head of the cooking club sums up the “doomed” education of these kids and the “infixable” cultural problems.

"By starting one high school cooking club at a time, we are attempting to change society’s relationship with food by empowering the next generation. We are arming them with knowledge, tools and experience, and allowing them to make their own decisions and start their own personal food revolutions in whatever way they are inspired to do so. While it is a path to change that requires a lot of trust in human behavior, empowerment is also the most natural path to change. Watching the personal progress of the students in the cooking club at the Obama Academy has been a lot of fun so far. From their new found knife skills to their stories and questions about food, their excitement and passion for food is being unlocked. Thanks to Katz and several other community groups who have been excited to team up with us, progress is gaining momentum quickly and organically

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Is that because he is banned from racing? :slight_smile:

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Great, another moonbat group supporting centralized food consumption mandates and portion guidelines.

These asinine policies of giving meager portions to kids only helped spawn underground markets for junk food, leading to increased consumption of shitty food.

When will the moonbats ever learn.

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Great, another moonbat group supporting centralized food consumption mandates and portion guidelines.

These asinine policies of giving meager portions to kids only helped spawn underground markets for junk food, leading to increased consumption of shitty food.

When will the moonbats ever learn.

Yeah! You bastards!!! What do you think you’re doing to the great nation of America!!! Trying to teach H.S. kids to “make healthier food decisions” and giving them the “tools to learn to cook”??? Fucking disaster. We all know that the model of the self sufficient hard working American is someone who just drives by McDonalds on his way home. Fuck that cooking shit. Aghhhahahhahhaha!!! OUTRAGE!!!

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I never heard the term moonbat, but I second that.

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Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution is a fraud, and his school lunch bullshit is a complete and utter failure.

http://www.alternet.org/...olution’_flunked_out

His “reality show” was faked to make it appear that his program was economically viable, but in the end it was pure bullshit and the kids dropped out of the school lunch program in droves.

This is all feel good socialist bullshit so I’m not at all surprised a group of MBA students are eating this shit up–no pun intended.

His reality show just exploits the shit out of these kids and schools, it’s fake like all of them.

Kid’s need to get off their asses an excercise, let’s try that for once.

FAKE

"At the end of one episode, we hear Rhonda McCoy, director of food services for the local county, tell Jamie that he’s over budget and did not meet the fat content and calorie guidelines, but she’s going to let him continue with the “revolution” as long as he addresses these issues. What is not revealed is that the “meal cost at Central City Elementary during television production more than doubled with ABC Productions paying the excess expense,” according to a document obtained by AlterNet from the West Virginia Department of Education. "

KIDS HATE IT

“In short, the “Food Revolution” has flunked out. At Central City Elementary, where Jamie burst in with loads of fanfare, expense and energy, the school has reintroduced the regular school menu and flavored milk because the “Food Revolution” meals were so unpopular. In what looks like a face-saving gesture, Jamie’s menu remains as a lunchtime option, but given the negative student response, don’t be surprised if it’s quietly phased out by next school year. (You can see both menus here.)”

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It’s all too easy to focus on the negative of the situation. Especially when it stares you in the face everyday in the cafeteria during school lunch period. But, the truth is: we know, or at least can recognize, that school food is frozen, soggy, greasy, disgusting. The question and real issue at hand is, what are we going to do about it? The kids remain adamant about expressing their frustrations. But, they’re starting to move toward generating constructive feedback and goal-oriented ideas. These kids are ready to take action.

The kids at every school across the country, are the future owners and operators of our restaurants and businesses. If we want to see new ideas and creative solutions, these kids are the catalysts. If they’re not eating well, they’re not thinking well.

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Blablablabla. If I had the time you had to post, I’d beat Lance Armstrong at Kona.

You’re just jealous because I type faster then you and actual make logical points that you can’t seem to come up with responses for :slight_smile:

~Matt

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more than likley the case and i think JO would agree . . .“In short, the “Food Revolution” has flunked out. At Central City Elementary, where Jamie burst in with loads of fanfare, expense and energy, the school has reintroduced the regular school menu and flavored milk because the “Food Revolution” meals were so unpopular.”

but that is exactly what the strategy of this cooking club was designed to address. . . namely a grassroots effort to empower the kids themselves to make more informed decision about food and learn about what types of food they can fill themslevs with rather than be forced to eat what is given to them. I mean really, how is this a bad thing? a kid learns to choose say a baked peice of chicken, an apple, an oatmeal cookie and some steamed broccoli rather than pizza, soda and a twinkie for lunch?

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Responses to, not responses for.

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“we cannot expect people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.”

F communism in all its forms. If you are too stupid to eat healthy then die, not my problem or responsibility. Socialism and communism just make everyone stupid and pour. Teach these kids to read, write and do math and move on. The rest they can then learn for themselves.

Why teach them to fish when you can just give them an EBT card to buy fish mcnuggets, right?

University sponsored communism… Yipp f’n Eeeeee.

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Yeah! You bastards!!! What do you think you’re doing to the great nation of America!!! Trying to teach H.S. kids to “make healthier food decisions” and giving them the “tools to learn to cook”??? Fucking disaster. We all know that the model of the self sufficient hard working American is someone who just drives by McDonalds on his way home. Fuck that cooking shit. Aghhhahahhahhaha!!! OUTRAGE!!!

This is by far the best thing you ever posted

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The best to you in your project. Sounds like a good mission.

Please don’t listen to the naysayers.

Note: JO has some good recipes. :slight_smile:

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x2, ignore the haters.

Cooking is a rewarding activity in a lot of ways, and it is worthwhile endeavour to counter the message of most food and restaurant advertising that glorifies consumption of highly processed foods, over simple, lower-cost unprocessed food.

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Why would kids hate eating a sausage pizza for breakfast? Of course their parents see “breakfast bagel” on the school menu and that has to be somewhat healthy, right? If there is one thing I have learned while working in education it’s that 90% of kids make absolutely horrible choices. Sometimes you just have to make the choices for them and tell them to HTFU.

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If the kids in Pittsburgh are anything like the kids in Los Angeles, most of that food will end up in the trash…which is what happens at LAUSD: tons of food tossed away because the kids won’t eat it because it tastes like shit.

I think it is a very noble thing you are trying to do, so go for it. To make sure it is not a total waste try to recover most of ‘the shitcanned food’ so it can be put to good use at a foodbank or homeless shelter. This will require special bins/containers but it will be worth your time. Food waste is a sin in my opinion and if you really want to “empower the next generation” preventing food waste and/or the logistics of such should be a part of your program. What cannot be recovered can go into a compost pile for fertilizer and given to the 4H club or local organic gardenders.