It’s mid-October, but the warm weather here in Chicago has me thinking we’re approaching summer. My small garden thinks so, too. Lettuce, basil, kale, peppers and chives are coming up strong, undaunted by the brown, crinkly leaves falling from the trees above.

Living in the city, planting space is limited and the season is (eventually) finite; I can’t rely solely on what I grow. But along with trips to the Green City Market downtown, and smaller farmers’ markets nearby, we probably eat locally grown produce for over half the year.

Of course, we are fortunate to have easy access to an abundance of fresh food choices. Huge swaths of Chicago are considered “food deserts” — in these neighborhoods, corner convenience stores and fast food restaurants greatly outnumber supermarkets, and access to affordable, healthy produce is severely limited by distance and cost.

Not surprisingly, residents in Chicago’s food deserts, the majority of whom are African American, experience a higher rate of diet-related illnesses (as a recent report shows), including diabetes, certain kinds of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Support for urban agriculture is growing, along with a push to increase the number of farmers markets located throughout the city — a new market opened in Englewood, an impoverished South Side neighborhood, earlier this year. Yet affordability remains an issue. As this story points out, equipment is not available to process food stamp debit cards at all farmers markets, and even at markets with the equipment, not all vendors accept the cards.

Meanwhile, as Rachel has mentioned, the federal Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) is adding a paltry $8 a month for use at farmers markets by mid-2009 (read the latest here).

Despite increased public interest in farmers markets and community-supported agriculture (CSAs) that offer consumers a stake in a local farm, the relationship between food, health and the environment, as well as the importance of affordable and sustainable agriculture, doesn’t exactly make for a crowd-rousing stump-speech.

In fact, we’ve heard almost nothing from the presidential candidates about federal food policy, even as food prices keep rising. Perhaps that will change in the final weeks, but I wouldn’t bet my kale on it.

The political aspect hasn’t escaped Michael Pollan, however. The author of, most recently, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” Pollan penned an open letter to the president-elect that was published in The New York Times Magazine. It is perhaps the smartest and most engaging piece you’ll read this year on what a McCain or Obama administration should do to overhaul the way we grow food and radically change our approach to healthy eating.

Pollan begins by explaining, in no uncertain terms, the urgency:

[W]ith a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign.

Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.

Pollan takes readers on a detailed yet easy-to-follow journey of how the United States food system developed the way it did — and what it can count as its chief success: namely, we produce cheap calories in great abundance.

He then offers an agenda for a 21st-century food system with specific proposals under three main sections: resolarizing the American farm; reregionalizing the food system; and rebuilding America’s food culture. His plan plan for a decentralized food system includes such essentials as modifying the food stamp program and expanding WIC:

Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.)

Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

The adventurous agenda includes suggestions for changing our relationship with food. For children, that means starting early: Plant gardens at every primary school, overhaul school menus and increase “school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.”

We also need to cease negotiating health messages with the food industry. Pollan calls for the surgeon general to take over the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. Currently it falls to the Department of Agriculture, which you might say has a conflict of interest.

But why not start at the top? In addition to encouraging the White House to go meatless one day a week, Pollan calls for the ultimate suburban sacrifice: tear out a portion of the White House lawn and plant an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

OK, insert your favorite arugula-loving-liberal joke here. But at another crucial point in history, White House support was influential:

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.

Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

Read the whole piece (it’s well worth it!). Readers have posed interesting questions and suggestions in the comments, and the Times breaks out Pollan’s responses. Finally, here’s more good stuff from the “food issue.”

*Photo of scenes from Chicago Green City Market by schopie1, reprinted under a Creative Commons license.

The Food & Water Watch program of Democracy in Action alerted us to a public comment period that is closing on Wednesday, October 15 and is collecting comments on the USDA’s child nutrition and WIC programs for consideration prior to the 2009 reauthorization of the programs. Democracy in Action is asking individuals to submit comments requesting that hormone-free and organic milk be among the options in the federal school breakfast and lunch program, and has an action page set up for submitting comments on this topic.

OBOS has written about the topic of rBGH in milk previously - see our web content and this previous post for background information.

The reauthorization will also address WIC, a program intended to improve the nutrition of pregnant and lactating women and their young children - the agency has specifically requested comments regarding the Farmers Market Nutrition Program for provision of fresh fruits and vegetables.

We’ve written previously that, while increasing access to fresh produce is a good thing, the WIC provisions for this (expected to occur mid-2009) are likely inadequate to truly make a difference for women and their families - they’ll add a mere $8/month in vouchers for use at farmers markets. Your comments on the WIC provisions for fresh fruit and veggies can also be submitted prior to Wednesday.

