Physician, Heal ThySelf

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In Consumer Reports’ latest look at food safety, the magazine purchased national brands of bagged and boxed salad greens and tested them. Their findings? Despite those labels promising that the lettuce is “triple-washed,” you’d better wash it all again to try to remove the unpleasant-sounding “fecal contamination.” And oh, yeah, organic wasn’t any cleaner than conventional — at least with regard to these microbes.

from Sift

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For lasagne, hold the ricotta and béchamel, and try celery root instead.

View full post on Bitten

By Samuel Fromartz

I was leaving the gym when I checked my messages. Alice Waters' office at Chez Panisse was calling -- yeah, right. Who was this really? 

When I called back, it turned out Waters was calling and looking for a baker for her charity dinner in Washington, to replace one who had dropped out. Barton Seaver, a friend and chef at Blue Ridge,  suggested me. "We hear you make the best baguette in DC," said Sarah Weiner, Waters' assistant. "Well, yeah, I won a contest," I stammered, "but I just bake at home. The most I've baked was for Thanksgiving dinner." 

They needed to feed 40 -- at a $500 a plate dinner at Bob Woodward's house. Could it be done in my home ovens? I said I'd call back. I went home to figure out how much bread I needed to bake and realized I could probably do it -- 5 big loaves and several baguettes. I then called Peter Reinhart -- the renowned baker and author I've known for a couple of years -- to see what he thought. "That's not a lot of bread," he said, and he encouraged me to give it a whirl.

So began my first gig as a professional baker -- at an Alice Waters' dinner.

I quickly settled on breads I made time and again and eat at home -- a pain au levain made with sourdough and a mix of white, whole wheat and rye flours; a pane casareccio di Genzano, an airy white big loaf crusted with wheat bran that I picked up from Dan Leader's Local Breads; and of course, my baguettes. 

I've never baked this much bread before, so I worked out a timeline -- and good thing too, since I would need to begin Friday to have the breads ready on Sunday. I started by feeding 50 grams (about a quarter-cup) of sourdough starter Friday morning, building it to 150 grams. On Friday night, I fed it again to take it up to 450 grams. Saturday morning, I refreshed it a third time. By Saturday evening, when I needed the ripe starter to make my doughs, I had over 1500 grams (3.3 pounds) of the stuff. With that steady feeding every 8-12 hours, the starter was bubbling, itching to impregnate the dough. It's pictured at left, and below, in the big bin on the right.

I measured out the flours and began mixing the dough. I don't really knead or use a mixer. Rather, I combine the ingredients by hand until they come together. Then I let the shaggy mass rest so the flour slowly soaks in the water, then fold it over every hour or so to develop the gluten. By the end of the process, the dough glistens with moisture. If you pull away a small piece and stretch it, you should be almost able to see through it -- the so-called windowpane test that shows when a dough is done. This folding technique is a cousin to the no-knead method, since you just fold over the dough and let time do its work. It works beautifully, especially since my home mixer couldn't handle the volume of dough I made. 

Now the magic began -- the first rise, the source of all flavor -- and luckily it was a chilly night. Why was that important? Because I let my sourdoughs rise in an unheated basement storage room that is about 55F. That's the perfect temperature for a languid fermentation, when the sugars in the bread develop. Bakers buy proofing cabinets that cost thousands of dollars to get this temperature with refrigeration. My solution was less precise, but it worked fine. The genzano and baguette doughs rose in the refrigerator, since they contained instant yeast as well as sourdough and I wanted a slower fermentation.

At 7 the next morning, I took the pain au levain dough out and let it warm up for about an hour. I then shaped three boules, letting them rise for 2-1/2 hours. In the meantime, I heated up the baking stones in my double-oven. Then I repeated this with the Genzano loaf, about an hour later, and then the baguette. 

The rise went well, full of oven spring. I attribute that to the levain, which you'll recall had built over a 52-hour period with successive refreshments, including the last one in the dough. (Pictured below are the pane casareccio di Genzano - Genzano Country Bread).

I finished baking at about 2 p.m. and let the breads cool, then delivered the loaves for the dinner. Jean-Pierre Moullé, the chef at Chez Panisse, was there to greet me. We talked briefly about the breads and I mentioned I was a home baker, not a professional.

"I know, but you did not bake these at home," he said.

"Yes, I did," I countered -- and I noticed his eyebrow rise a bit.

