SOS Campaign

SOS Campaign Topics:
Irradiated Food Issues
School Nutrition Issues
Farm-to-School Issues
School Pesticide/IPM Issues

Featured Article:
Beets, Not Burgers
Article on Child Obesity
from Newsweek

An increasing amount of scientific evidence suggests that the physical environments to which children are exposed can profoundly impact their ability to learn. Children spend most of their waking hours outside of home in school, so it is important to make sure that schools are healthy places that promote children's well-being and their performance.

This is why Generation Green is teaming up with the Organic Consumers Association (www.organicconsumers.org) for a campaign to "Safeguard Our Students." This SOS campaign will focus on reducing children's exposure to pesticides by promoting integrated pest management and improving school nutrition programs.

The SOS campaign overlaps perfectly with Generation Green's concerns about food in schools: the lack of healthy choices and true nutrition, the over-reliance on pesticides to grow food and to manage pests in cafeterias and elsewhere, and too little reliance on sustainable agriculture.

The SOS campaign has four simple goals, as follows:

• KICK junk foods and junk food ads out of our schools.
• START converting school lunches to healthier menus, using organic and transition-to-organic ingredients (no pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, or genetically engineered ingredients).
• STOP spraying toxic pesticides on school grounds and in buildings and convert to integrated pest management practices.
• TEACH students about healthy food choices and sustainable agriculture.

In large part, the SOS campaign focuses on the nutritional quality of food served in schools, and it works to connect sustainable farmers with school lunch programs, goals that Generation Green supports. But there is another concern we share and that needs to be addressed: irradiation of foods.

Why are we concerned about this? Because the Farm Bill that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2002 has helped put irradiated foods into school lunches. Schools aren't required to buy such food, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is required to offer irradiated food to school lunch programs.

Yet irradiation of food destroys many nutrients and produces radiolytic byproducts that have not been studied or tested and might be harmful when ingested by children.

When the Farm Bill required that USDA offer irradiated food, it had no mechanisms mandated to prevent USDA from offering irradiated food at lower prices, and it no requirement to inform parents if irradiated foods are used in their schools. There were also no requirements to label irradiated foods as such. Generation Green and OCA both found this intolerable, and we worked against this lack of guidance and regulation. In June 2004, we achieved a huge victory, with Congress finally adding some irradiated food provisions for school lunches in the reauthorization bill for the Child Nutrition Act. To find out more about that victory, and other school food irradiation issues, click here. There is still more to do, but this was a great step forward legislatively.

To find out more about other issues besides food irradiation that are important to the SOS Campaign, use these links:
School nutrition | Farm-to-school programs | Pesticide Reduction

For an action kit or other information on what you can do to help, contact Mary Guthrie by telephone at (800) 652-0827 or send her an e-mail at mary@generationgreen.org

For more information on the SOS campaign, you can also visit http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.htm.