To comment, view Docket FNS-2008-0011at Regulations.gov - click on the HTML or PDF icon beside “Views” to read the request for comments, and click on the yellow icon beside “Add Comments” to submit your suggestions. Comments are due by Wednesday, October 15.

Earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune reported on a religious fast by a 17-year-old:

For more than a month, the only thing Eva Mehta put in her body was water, and never after dark.

At times, the 17-year-old was so weak and nauseated that her parents had to use a wheelchair to bring her from their van to their Jain temple in Bartlett. When the hunger pangs hit hard, she would pinch her ears. But she kept up her fast, even when she went to bed hungry and dreamed of food.

“I would just say in my mind, ‘No, it’s not real. I just won’t eat it. I’m not going to eat this until I’m done fasting,’ ” she said.

Her fast ended Sept. 3 after 34 days. By then the 5-foot-4 Evanston teen had lost 33 pounds, her weight dropping to 119.

Jains are a small religious minority in India. The religion teaches a path to enlightenment through a life founded on nonviolence to all creatures.

The story notes that Mehta’s fast was a temple record, “a triumph of discipline and devotion, say Jain leaders, who plan to hold a celebration Saturday at the Bartlett temple for Mehta and others who fasted.”

That may be the case in the eyes of worshippers, but to me the story was a little too congratulatory on the drastic weight loss, without offering any perspective on the health risks.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. One of the Trib’s health columnists wrote a blog post the same day the story ran that explains the effect a month-long fast can have on your body. Yet it basically adopts a don’t-try-this-at-home tone. More analysis about the media coverage is warrented.

Quote of the Week: “The “new feminism” may include uncritical support for women who oppose teen pregnancy programs and for women who force rape victims to pay for their own rape kits. But I just don’t see where support for women who persist in fabricating their own records is a feminist principle.” — Dahlia Lithwick

Quote of the Week, Part 2: “In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism — a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin’s potential power — means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children’s books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education [...] Stop the election; I want to get off.” — Rebecca Traister

Plus: More on those rape kits …

Website of the Week: Women Against Sarah Palin

Take On Dr. Phil’s Take on Home Births: We’ve heard from several readers that Dr. Phil is soliciting home-birth horror stories on his website for an upcoming show. Perhaps hearing from some satisfied home birthers will lead to a more balanced program. Also see this related call for pregnant women considering a home birth.

It’s Fall, So Viewers Must be Gawking at Fat People: The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley recently covered the growing number of weight-loss television programs — “binge viewing for a nation obsessed with weight” — and the cultural implications. A sampling: “Bulging Brides” on WE; “The Biggest Loser” on NBC; and “Honey We’re Killing the Kids,” among others …

Plus: Writing at AfterEllen.com, Reese DoWitt questions the saneness of MTV’s “Model Makers,” a proposed reality TV series in which 15 wannabe-models have to slim down to win the show’s $100,000 grand prize.

And Richard Perez-Pena, also of NYT, notes that “The Biggest Loser” is a big win for Rodale and its biggest magazine, Prevention, which have collaborated with the series for the past three years.

Taking Cheerleading Seriously: “A growing body of evidence indicates cheerleading has become one of the riskiest athletic activities for women, leaving a long trail of sprained wrists, twisted ankles, damaged knees, strained backs — and sometimes much worse,” writes Rob Stein in the Washington Post.

Despite a sharp increase in the number and types of cheerleading squads and the complexity of their routines, cheerleading is not officially considered a sport at most high schools and universities. As a result, it’s not subject to the safety regulations that apply to gymnastics, for example.

“When people think about cheerleading, they think about the girls with the pompoms jumping up and down,” said Frederick O. Mueller, a leading sports injury expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They don’t think about someone being thrown 25 feet in the air and performing flips with twists and other risky stunts we see today.”

Equally shocking are the cheerleading proponents quoted who seem in denial about the risks. It’s a sport, folks, not an after-school club, and should be regulated like any other official athletic activity.

Facing Deportation and Fleeing Domestic Abuse: Women’s eNews reports on the mass arrest this summer of undocumented workers in Rhode Island that left a number of abused women fearing their deportations will put them back within reach of abusers they fled. A longstanding case pending in San Francisco could set a new precedent, reports Amy Littlefield.

What About the Children?: Writing at Huffington Post, Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, discusses the effect of immigration raids on children. A report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, “Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children,” notes that there are about five million children in the United States with at least one undocumented parent.