Later that evening, at a party preceding the dinner, Alice Waters took me aside, bread lover that she is, and thanked me warmly. It was a nice moment.

For a home baker, there's always the moment of anticipation when the bread comes out of the oven and you wait for it to cool before tearing into it. Alas, with these loaves, I didn't get a chance to cut into them, to evaluate the flavor and aromas or assess the interior crumb or the density of the crust -- all crucial to a decent loaf. But I trust they were fine. 

The thing is, I don't bake for a living. There is no daily pressure, no waking at 1 a.m. to get to the ovens, no staff, no orders. It's just me and the bread. And until yesterday, I've only given my breads away to friends. Now I've donated them for a worthwhile cause. Maybe I've just widened the circle of people who eat my bread. And that's just fine.

View full post on Chews Wise

Buy your beans from Eden Organics, the only company that currently does not use BPA in the lining of its canned beans or chilis. Here is what they have to say about their cans:

"All 33 Eden Organic Beans including Chili, Rice & Beans, Refried, and Flavored, are cooked in steel cans coated with a baked on oleoresinous c-enamel that does not contain the endocrine disrupter chemical, bisphenol-A (BPA). Oleoresin is a non-toxic mixture of an oil and a resin extracted from various plants, such as pine or balsam fir. These cans cost 14% more than the industry standard cans that do contain BPA. The Ball Corporation tells us that Eden is the only U.S. food maker to date to use these BPA free cans and we have been since April 1999."

However, Pomi uses Tetra Pak packaging for its tomato products and Tetra Pak does not include BPA. Pomi sells chopped and strained tomatoes as well as marinara sauce. Pomi's tomatoes are packaged in Italy so the carbon footprint of these tomatoes is gonna be pretty big. The Tetra Pak packaging also looks to be unrecyclable - two strikes against it in my opinion. I guess we get to pick our poison on this one -- planetary or personal...

If you're not excited about the Pomi/Trader Joe's tetra pak tomatoes, you can also limit your exposure to BPA somewhat by buying tomatoes/tomato sauce in glass jars. They are not BPA-free because BPA is used in the lining of the frikking jar lids, but given that the tomatoes or sauce are not that likely to touch the lid of the jar, my highly scientific guess is that tomatoes packed in glass jars are probably a lot healthier than canned tomatoes. There is one company, Bionaturae, that makes its glass jars without BPA in the lining of the lids. However, their lids are lined with a a PVC-based organosol lacquer and since PVC is another toxic chemical we are all supposed to avoid, this does not really inspire confidence. Makes me feel like lobbing rotten tomatoes...

Special thanks to Alicia at the Soft Landing for her great post on BPA-free tomatoes

• Got BPA? Switch To Glass Storage Containers 
• Say Buy-Bye To Bottled Water 
• Which Brand of Milk Is Best?
• Forget Free-Range, Buy Pasture-Raised Eggs From a Local Farm
• No More Toxic Alphabet Soup For Me
  

View full post on The Garden of Eating - a sinfully good blog about food

pane forte, "stained glass" fruit cake and champagne

Here is an image of what Christmas looked like this year. My mother and two Aunts completely spoilt us by sending over all these goodies from Australia.

You may have read about my mother’s pane forte on Poetry of Food.  Two arrived, rich and delicious, wrapped and tied with a ribbon in the tins they were baked in, just in time for afternoon tea.

One of my aunts had French champagne delivered to our door, which arrived in the first snow storm. My other aunt sent her famous “stained glass” cake, named as such because if you hold a slice up to the light the dried fruits look like stained glass.  It’s also chock-full-of-nuts and encased in just enough batter to hold it all together.

Celebrating with these familiar treats warmed my heart and enriched the holiday season. Thank you.

Wishing you all a healthful and delicious 2010!

happy new year

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My mom called me last week to tell me she'd eaten the first of the berries from her newly planted patch. "It was amazing," she sighed, "like they used to be when you were young." While I can't say for sure how good store-bought strawberries were when I was a kid, I do know that 20-some years of agribusiness hasn't done the strawberry any favors. Typically, they are as big as they are bland, streaked with white inside and dry as a sun-baked bone. They contain only the barest hint of what they could be were they ripened to a bright red by the sun, picked in season and eaten immediately.

