Culinary Boot Camps: Designed to Foster a Healthier Next Generation

From USDA:

Posted by Chris Kelly, USDA Food and Nutrition Service, Mid-Atlantic Region, on January 15, 2015 at 1:00 PM

USDA Team Nutrition grants support initiatives designed to improve children’s lifelong eating habits.

The following guest blog is part of our Cafeteria Stories series, highlighting the efforts of hard working school nutrition professionals dedicated to making the healthy choice the easy choice at schools across the country.  We thank them for sharing their stories! To learn more about FNS nutrition assistance efforts, follow us on Twitter attwitter.com/usdanutrition

By Stewart Eidel, School and Community Nutrition Programs, Maryland State Department of Education

USDA Team Nutrition Grants support initiatives designed to improve children’s lifelong eating habits. Thanks to this funding, and by incorporating the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and with recipes from the Food and Nutrition Service Team Nutrition website, Maryland’s State Department of Education School and Community Nutrition Programs, where I work, developed new training for our school food service professionals called “Culinary Boot Camps.”

We started the Culinary Boot Camps in the summer of 2013, training more than 130 school food service staff at six locations throughout Maryland. This past summer we hosted 140 more at five locations for the week-long course. With the help of two certified chefs, our staff have improved their basic culinary skills, learning ways to skillfully slice vegetables and creatively prepare recipes to lure otherwise finicky children into tasting and enjoying nutritious foods.

And the feedback has been outstanding. Our school food service staff enjoys the opportunity to learn from expert chefs, and our kids are seeing fresher looking foods, food that is bright in appearance, clear and crisp in flavor. I think the kids accept that food just as readily as they accept the chicken patty. Now we know the chicken patty is not going away, so what we’re saying is let’s incorporate these new foods required by the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act into our school menus. If we can incorporate those in addition to the items they’re used to, then over time children will learn to accept them and engage in the process of consuming a healthier diet.

Our job is all about nutrition, following standardized recipes and making sure food is safe. But these Culinary Boot Camps allow our food service professionals to think about the flavor and the color and the texture and the appearance of food. It gives them a great background to go to their bosses and say: “Well, I learned these skills…now there are recipes that you can allow us to put on the menu and enhance the quality of the foods for the kids.”

We saw a need to enhance a wide range of skills required to prepare and serve nutritious, high-quality meals that appeal to students. We want our school food service directors to plan menus utilizing more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes…more creative menus that take advantage of the healthier cooking methods and presentation skills honed at our Culinary Boot Camps.

See our school food service staff in action, transforming healthy foods into favorite foods at one of the camps we hosted in Worcester County, Md.

Where Do Kids Eat When School is out in Summer? FNS Partners with the Department of Education to Find Solutions

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Audrey Rowe, Administrator, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, on April 11, 2014 at 10:00 AM

Federal partnerships, like the one between USDA and the Department of Education, work to provide healthy summer meals solutions for our nation’s children.

As we approach the summer season, USDA is vigorously preparing to fill the nutrition gap faced by millions of kids across the country. While 21 million of our sons and daughters receive free and reduced-priced lunches during the school year, only a small percentage participate in the summer meals programs, leaving too many of our most vulnerable without a nutritious meal.

A new partnership between the USDA and the Department of Education seeks to transform these alarming rates of food insecurity for the better. Last week I had the pleasure of convening with Dr. Jonathan Brice, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education in the Department of Education. This meeting was the first of the current administration, solidifying the strong partnership in summer meals and placing an emphasis on school participation.

Dr. Brice explained that “the Department of Education believes that summer meals are critical to the success of millions of children across the country.” As a former administrator and teacher in public schools throughout Delaware and Maryland, Brice conveyed the effectiveness of the summer meals program for summer school students, athletically involved youth, and kids of all backgrounds. He emphasized that the Department of Education viewed summer meals as “a critical opportunity for communities to come together and show children how much they matter.”  I couldn’t agree more with his sentiments.