Ensuring the Human Right to Survive Pregnancy in Southeast Asia: A meeting of world leaders later this month to discuss progress on the Millennium Development Goals “presents a decisive opportunity to ensure that the limited progress on maternal mortality is at the center of the dialogue,” writes Ramona Vijeyarasa at RH Reality Check. “2005 maternal mortality ratio estimates released by WHO were as high as 540 maternal deaths per 100,000 lives births for Cambodia, 420 for Indonesia and 230 for the Philippines as compared to 14 for the Republic of Korea or 11 for the United States.”

Study: Delivery Method Affects Brain Response to Newborn’s Cries: “When my own daughter was born by Caesarean section delivery, I was surprised how uninvolved I was in the process. My body was numb, and my view of the surgery was blocked by a sheet. When I finally heard a baby cry, it took a minute for me to realize that the sound belonged to my own baby,” writes Tara Parker-Pope at Well.

“That’s why I was particularly interested to read of new research showing that the method of delivery seems to influence how a mother’s brain responds to the cries of her own baby. The brains of women who have natural childbirth appear to be more responsive to the cries of their own babies, compared to the brains of women who have C-section births.”

The very small study (12 women), which was published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, draws strong responses at the Well blog.

When an Apple is Harder to Find than French Fries: “You can’t choose healthy foods if you don’t have access to them. And that’s the dilemma faced by millions of residents in the ‘Food Deserts’ of America,” writes Mari Gallagher, a researcher and author of the 2006 study “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago,” as well as similar studies in Detroit, rural Michigan, Louisville, Harlem and Richmond.

Food deserts are geographic areas lacking in grocery stores and awash in fast-food restaurants. Read more here.

Flesh-Eating Fish Perform “Pedicures”: See what shows up in my in-box from NPR?

Drug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise: “In two years, cervical cancer has gone from obscure killer confined mostly to poor nations to the West’s disease of the moment,” begins this lengthy New York Times story by Elisabeth Rosenthal about concerns over the rapid rollout of vaccines against HPV, which have now been used by tens of millions of girls and young women in the United States and Europe.

Some of the issues raised:

Merck’s vaccine was studied in clinical trials for five years, and Glaxo’s for nearly six and a half, so it is not clear how long the protection will last. Some data from the clinical trials indicate immune molecules may wane after three to five years. If a 12-year-old is vaccinated, will she still be protected in college, when her risk of infection is higher? Or will a booster vaccine be necessary?

Some experts are concerned about possible side effects that become apparent only after a vaccine has been more widely tested over longer periods.

And why the sudden alarm in developed countries about cervical cancer, some experts ask. A major killer in the developing world, particularly Africa, where the vaccines are too expensive for use, cervical cancer is classified as very rare in the West because it is almost always preventable through regular Pap smears, which detect precancerous cells early enough for effective treatment. Indeed, because the vaccines prevent only 70 percent of cervical cancers, Pap smear screening must continue anyway.

“Merck lobbied every opinion leader, women’s group, medical society, politicians, and went directly to the people — it created a sense of panic that says you have to have this vaccine now,” said Dr. Diane Harper, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Dr. Harper was a principal investigator on the clinical trials of both Gardasil and Cervarix, and she spent 2006-7 on sabbatical at the World Health Organization developing plans for cervical cancer vaccine programs around the world.

“Because Merck was so aggressive, it went too fast,” Dr. Harper said. “I would have liked to see it go much slower.”

Plus: In a separate story, Rosenthal refers to two articles published in New England Journal of Medicine that conclude the vaccines are being used without knowing for sure that they are worth the high cost or if they are effective in preventing cervical cancer. Read the articles here and here.

HHS Fails to Deliver on Contraception/Conscience Proposal: “The Department of Health and Human Services today formally released proposed regulations that Secretary Michael Leavitt claims are necessary to protect health care providers and institutions who decline to provide certain medical services because those services offend their ‘consciences,’” writes Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check.

“After intense criticism in the mainstream media and from millions of Americans, HHS has removed an explicit redefinition of contraception as abortion from the regulation. In so doing, the agency may have created a much larger problem.”

Plus: Here’s the official version of the regulation, and Rachel’s previous writings on this topic.

Birth of a Movement: “Last month, a seven-judge appellate panel in Pennsylvania ruled that delivering babies is not the practice of medicine. It’s always comforting when the law catches up to history; midwifery is, after all, the second-oldest profession,” writes Roberta Devers-Scott, a Vermont midwife and psychologist who has written an op-ed about the prosecution of midwives, including her own case.