Craigie on Main, a local restaurant, makes an admirable proclamation on their menu, "sorry, no tomatoes til August." It's an acknowledgment of the fact that local tomatoes eaten in season are pretty much the only tomatoes worth serving and eating. While it might seem sad to not have a tomato at any other time of the year, it turns that moment in which local tomatoes are available into a celebration of the perfection to be found in eating locally and seasonally. It's in that spirit that I also advocate a "sorry, no strawberries 'til June" position, but you know what? It's June!

This is the strawberry moment for New England. The fields are full of juicy red fruit, ready to tumble from the stem into an outstretched hand. And that's just what they did on a recent trip out to Western Massachusetts where we spent the morning picking.

my first strawberry in the garden

Even the plants in my newly inherited community garden plot are bearing fruit, despite being uncared for over the winter. Next year I expect they will be even more plentiful, but this year they are good only for a quick garden snack, which is probably fine since I had so many other berries to deal with from the picking trip.

strawberry mint canapé eaten in situ, dirty hands and all

There's little that can improve upon the experience of a perfectly ripe strawberry, heavy with sun-warmed juice, but a freshly plucked mint leaf is a nice touch, the cool sharpness contrasting with subtle sweet-tart warmth.

If you do insist on messing about with these perfect berries though, I can't think of many better ways than to go with the classic strawberry shortcake. Of course, I really can't help but mess about, which is how this one-off shortcake was born. Thinking of the natural affinity between strawberries and oranges and a less obvious connection between berries and astringent herbs, I employed my orange-rosemary sugar to make spelt biscuits with lots of flavor and a little more substance than usual, but with all the flaky tender-crumbed charm of a standard shortcake. Instead of macerating the strawberries with sugar, a process usually employed to soften the berries slightly and make them give up some of their juices, I tossed the already juicy and soft berries with a strawberry syrup, made with instruction from the new and wonderful book, The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves.

The syrup is a simple matter of macerating the berries with sugar and letting them sit overnight before cooking them down, pureeing and straining the mixture. It yields a gorgeous thick syrup that is purely, deliciously full of strawberry flavor. It's wonderful over waffles and refreshing mixed into sparkling water or sparkling wine (I recommend Moscato d'Asti) for a fun brunch drink that mixes things up from the traditional mimosa.

Speaking of tradition, it's as good as written law around here that when there are fresh, local strawberries on hand there must also be strawberry shortcake. So, we had back to back shortcake. The second time 'round though I needed it to be an easily transported dessert to bring to a party. Cake form seemed like the perfect way to go, all assembled and easy to head out with. Playing on the orange tones of my first orange-rosemary shortcake, I incorporated some Grand Marnier to lend a sweet citrus flavor to the whipped cream. Also, instead of a plain vanilla bean cake, I made a rustic cornmeal cake to add pleasant texture and sweetness from the fresh milled corn.

One note though, as pretty as it is to have the green tops on the strawberries topping this cake, it's a total suckers move and I implore you to resist it! I can't tell you how many ways in which I should have known better, but the beauty of the berries with the tops still on conspired to drag me down as I opted, thoughtlessly, for aesthetics over eating. A choice that meant I later had to sit, shamefaced, as my friends picked berries out of the mess of whipped cream to remove the tops, which of course they couldn't enjoyably eat. Sigh.

I tried to make it up to them though with my favorite pie, strawberry rhubarb. Following the thought about cornmeal and strawberries, which worked so well in the cornmeal shortcake, I made a tender pâte sucrée with cornmeal and coconut oil instead of margarine or oil. The coconut was a very mild flavor influence on the end result and worked surprisingly well in the crust which was wonderfully flaky, light and tenderly sweet against the tart fruit filling.

Last year I served my strawberry rhubarb pie with basil ice cream, but this year my basil is not incredibly bountiful. My lemon verbena could swallow up the yard, but the basil is sort of a no-go. It's sad. There is enough to work smaller projects with though, so I made a dessert that caught my eye in Johnny Iuzzini's Dessert FourPlay a couple months ago. In the original version, Iuzzini fills strawberry mochi with strawberry rhubarb compote and serves it with basil fluid gel. I took some liberties to make the dessert a little faster to assemble and different in flavor, pairing my fresh strawberry jam filling with a freeze-dried rambutan mochi (reasoning that if I find an affinity between strawberries and lychees, rambutans would work as well) and serving it with Thai basil sauce. My mochi technique could use some work (I blame the leakage on my imperfect motor control with a hand still swollen from carpal tunnel release surgery) but overall, I adored this light little dessert and its intriguing Southeast Asian flavors.