Our partnership is groundbreaking on many levels. To alleviate the burden of hunger in the summer, we need the support of principals, educators, food service professionals, and community members to promote a program that focuses on the nutritional wellbeing of kids in our communities. With program participation growing in schools nationwide, and now the official backing of the Department of Education, the future of increasing summer meals participants and decreasing food security in America looks more promising than ever.

Echoing the sentiments of Dr. Brice, our children need to be well-fed and provided with nutritious meals in order to become successful adults. The more we learn to cultivate unique and effective partnerships, the more effective we will be at ending child hunger in this country. Collaborating with the Department of Education is a step in the right direction to ensure more children have access to healthy foods when school is out.

USDA Researchers Go High-Tech to View Tiny Organisms

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Jan Suszkiw, USDA Agricultural Research Service Information Staff, on April 8, 2014 at 2:00 PM

Under the microscope: a worm-like mite species Osperalycus tenerphagus

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

During the month of April we will take a closer look at USDA’s Groundbreaking Research for a Revitalized Rural America, highlighting ways USDA researchers are improving the lives of Americans in ways you might never imagine.

“Seeing the unseen” may sound like a science fiction movie theme, but it’s actually the real-life mission of USDA scientists who use special high-powered microscopes to view microscopic organisms that play a big role in agriculture.

The facility where these scientists produce the images of the unseen world–from fungal spores to plant cells–is called the Electron and Confocal Microscopy Unit (ECMU) and it’s operated in Beltsville, Md., by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

Researchers often request the images to aid them in their studies, and to illustrate papers, posters and grant proposals. Outside research organizations have also sought out the expertise of ECMU director Gary Bauchan and his colleagues in producing the images, as well as the skill with which they ensure the integrity of specimens and samples submitted to them.

In December 2013, for example, Ohio State University (OSU) doctoral student Samuel Bolton finished a 12-month assignment working with Bauchan and ARS entomologist Ron Ochoa to identify and describe a new, worm-like species of mite belonging to the family Nematalycidae.

The mite, dubbed Osperalycus tenerphagus, “is the first species of this weird family to be described in over 40 years,” said Bolton, who studies mite systematics under the guidance of OSU professor Hans Klompen in Columbus, Ohio.

Bolton literally dug up the species while excavating loam soil across the street from OSU’s Museum of Biological Diversity. This was unusual because mites in the Nematalycidae family are mostly found in sandy habitats (dunes, beaches, desert soils).

Because the mites were worm-like and very soft-bodied, the only method for viewing the creatures in their natural state was to freeze them and observe them frozen. Thus, before imaging, the mites were placed on small, copper plates and then plunged into liquid nitrogen at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, the specimens were thinly coated in platinum and positioned on a cold stage at minus 202 degrees Fahrenheit within a low-temperature scanning electron microscope. There, they were imaged at magnifications of up to 30,000 times.

“We are confident we have by far and away the best images that have ever been captured of this strange looking mite,” says Bolton. He, Bauchan, Ochoa and Klompen have published their discovery in The Journal of Natural History.

USDA-Funded Researchers Map the Loblolly Pine Genome

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Scott Elliott, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, on April 4, 2014 at 1:00 PM

During the month of April we will take a closer look at USDA’s Groundbreaking Research for a Revitalized Rural America, highlighting ways USDA researchers are improving the lives of Americans in ways you might never imagine, including research into trees that could fuel new energy solutions.

A team of researchers led by the University of California–Davis has mapped the complete genome of the loblolly pine. And if you don’t think that understanding the genetic makeup of loblolly pine is a big deal, perhaps you cannot see the forest for the trees.

Loblolly pine, the most commercially important tree in the United States, is the source of most paper products in this country and 58 percent of timber. On the surface, that might be reason enough for the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to invest $14.6 million in 2011 toward science that could increase the productivity and health of American forests.