Health Care is the Issue:  Judy Waxman, vice president and director of health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, identifies seven questions to ask when looking at health reform proposals to determine whether the proposals help to ensure that all women have access to health care that meets their needs.

The Future of Personalized Medicine: View a webcast of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s series Today’s Topics In Health Disparities, which discusses the potential of race-based medical solutions for improving healthcare and reducing racial/ethnic health disparities. The webcast takes a closer look at efforts to study the interaction between race, genetics and health.

Spinach With a Side of Radiation: “Consumers worried about salad safety may soon be able to buy fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce zapped with just enough radiation to kill E. coli and a few other germs,” reports the AP. “The Food and Drug Administration on Friday will issue a regulation allowing spinach and lettuce sellers to take that extra step, a long-awaited move amid increasing outbreaks from raw produce.”

A leading food safety expert said irradiation indeed can kill certain bacteria safely — but it doesn’t kill viruses that also increasingly contaminate produce, and it isn’t as effective as tightening steps to prevent contamination starting at the farm.

“It won’t control all hazards on these products,” cautioned Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

She questioned why the FDA hasn’t addressed her agency’s 2006 call to require growers to document such things as how they use manure and ensure the safety of irrigation water. Irrigation is one suspect in this summer’s nationwide salmonella outbreak attributed first to tomatoes and then to Mexican hot peppers.

“We are not opposed to the use of irradiation,” DeWaal said. But, “it’s expensive and it doesn’t really address the problem at the source.”

The Claim: Morning Sickness Means a Girl Is More Likely: “The notion that morning sickness can sometimes indicate that a girl is on the way may be an exception,” to a number of old wives tales about pregnancy that are based more on fantasy than fact, reports The New York Times. “A number of large studies in various countries have examined the claim, and almost all have found it to be true, with caveats. Specifically, studies have found that it applies to women with morning sickness in the first trimester, and with symptoms so severe that it leads to hospitalization, a condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum.”

A True Love Story: “I’m completely smitten with WALL•E, this summer’s Pixar/Disney offering. But the last thing I expected to see in my friendly, heterosexual upper east side Manhattan neighborhood movie theater was a feature length cartoon about a pair of lesbian robots who fall madly in love with each other,” writes Kate Bornstein. “WALL•E is nothing short of hot, dyke Sci Fi action romance, some seven hundred years in the future! Woo-hoo! Isn’t that what you saw? No? What movie were you watching?” Hee. via en|Gender.

U.S. Black Maternal Health Tied to Social Stress: Writing in Women’s eNews, June Ross looks at how advocates for black women are redefining maternal health — the period from pregnancy through the first six months after delivery — to include a woman’s overall well-being. It’s the first in a series on black maternal health.

“Regardless of their age, marital status, education or early prenatal care, African American women are more likely to bear premature and low-birth-weight infants, those under 6 pounds, whose survival odds are below the U.S. norm,” writes Ross. “Nationwide, black women are three to four times more likely to die giving birth than either white or Latina women. Their infants’ mortality risk is doubled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disparity has persisted even as infant mortality rates for the nation as a whole have fallen.”

“Prenatal care alone doesn’t solve the problem,” said Eleanor Hinton Hoytt, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative. “It’s the life course of women in our communities that is making us give birth prematurely to sick babies. The gap (between black and white women) persists because we haven’t done enough. We need to reframe the policy issues. We need to address maternal health first, then talk about infant mortality.”

It’s a great piece that also looks at the work of Byllye Avery, who stresses the intergenerational aspects of black women’s health and who founded the first Black Women’s Health Imperative. She now runs the Avery Institute for Social Change, which brings together health activists, strategists, community advocates and scholars for constructive dialogue on health disparities and health care reform.

Plus: Also from Women’s eNews, a look at the call for billions to reduce maternal mortality at the G-8 economic summit — Pat Sheffield at RH Reality Check reports on how it went; and an article in a series on the status of U.S. women looks at the growing ranks of poor single mothers since the 1996 welfare overhaul.

And also at RH Reality Check, Miriam Perez looks at “The Myth of the Elective C-Section,” which references “Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth.”

A Giant Fumble: Moving on to child care, what’s up with Google?

AMA Apologizes for Past Racism: The American Medical Association on Thursday “formally apologized for more than a century of policies that excluded blacks from a group long considered the voice of American doctors,” writes AP medical writer Lindsey Tanner. “The apology is among initiatives at the nation’s largest doctors’ group to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more blacks to become doctors and to join the AMA.”

Read the full statement.