A more straightforward, classic pairing between strawberries and chocolate was something I noticed had fallen by the wayside this season. I guess I've been taking my chocolate pretty straight these days and have been in a particular rut with the super dry, dark and lovely 84% Theo single origin bar from Ghana. So good. But I digress. Feeling that these amazing strawberries could make chocolate even more magical, I whipped up a very random pudding of organic baby bananas, dark chocolate, anise, chilies, cinnamon, nutmeg and espresso salt, sweetened with date syrup and topped with fresh berries. It was meant as a quick treat of no consequence but was so good, I'm pledged to make it again and actually write down every element of the recipe since several friends have proclaimed it's one of the best things ever, period.

After finally getting my strawberry and chocolate fix, I realized that I'd sort of been enjoying the two together all along in my breakfast bowl. Homemade cocoa nib granola with fresh berries isn't quite chocolate dipped strawberries, but it's more than satisfying at seven am.

Thinking about how nicely nibs complemented strawberries, I sprinkled a few Taza chocolate covered nibs into my mini tarts. They provided a nice bittersweet crunch against the fruit and buttery almond crust.

almond strawberry cheesecake

Almonds are a natural complement to strawberries. Their rich sweetness and lightly bitter edge are perfect against tart berry notes. And there's a reason why strawberry cheesecake is so popular; sweet tangy cheese has its richness both cut slightly and complemented by each bite of berry. So, an almond crusted and amaretto spiked cheesecake topped with fresh strawberries glazed with hot strawberry syrup and sprinkled with almond slices seemed like just the thing.

I've had a lot of semi-successful vegan cheese-ish substances around lately as I've been experimenting to find one that really suits me. None of them are perfect, but with a good amount of fiddling, they've all turned into tasty additions to desserts and ice cream bases. The mixture that I turned into cheesecake was also spun off into a nice mellow farmer's cheese that went wonderfully with fresh strawberry rhubarb jam (again from the Joy of Jams, but with much less sugar than called for).

In fact, I made several jams from the new book: plain strawberry, strawberry rhubarb and strawberry kiwi. With such deliciously fresh tasting jams are hanging around the house, it seemed pretty much obvious that I needed to make a delicious delivery mechanism for them. So when King Aurthur flour had a free-shipping deal, I refilled my stock of organic high gluten flour and made a batch of bagels from the Bread Baker's Apprentice, some coated into sesame seeds and some streaked with pasilla chili powder and topped with chili lime Hawaiian sea salt.

brunch at Dara's with everyone's delicious contributions: homemade bagels and jam, fennel seitan, chicory in tahini garlic sauce, roasted potatoes, beet orzo and melon with mint

Toasted and spread equally with fresh made jam and strawberry cream cheese, these were a delicious promise that the joy of strawberries in season can last as long as the jars of jam do, even if we've only got another week or two to enjoy them fresh.

View full post on The Conscious Kitchen

In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa. The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in a rigorous analysis known as an environmental impact statement (or EIS). USDA released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009. A 60-day comment period is now open until February 16, 2010. This is the first time the USDA has done this type of analysis for any GE crop. Therefore, the final decision will have broad implications for all GE crops.

Read more and tell the USDA you DO care about GE contamination of organics!

Posted in GE Crops, GE Food, Massive disappointments, Organics, Politics and Policy, Take Action

View full post on The True Food Network

The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that San Francisco schools have had to pick up the entire bill for the school lunch program. Inspectors found “critical” program violations in the district and have cut off federal and state funding until the district shapes up.

Phyllis Bramson-Paul, the director of the state agency that distributes school meal funds, told The Chronicle that such an action is rare. “When we withhold funds, it’s because our findings are pretty egregious,” she said.

So what, exactly, did the district do to deserve its punishment? The violations had nothing to do with food quality. They didn’t have to do with food safety either. As far as inspectors were concerned, San Francisco schools were meeting most of the nutrition requirements for school meals. What they weren’t doing right was counting the number of reimbursable meals served to students. In simple terms, the district may have been using taxpayer money to feed children above the income cutoff.