Loblolly pine also looms large on the horizon as a feedstock for the next generation of American biofuel.  President Obama’s goal of reducing the United States’ dependency on foreign oil by 30 percent by the year 2030 will be met, in large part, by producing home-grown biofuel. According to Genome Biology, approximately 75 percent of that biofuel will have to come from non-grain, non-food sources called lignocellulosic biomass – and loblolly pine could be a major contributor to filling that need.

Mapping the loblolly genome, then, became an important part of the plan in terms of improving the health and sustainability of this important plant. But, mapping a genome is no easy task, and the loblolly pine proved to be the greatest challenge to date for this type of research. The loblolly genome is the largest ever sequenced and is about seven times larger than the human genome.

To sequence a genome, scientists must first examine the DNA of their subject and then “map” the location of each nucleotide (the “A, C, T, and G” bases) of the entire DNA chain. Scientists use this information to find the best traits, such as disease resistance, and develop better future generations.

The challenge of overcoming the sheer volume of loblolly data is a triumph of its own for the research team.  According to David Neal, team leader and professor of plant sciences at UC–Davis, the team could “read” the nucleotide letters, but only in short batches. The problem was putting together the 16 billion fragments in a way that would allow them to read the complete story of the loblolly pine.

Researchers met this task by employing a new technique developed at the University of Maryland.  Team members overlapped smaller sections of data to form larger chunks and then threw away the redundant information. The process eventually meant the computer had 100 times less sequence data to deal with. The success of this process may help speed up future genome-mapping projects.

The loblolly project team consisted of UC–Davis, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Indiana University–Bloomington, Texas A&M University, Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and Washington State University.

Their complete articles of this research were published in the March 2014 issues of GENETICS and Genome Biology.

Stop Stink Bug Project

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Sharon Durham, Public Affairs Specialist, USDA, Agricultural Research Service, on September 13, 2013 at 12:00 PM

The brown marmorated stink bug, a winged pest from Asia that is eating crops and infesting U.S. homes. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are launching a campaign to ask volunteers to count the number of stink bugs in their homes. USDA-ARS photo by Stephen Ausmus.

Calling all insect enthusiasts and frustrated gardeners!  USDA scientists need your help in documenting Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs (BMSB) in your home. Beginning September 15^th through October 15^th, we’re asking citizens across the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States to record daily counts of this pest on the exterior of their homes, along with their location and the time of each count. While USDA scientists are focusing on the Mid-Atlantic region, any data they can get from other U.S. regions would also be helpful to their research.

The quest to find out just how many stink bugs there are, and how they behave, is the brainchild of a consortium of researchers from USDA, the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, Virginia Tech, the Northeastern IPM Center, Oregon State University, North Carolina State University, Cornell University, the University of Delaware and Washington State University. This project is represented on the website, “Stop BMSB (www.stopbmsb.org),” which was launched in 2011.

The project involves more than 50 scientists who are investigating the impact BMSB have on grapes, orchard crops, small fruits, ornamental crops and vegetables, as well as ways to prevent or minimize the pest’s impact. BMSB have been found in 40 states and have caused the most damage in the Mid-Atlantic region. The value of at-risk crops where BMSB have been established or identified exceeds $21 billon.

Because landscape features such as woodlands, structures, roads and different land use types affect the spread of the insects, it is important to collect data related to BMSB locations. BMSB survive cold winter temperatures near farmland in homes, office buildings and warehouses.

Scientists are just beginning to understand how landscape features will be a key component in combating stink bugs. Volunteers willing to count their stink bugs can contact USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) entomologists Tracy Leskey (tracy.leskey@ars.usda.gov), Doo-Hyung Lee or Torri Hancock at (304) 725-3451, at the ARS Appalachian Fruit Research Laboratory in Kearneysville, West Virginia.

Participant forms to record BMSB counts can be printed by going to http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/19310505/BMSB%20Citizen%20Scientist%20Particip