When a Mammogram Isn’t Enough: The Wall Street Journal reports on the use of MRIs and ultrasounds to help detect breast cancer in women who have a higher risk of the disease. These methods are more sensitive, but the downside is that they also have a higher rate of false-positives, which can lead to unnecessary stress and biopsies.

Should Doctors Lecture Patients About Their Weight?: Well looks at a recent blog post by “Dr. Rob” (Dr. Robert Lambert of Georgia) at Musings of a Distractible Mind. A whopping 600-plus comments follow. Here’s one of the good ones, as is the one that follows it.

Father’s Age Also a Factor in Fertility: Also from Well. Ah, the cultural implications …

Open Letter to Obama: Lynda Waddington of Essential Estrogen and the Iowa Independent offers her personal story about late-term abortion.

Death of an Activist: Via Viva La Feminista, news of the death of Jana Mackey, a 25-year-old law student and feminist activist who wanted to be an advocate for victims of domestic violence. She was murdered by her ex-boyfriend.

Plus: New York’s domestic violence law is about to be expanded. According to The New York Times: “The new law would make it possible for people in dating relationships, heterosexual or gay, to seek protection from abusers in family court. As it stands, New York has one of the narrowest domestic violence laws in the country, allowing for civil protection orders only against spouses or former spouses, blood relations or the other parent of an abused person’s child.”

Eating at the Farm: I’m in Vermont this week — trying to eat locally as much as possible, same as we do in Chicago during the short-but-sweet growing season — and I have to give a shout-out to Pizza On Earth, where not only does the pizza come topped with farm-fresh ingredients, but you can pick up your share of fruit and vegetables from Stony Loam Farm when you pick up your pie. Or stay and eat outdoors overlooking the rows of vegetables, flowers and herbs.

We ordered the week’s pizza special, curry squash (sounds awful but it was good) and left with a bunch of (free!) garlic scapes.

The New York Times yesterday looked at the growth of community supported agriculture (or CSA) groups around the country and the benefits to members and farmers. One of the unexpected benefits is being introduced to seasonal food you might not otherwise try. If it’s in my bag, I’m going to try to use it, whereas at the farmers market or supermarket I’m more likely to skip over foods I don’t recognize.

You can find a local CSA and other farm subscriptions at Local Harvest. Here’s the view at Stony Loam:

Following up on our recent discussion about whether it’s OK to hide veggies in food prepared for picky little eaters, there’s an interesting post at Well about the tendency of adults to, er, vastly overestimate their own intake of fruits and vegetables.

The post, which is based on a small, self-reporting study of 163 women, also includes a funny excerpt of “Unhappy Meals,” a 2007 NYT magazine article by one of my favorite food writers, Michael Pollan.

Plus: Beets …. mmmm ….

This is a little off the beaten path, but it is most definitely health-related.

My 5-year-old niece visited for a sleepover this weekend, and despite being told that getting her to eat vegetables was pretty much impossible, I decided we’d make a build-your-own veggie burger.

She selected a black bean patty for the head; I chose a portobella cap. We both added carrot sticks for the arms and the legs, kale for the skirt or shorts, chopped garlic scapes for the eyes and nose, and a yellow tomato slice for the mouth.

Alexandra replaced the tomato with a ketchup smile, but then offered that the tomato would make an excellent hula-hoop. I smiled smugly. This meal thing was easy; all it took was a little creativity.

We took pictures (proof!). Then we started to eat. Or, rather, I ate.

Many parents and caregivers are probably familiar with what came next. Alexandra broke up pieces of the bun and dunked it in ketchup (”But it’s a vegetable, tia Christine!”). The body parts swirled around on the plate until they resembled a cubist painting.

Clearly I had no idea what I was up against.

After Alexandra left the next morning (following whole grain pancakes with blueberries, bananas, carob chips and a real chocolate chip or two — I was a pushover by 8 a.m.), I came across this L.A. Times story on the various methods used to get kids to eat vegetables, including pureeing veggies and hiding them in sweetened foods. Melinda Fulmer writes:

Everyone hopes that their kids will eat their fruits and vegetables so they’ll grow into big, strong adults who will eat the nine daily servings recommended by the U.S. government. But everyone also knows kids rarely put “broccoli” at the top of a list of favorite foods.

So an increasing number of parents are loading the foods their kids will eat with produce they think they should be getting. And food makers are lending a hand, offering a growing array of processed foods that sneak vegetables and fruits into chips, juice and nuggets.

But some nutritionists and public health experts wonder if parents these days are relying too much on the sneak attack. They doubt if kids will ever develop a taste for vegetables in all their leafy glory if they are hidden in smoothies and macaroni and cheese. Some say this well-intentioned sneaking could produce kids less likely — not more — to eat greens.

