organic milk

As the mother of two small children (age 2 ½ and 6 months), I try my best to make healthy eating choices every day. I make my own baby food (lots easier than it sounds and very cost-effective), use as little pre-packaged/processed foods to make meals as I can, and avoid sugar and junk food whenever possible. That being said, I will admit that I used to roll my eyes at the word organic. I looked at the prices and didn’t really understand why I was paying sometimes more than twice the price for the “same” foods.

UPDATE: Organic Valley has agreed to give BOTH OF OUR WINNERS A FULL YEAR OF FREE MILK, rather than having them share the prize. Thanks Organic Valley, you rock!

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Thank you, friends, for your good food resolutions, and for promising to do a better job for your kids when it comes to food this school year. After tallying nearly 500 votes from people all over the country, two of the nearly 50 promises we received from parents, teachers, and school administrators committed to getting our kids healthier clearly stood out from the pack. That's why Sadie Sponsler, RD and Andrea Zehnder will share our grand prize. Here are both of their resolutions, one last time:

Last week, I published a post about our new school lunch contest, asking parents and other concerned adults to make a school year resolution on behalf of their children and families. If we're serious about making change in our lives, I reasoned, we should be willing to share our thoughts broadly, to make public commitments, and to reach high. In less than a week, nearly 50 of you did.

UPDATE: Congratulations to our winner, Marie Pidde! We hope you had fun.

The weather in the Twin Cities today is forecasted to be sunny and warm. Fine. Spend your morning outside doing whatever it is you're compelled to do on a beautiful Sunday in April, but save the afternoon for us: your friends at Simple, Good and Tasty.

We're going to be at the Eden Prairie Community Center for the Eat Local Eden Prairie Fair and we'd love to see you. We'll be doing a coloring contest for the kids, selling Local Food Lover cards to the grown-ups, and extolling the virtues of local food to anyone who stops by. And in case you need an additional incentive to spend an hour or two indoors with us, we're giving away two tickets to see Anthony Bourdain when he comes to the Minneapolis this Friday.

SGT is currently holding a school lunch challenge. Enter and you can win big prizes like lunchboxes and free organic milk for a year. Get the details here.

Please read the article that started it all, "An Open Letter to Our Children: We're Sorry About School Lunch" (and a host of interesting comments) too.

Lots of buzz at last week’s Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference surrounded a rather astonishing development in the organic world: the U.S. Department of Agriculture had finally done something, well, good.

After five years of debate, on February 17, the USDA had amended the standards for organic milk to reflect what most consumers thought “organic” meant in the first place. So now (or at least by June 2011, when the amended standards take effect for all suppliers) when people buy milk labeled “organic,” they’ll be getting what they paid for.

In light of Simple, Good, and Tasty's recent article about our national school lunch program, I want to share some great news about school lunches for the kids in Colorado's 28,000 student Boulder Valley School District (BVSD): thanks to a recent partnership with Organic Valley, the milk will be organic. Here's an excerpt from their press release:

Okay, okay - it's organic food labeling that we need help with - not the food itself. The food itself? I'll let the excellent book Real Food by Nina Planck describe it:

Organic means food was produced without synthetic fertilizer, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, genetically engineered ingredients, and irradiation.