This is a sad story, and it points to our skewed values about school meals. I have visited several cafeterias that operate in violation of nutrition standards, selling soda and other prohibited foods. In fact, the most recent School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study found that only 20 percent of schools offered and served lunches that met the standards for fat, and only 30 percent offered and served lunches that met the standards for saturated fat. Inspectors didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

It all comes down to a simple question. Do we care more about feeding children healthy meals, or do we care more about making sure we don’t feed students above a certain income level? Right now, it’s the latter. I call that finding pretty egregious.

View full post on School Lunch Talk

Happier times: the cover of the Marine Stewardship Council's current annual report

Long regarded as the gold-standard for eco-certification of sustainable fisheries around the world, the London-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has begun to lose some of its glitter, in the eyes of many of the scientists and environmentalists meeting in Paris this week at the Seafood Choice’s Alliance’s annual Seafood Summit.

The flashpoint is the council’s plans to grant certification to the British Columbia’s Fraser River sockeye salmon fishery. The final decision is expected to be announced next week.

“I almost choked when I heard that they were planning to certify Fraser River sockeye. The population is in freefall,” said Daniel Pauly in an interview. Pauly, who was the keynote speaker at the summit, is a renowned marine scientist and author and the principal investigator at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre. He was also one of the advisors called in to lend the MSC solid scientific credibility when the organization was founded back in the late 1990s.

Canadian environmental groups, at least three of which sent delegates to Paris specific to lobby against MSC certification of Fraser sockeye, say that the fishery—far from being sustainably harvested—may be collapsing.

They point out that in six of the last eleven years, the fishery has been closed due to poor returns of breeding salmon. Last year, despite the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Ocean’s prediction of a run of 10.7 million fish, only 1.7 million made the journey upriver to spawn. The International Union of Conservation for Nature recently declared that three of the Fraser’s genetically distinct salmon populations are endangered, and one other is critically endangered. Meanwhile, federal government has launched a judicial inquiry into how its own officials failed to predict this year’s absence of fish.

“We’re supportive of MSC certification generally, but we are trying to stop this one dead,” said Craig Orr, executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society an environmental group in B.C.

Exactly why the MSC is moving ahead with such vigor remains unclear. Activists speculate that the province’s salmon processors have come under pressure to get eco-certification from supermarket chains in Britain (where the MSC label carries more clout than it does in North America). Pauly points out that at this point the MSC would be in an awkward position to back out because the applicants have already invested huge amounts of money in the costly certification process.

Kerry Coughlin, MSC’s Seattle-based regional director for the America’s said that she can remember no fishery being refused certification this late in the process. But she asserted that the pending approval should have come as no surprise.

“The way the MSC process works is that stakeholders are invited and encouraged to have input all the way through,” she said. “The MSC program is based on three principles: Are the fish stocks healthy, is the fishery damaging the marine ecosystem, and—key here—is there an ongoing effective management of that fishery. Our decisions are based on peer-reviewed scientific research.”

The Fraser’s closure to all commercial fishing, she said, was a sign that the resource was being managed effectively. “It’s an appropriate management response to allow the stock to rebuild.”

Pauly expressed concern that the B. C. situation may be part of a trend. The MSC has been certifying new fisheries at an almost dizzying rate. Currently it gives its blessing to 59 of them, up from 38 in 2008. There are an additional 120 under assessment, most of which will get approved, if past trends continue.

MSC auditors have recommended that it recertify Alaska’s pollock fishery, even though the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s highly regarded Seafood Watch program downgraded the fishery in January, saying that the trawls it uses, which are supposed to operate in “mid-water” frequently scrape and damage the ocean floor.

Seafood Watch also cites by-catch of king salmon as a problem. The aquarium is particularly concerned about kings that return to the Yukon River, where they once supported a small seafood processing company that provided the sole source of income for local natives. For the past two years, that company has been closed due to a lack of fish. Because of that the United States Commerce Department has officially designated the area a “disaster.”

There are also concerns that the pollock catch is robbing stellar sea lions and northern fur seals of food. And, while still huge, the annual pollock catch has been dropping steadily for the last several years.

The sheer size of the pollock industry makes some observers wonder whether it has become too big to fail for the MSC. With a value of more than $1 billion, it is the United States most lucrative fishery (if you’ve ever eaten a fish stick, an institutional fish and chip dinner, or a fast-food fish burger you’ve had pollock without knowing it). This one species alone represented 60 percent of the volume of MSC-certified fish in 2008.