“Children should learn to make healthy choices,” says Pat Crawford, co-director of the Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley. “It really comes down to whether we are feeding our children for nutrients, or for the potential development of healthy patterns that are lifelong.”

Many mothers say they were turned on to hiding vegetables in their kids’ foods by bestselling cookbooks such as Jessica Seinfeld’s “Deceptively Delicious” and Missy Chase Lapine’s “The Sneaky Chef.” Both offer kid-friendly recipes with hidden vegetable and fruit purées in such items as pizza and pasta.

Some of the big food companies that have entered the fray by including helpings of fruits and vegetables in everything from chips to pancake mix are also continuing to include sodium, fat and sugar in amounts that would seem to negate the health benefits. Consider, for instance, that “a 1-ounce, 130-calorie serving of Frito-Lay’s Tangy Tomato Ranch chips offers 210 milligrams of sodium, 3 grams of sugar and 5 grams of fat along with its half-serving of vegetables.”

I also visited a cool blog mentioned in the Times — Fresh Mouth, where a family of five had one mission: to eat only fresh food or processed food with 5 ingredients or less for 30 days. It takes some serious commitment, but Fresh Mouth also makes it seem fun.

So, dear readers, are any of you hiding vegetables in your kids’ meals? What other methods have worked for you?

Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region: “Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine,” reports The New York Times.

The study was conducted by researchers at Dartmouth and was commissioned by the nation’s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which announced a three-year, $300 million initiative intended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography.

Repairing the Damage, Before Roe: “With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside,” writes Waldo L. Fielding in this op-ed. “When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe ‘bad old days.’ Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.” Read on.

Legal Effects of Marriage for Same-Sex Couples: The San Francisco Chronicle has a comprehensive run-down of the legal and financial changes same-sex couples face if they get married in California.

Plus: What happens to the status of couples already married if the November initiative to ban same-sex marriage passes? Expect heavy litigation and a decision ultimately decided by the California Supreme Court, says UCLA law professor Brad Sears.

Paying for Health Care in Retirement - Good Luck: “I write about health care, and still the realization hit me like a ton of bricks today after I put down a just-released report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. None of the presidential candidates have been talking about how to fix Medicare," writes Judith Graham at the Chicago Tribune.

Here’s the sobering EBRI report (PDF), effectively titled: “Savings Needed to Fund Health Insurance and Health Care Expenses in Retirement: Findings from a Simulation Model.”

On Becoming a Woman: In case you were looking for some, er, real-life advice, Blinky has excerpts from this 1950’s guide. Here’s analysis from Echidne, who calls it “a fascinating trip into the sexual politics of the past.”

“On the other hand,” she adds, “almost everything in those excerpts is advocated in this country somewhere, right this very moment. Abstinence is the responsibility of girls, for example. Women gentle and home-directed while men are strong and outer-directed? I was just told this by a liberal guy.”

Speaking of Abstinence: The National Abstinence Education Association has launched a $1 million campaign to recruit 1 million parents to “lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach,” reports the Washington Post.

The campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorize about $190 million in federal funding for such programs, which have come under increasing criticism because of a series of reports that concluded they are ineffective. Such criticism has prompted at least 17 states to refuse federal funding for such programs.

The group hopes to counter that trend, in part with a provocative video that asserts that comprehensive sex education encourages sexual activity by teenagers and a Web site that offers advice to parents about sex education.

Plus: Five days later, the same WaPo reporter, Rob Stein, wrote a page-one story about a new study by the Centers for Disease Control that found “a decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007, and that the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.”

The new figures renewed the heated debate about sex-education classes that focus on abstinence until marriage, which began receiving federal funding during the period covered by the latest survey and have come under increasing criticism that they are ineffective.

“Since we’ve started pushing abstinence, we have seen no change in the numbers on sexual activity,” said John Santelli, chairman of the department of population and family health at Columbia University. “The other piece of it is: Abstinence education spends a good amount of time bashing condoms. So it’s not surprising, if that’s the message young people are getting, that we’re seeing condom use start to decrease.”

Not surprisingly, proponents of abstinence-only programs blamed comprehensive sex-ed.

Hands Up if You’ve Experienced Street Harassment: The F-Word is gathering comments here, in response to comments here.

Breast Cancer News from ASCO Conference: Several breast cancer-related studies presented at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago are summarized here by Daily Women’s Health Policy Report. Meeting abstracts from the conference are available here.