“I’m afraid that certification is a one direction movement—once a fishery gets certified it’s going to take large numbers of very well trained and powerful horses to pull it over to the other side,” said Paul Johnston, principal scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories. “The presumption is that once it is certified, it will stay certified. But is you look at what’s going on in the pollock fishery, it looks to me like its teetering along a knife edge.”

The MSC’s Coughlin defends her organization’s stance on the pollock fishery. “Their by-catch is quite low.” She said. “99.9 percent of the catch is target stock and that is an extremely high rate for any fishery. True, because it’s a large fishery, it does take a large total number of salmon. But is the pollock fishery contributing to the depletion of the salmon fishery? The certifier determined that it is not.”

Controversy also surrounded the MSC’s recertification of the South Georgia (a British island in the South Atlantic) Chilean sea bass fishery last fall, long after most conscientious seafood eaters and chefs had taken a pass on the embattled species.

True, the Georgian fishery is well-managed, but because the dismal levels of the general Chilean sea bass population, and rampant, illegal overfishing, many environmentalists questioned the wisdom of the decision. The South Georgian catch represents only a small fraction of the total Chilean sea bass take, but many experts fear that by granting that fishery its imprimatur, the MSC has opened the door to confusion on the part of consumers and provided a conduit for illicit Chilean sea bass to find its way onto restaurant menus and into the marketplace.

“As I look at these decisions, one seems more absurd than the other,” said Pauly. He said that a core principle in conservation is that, when in doubt, certifiers should err on the side of caution. “If not, what the hell is the MSC all about?”

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White House, NFL, USDA unite to combat child obesity, improve school lunches
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will host a party for Super Bowl XLIV this evening, when the Saints go marching in to tame the Colts. Military service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are invited, according to the White House, as are their families. It's a fun honor not included in the President's 2011 budget, which boosted financial support for military families by $8.8 billion. Mrs. Obama announced the funding at a special luncheon with military spouses, because supporting military families is another key component of her portfolio as First Lady. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki will also be at the pigskin party. (Photo: President Obama holds a special presidential football helmet presented to him during his visit to Elyria, Ohio, one of the stops on his White House to Main Street tour)

Three of the Cabinet Secretaries invited to tonight's Super Bowl party will join Mrs. Obama at the national launch of her child obesity initiative on Tuesday: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. At Thanksgiving, President Obama appeared in a PSA with Saints' quarterback Drew Brees to promote Fuel Up to Play 60, a child obesity initiative that's a co-program with Mrs. Obama's initiative. FUTP60 is a partnership between NFL, USDA and the National Dairy Council, and Sec. Vilsack recently announced that the program has now expanded to 58,000 schools nationwide.

The project has NFL superstars visiting schools to promote healthy eating and physical activity, and encourages kids to play for at least an hour a day. It also has online electronic games to teach nutrition education, and uses social media for outreach to kids, so Sec. Vilsack just had his first-ever teleconference with bloggers (including your intrepid blogger). Sec. Vilsack cited FUTP60 as exemplary because it gets kids to learn about nutrition in a fun setting, as well as makes the important point that physical activity is not only necessary, but fun. He also said that the rapid expansion of the program really lets lawmakers know that there are millions of people demanding better nutrition in school food programs.

"As Congress gears up to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act, it's important that they're aware that there's a wide base of support for better standards," Sec. Vilsack told the bloggers. "We need to show a unified front on this."

Sec. Vilsack also lauded Mrs. Obama for her leadership in combating child obesity.

"You could not have a better spokesperson for this issue than the First Lady," Sec. Vilsack said. "As a mom and First Lady, she's a wonderful representative."

All 32 NFL teams are participating in Fuel Up to Play 60, and the National Dairy Council committed $250 million to the project. Watch the video of President Obama playing football on the South Lawn with Drew Brees and DC school kids here. (Photo above from the game)

The lone Republican on the guest list for tonight's shindig is rooting for his home team, the Saints: Rep. Anh 'Joseph' Cao (R-LA).

The rest of the White House Super Bowl guests:

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA)
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA)
Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN)
Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN)
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)
Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT)
Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan
Attorney General Eric Holder
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson
Secretary Janet Napolitano
UN Ambassador Susan Rice

View full post on Obama Foodorama