Eat Locally, Think …: “The local food movement typically has been about improving the health of the planet,” writes Tara Parker-Pope. “But now researchers are trying to find out if eating locally farmed food is also better for your health. A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant to study the public health impact of moving toward a local, sustainable food system.”

Chicago can’t hold a carrot stick to California when it comes to the availability of locally grown produce, but the farmers markets rock during the summer and fall. How ’bout where you live?

If I Could Be Anywhere Right Now: It would be here.

Ethics Worth More Than Financial Payments: “With little fanfare, a small number of prominent academic scientists have made a decision that was until recently all but unheard of. They decided to stop accepting payments from food, drug and medical device companies,” reports The New York Times.

No longer will they be paid for speaking at meetings or for sitting on advisory boards. They may still work with companies. It is important, they say, for knowledgeable scientists to help companies draw up and interpret studies. But the work will be pro bono.

The scientists say their decisions were private and made with mixed emotions. In at least one case, the choice resulted in significant financial sacrifice. While the investigators say they do not want to appear superior to their colleagues, they also express relief. At last, they say, when they offer a heartfelt and scientifically reasoned opinion, no one will silently put an asterisk next to their name.

Blogging Against Disablism Day: Coming May 1. Last year, more than 170 people took part. Diary of a Goldfish has the details: “You can write on any subject, specific or general, personal, social or political. In the previous two BADDs, folks have written about all manner of subjects, from discrimination in education and employment, through health care, parenting, family life and relationships, as well as the interaction of disablism with racism and sexism.”

Plus: Tips on language.

“My Beautiful Mommy”: “Oh I just can’t think of enough bad things to say about this book but for starters…” begins Lucinda Marshall’s critique of a new children’s book written by a plastic surgeon to help kids age 4-7 get with the whole “mommy makeover” (tummy tuck and breast augmentation). It’s emblematic of reactions read ’round the web (though EW surprisingly feels the need to ask, “a practical solution for a well-defined demo, or pure evil?” Hmmm. Let me think.)

The book got a lot of attention this week after this Newsweek story came out. Making Light has good info on how a self-published vanity-press book made major league headlines … including a mention on Wait, Wait …. Don’t Tell Me” this morning.

Plastic Surgery on TV: When Botox, face lifts and reconstructive surgery gets in the way of acting, is it appropriate for a critic to call it out? Mary McNamara at the L.A. Times writes:

People should be free to look as they choose, and this town is tough on women — don’t talk to me about Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, they’re British. Would an American woman ever get away with anything approaching Nicolas Cage’s hair or James Spader’s increasing portliness? Of course not.

But television is a visual art, and if people are going to significantly alter the way they look in ways not directly connected with the roles they are playing, it can affect not only their performance but the whole tone of the show.

So you tell me, what is a critic supposed to say when part of the problem with a show is that the leading lady’s face seems incapable of movement or her eyes appear to be moving toward the sides of her head or her lips just look weird?

Plus: Maureen Ryan on women keeping it real: “In future, I’ll not only attempt to acknowledge when a plastic face impedes the enjoyment of a show, but I’ll also make it my business to congratulate the women who look like they’ve lived, for hanging on to what’s made them distinctive individuals.”

Remember the Controversy Over Contraceptives in Portland, Maine?: “For all the firestorm surrounding the decision to make prescription contraceptives available at King Middle School, only one girl has used the service in the six months since the program began, officials say,” reports the AP.

As of Thursday, the only student to obtain a prescription for contraceptives was a 14-year-old girl, the city reported in response to a Freedom of Access request from The Associated Press.

“If it helps one student who otherwise might be in a position of being at risk, then it’s worth it,” said Lisa Belanger, who oversees Portland’s student health centers.

Falling Breast Cancer Rates Prevalent Only Among White Women: “New research shows a sharp drop in U.S. breast cancer cases in recent years was limited to white women, possibly because they abandoned hormone replacement therapy in greater numbers than minority groups,” reports Reuters.

White women had been more likely to use hormone therapy, and were also the most likely to abandon the drugs after U.S. regulators warned about the cancer link in 2003, according to Dr. Dezheng Huo of the University of Chicago and the study’s lead investigator.

“The sharp reductions seen in Caucasians aged 50 to 69 years were not seen among other ethnic groups,” Hou told the American Association for Cancer Research.

The researchers said the decline has been mainly among women older than 50 with estrogen-receptor positive cancer.

Why We’re Fatter: This Slate article isn’t new — in fact, it was published in 2006 — but it was just brought to my attention and it’s definitely an interesting read. Writer Sydney Spiesel reviews five of the 10 explanations for obesity identified in a study by David Allison and Scott Keith of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“In all likelihood, the rise in obesity results from a combination of several of these factors, each making its own contribution and perhaps interacting with other causes in some yet-more-complicated way,” writes Spiesel.

History As Appetizing As Tater Tots: I admit I fall hard for history texts that bring in the social and cultural implications, which is why I’m putting this on my summer reading list: “School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program” (Princeton University Press, 2008) by Susan Levine, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor of history.

“The National School Lunch Program has outlasted almost every other 20th century federal welfare initiative and holds a uniquely prominent place in popular imagination,” Levine said in this UIC release. “It suggests the central role food policy plays in shaping American health, welfare and equality.”

Levine, by the way, is also the author of “Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth Century Feminism,” and “Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age.”

Strategic Spending on Organic Foods: With the price of organic foods rising, here’s some good advice for shoppers who want to prioritize spending on those organic fruits and vegetables that have a high pesticide residue when grown conventionally. Check out the The Environmental Working Group’s list of 43 fruits and vegetables tested for pesticide residue.

Today’s just a mini-dose … I’ll be at WAM! this weekend and hope to see many of you there!

More Women Pursue Claims Of Pregnancy Discrimination: “Pregnancy-bias complaints recorded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission surged 14% last year to 5,587, up 40% from a decade ago and the biggest annual increase in 13 years,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Carrot Some Vegans Deplore: Kara Jesella writes in The New York Times:

Two things that you can find a lot of in Portland, Ore., are vegans and strip clubs. Johnny Diablo decided to open a business to combine both. At his Casa Diablo Gentlemen’s Club, soy protein replaces beef in the tacos and chimichangas; the dancers wear pleather, not leather. Many are vegans or vegetarians themselves.

But Portland is also home to a lot of young feminists, and some are not happy with Mr. Diablo’s venture. Since he opened the strip club last month, their complaints have been “all over the Internet,” he said. “One of them came in here once. I could tell she had an attitude right when she came in. She was all hostile.”

The story begins like something straight out of The Onion, but it turns into a rather, er, meaty discussion of feminist politics and food … Read more at Feministing.com.

Perceptions: Feminists More Open-Minded on Weight: “A new study finds that women who describe themselves as feminists are more forgiving than other women when assessing the attractiveness of women who are either very underweight or very heavy,” reports The New York Times.

You’ll find the study in the journal Body Image — also see Rachel’s smart analysis. Here are some previous studies on feminism and body image.

The Mystery Suspect in the U.S. “Obesity Epidemic”: Writing at Women’s Media Center, Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., an author and lecturer at Harvard, discusses the effect of psychotropic drugs on weight gain. She begins:

Here’s one surefire way to make anyone feel helpless, hopeless, even crazy: Teach them that others will value them mostly for being thin and being nurturing, and put them in situations where they are too agitated or sad to be cheerful caretakers for family and friends. When they ask for help, give them a pill that may calm them down or pep them up but will have a good chance of increasing their weight. This has been the fate of millions of women, who then are more likely than men to blame themselves for their part what is being called the U.S. obesity epidemic.

The Washington Post has an interesting if somewhat frustrating front-page story today about the rise of allergies and immune-system diseases — which experts say have “doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in the last few decades, depending on the ailment and country.”

“Allergic diseases” includes ailments such as hay fever, eczema, asthma and food allergies. Autoimmune diseases include lupus, MS, Type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. In addition to varying theories about what’s causing the increase in both, scientists are implementing various methods in an attempt to stem the problem:

The cause remains the focus of intense debate and study, but some researchers suspect the concurrent trends all may have a common explanation rooted in aspects of modern living — including the “hygiene hypothesis” that blames growing up in increasingly sterile homes, changes in diet, air pollution, and possibly even obesity and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

“We have dramatically changed our lives in the last 50 years,” said Fernando Martinez, who studies allergies at the University of Arizona. “We are exposed to more products. We have people with different backgrounds being exposed to different environments. We have made our lives more antiseptic, especially early in life. Our immune systems may grow differently as a result. And we may be paying a price for that.”

Along with a flurry of research to confirm and explain the trends, scientists have also begun testing possible remedies. Some are feeding high-risk children gradually larger amounts of allergy-inducing foods, hoping to train the immune system not to overreact. Others are testing benign bacteria or parts of bacteria. Still others have patients with MS, colitis and related ailments swallow harmless parasitic worms to try to calm their bodies’ misdirected defenses.

Yes, worms.

While the good-hygiene theory is favored among some scientists, dissenters point to the rise of asthma in poor, inner-city environments as evidence that there must be something else going on.