Texas Launches No Kid Hungry Campaign

[hvactec]

A sea of 150 elementary and middle school students from Austin and Waco met on the steps of the Capitol today to sing, cheer and kick off the Texas No Kid Hungry Campaign.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell and a diverse group of corporate, education, nonprofit and government leaders spoke to the students and other attendees about a new partnership aimed to end childhood hunger by utilizing existing nutritional programs and launching a breakfast pilot program in 10 districts across the state.

“We’ve got more food than we need. A food shortage is not the issue. But we have a problem with food reaching kids who are in need,” Staples said. “We’re calling on all of Texas to step up and join us to make certain that no kid goes hungry.”

The Texas No Kid Hungry Campaign is a public-private partnership with the Texas Hunger Initiative, which is a project of Baylor University’s School of Social Work and the national children’s hunger organization Share Our Strength, which is providing $230,000 for the first year of the project. The initiative is also receiving support from Wal-Mart and from Maximus, a health and human services contractor. The Texas campaign is part of Share Our Strength’s national No Kid Hungry Campaign.

The purpose of the campaign is to end food insecurity in children by 2015. Food insecurity is when a person consistently faces hunger or lives in fear of starvation.

“Texas has one of the highest food insecurity rates in the nation, and that’s something we can’t be proud of,” said Bill Ludwig, the southwest regional administrator for the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. “A hungry child has absentee problems, a hungry child has severe behavior problems, and simply put, a hungry child cannot learn.” Ludwig said that more than 1.8 million children in Texas are at risk of hunger.

The partnership’s focus during its first year is to connect more eligible low-income children to federally funded school breakfasts and summer meals. Of the more than 2.4 million students in the state who get a free or reduced-price lunch at school, fewer than 1.4 million participate in the School Breakfast Program.

Texas Hunger Initiative Director Jeremy Everett said there are a couple reasons for low participation in school breakfasts. “For one, many kids don’t get to school early, so they don’t get a chance to eat,” he said. “And also, in mixed income schools, there’s a social stigma attached — if you are the only kid eating in the cafeteria in the morning, everyone’s going to know you have a lower income.”

Read more Texas Launches No Kid Hungry Campaign — Public Education | The Texas Tribune

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says dey use chicken lips to make potted meat...

Lab grown meat could save millions, scientists say
Sun, Nov 13, 2011 - Scientists are cooking up new ways to satisfy the world’s ever-growing hunger for meat.

“Cultured meat” — burgers or sausages grown in laboratory Petri dishes rather than made from slaughtered livestock — could be the answer that feeds the world, saves the environment and spares the lives of millions of animals, they say. Granted, it could take a while to catch on and it will not be cheap. The first lab-grown hamburger will cost around 250,000 euros (US$345,000) to produce, according to Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who hopes to unveil such a delicacy soon. Experts say the meat’s potential for saving animals’ lives, land, water, energy and the planet itself could be enormous. “The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it’s possible,” Post said in a telephone interview from his Maastricht lab. “I believe I can do this in the coming year.”

It may sound and look like some kind of imitation, but in-vitro or cultured meat is a real animal flesh product, just one that has never been part of a complete, living animal — quite different from imitation meat or meat substitutes aimed at vegetarians and made from vegetable proteins like soy. Using stem cells harvested from leftover animal material from slaughterhouses, Post nurtures them with a feed concocted of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals and all the other nutrients they need to grow in the right way. So far he has produced whitish pale muscle-like strips, each of them around 2.5cm long, less than 1cm wide and so thin as to be almost transparent. Pack enough of these together — probably around 3,000 of them in layers — throw in a few strips of lab-grown fat, and you have the world’s first “cultured meat” burger, he says.

“This first one will be grown in an academic lab, by highly trained academic staff,” he said. “It’s hand-made and it’s time and labor-intensive, that’s why it’s so expensive to produce.” Not to mention a little unappetising. Because Post’s in-vitro meat contains no blood, it lacks color. At the moment, it looks a bit like the flesh of scallops, he says. Supporters of the idea of man-made meat, such as Stellan Welin, a bioethicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, say this is no less appealing than mass-producing livestock in factory farms where growth hormones and antibiotics are commonly used to boost yields and profits.

Moreover, conventional meat production is also notoriously inefficient. For every 15g of edible meat, you need to feed the animals about 100g of vegetable protein, an increasingly unsustainable equation. All this means that finding new ways of producing meat is essential if we are to feed the enormous and ever-growing demand for it across the world, Welin said in an interview. “Of course, you could do it by being vegetarian or eating less meat,” he said. “But the trends don’t seem to be going that way. With cultured meat we can be more conservative — people can still eat meat, but without causing so much damage.”

MORE

 

[Mad Scientist]

“A hungry child has absentee problems, a hungry child has severe behavior problems, and simply put, a hungry child cannot learn.”

These School Admin people are full of shit! They just want more money that they can have control and probably skim off of too.

My dad and his brother and sister sometimes didn't eat but one meal a day yet they still managed to stay in school and graduate college.

All with no School Lunch Program!

 

[AVG-JOE]

Uncle Ferd says dey use chicken lips to make potted meat...

Lab grown meat could save millions, scientists say
Sun, Nov 13, 2011 - Scientists are cooking up new ways to satisfy the world’s ever-growing hunger for meat.

“Cultured meat” — burgers or sausages grown in laboratory Petri dishes rather than made from slaughtered livestock — could be the answer that feeds the world, saves the environment and spares the lives of millions of animals, they say. Granted, it could take a while to catch on and it will not be cheap. The first lab-grown hamburger will cost around 250,000 euros (US$345,000) to produce, according to Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who hopes to unveil such a delicacy soon. Experts say the meat’s potential for saving animals’ lives, land, water, energy and the planet itself could be enormous. “The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it’s possible,” Post said in a telephone interview from his Maastricht lab. “I believe I can do this in the coming year.”

It may sound and look like some kind of imitation, but in-vitro or cultured meat is a real animal flesh product, just one that has never been part of a complete, living animal — quite different from imitation meat or meat substitutes aimed at vegetarians and made from vegetable proteins like soy. Using stem cells harvested from leftover animal material from slaughterhouses, Post nurtures them with a feed concocted of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals and all the other nutrients they need to grow in the right way. So far he has produced whitish pale muscle-like strips, each of them around 2.5cm long, less than 1cm wide and so thin as to be almost transparent. Pack enough of these together — probably around 3,000 of them in layers — throw in a few strips of lab-grown fat, and you have the world’s first “cultured meat” burger, he says.

“This first one will be grown in an academic lab, by highly trained academic staff,” he said. “It’s hand-made and it’s time and labor-intensive, that’s why it’s so expensive to produce.” Not to mention a little unappetising. Because Post’s in-vitro meat contains no blood, it lacks color. At the moment, it looks a bit like the flesh of scallops, he says. Supporters of the idea of man-made meat, such as Stellan Welin, a bioethicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, say this is no less appealing than mass-producing livestock in factory farms where growth hormones and antibiotics are commonly used to boost yields and profits.

Moreover, conventional meat production is also notoriously inefficient. For every 15g of edible meat, you need to feed the animals about 100g of vegetable protein, an increasingly unsustainable equation. All this means that finding new ways of producing meat is essential if we are to feed the enormous and ever-growing demand for it across the world, Welin said in an interview. “Of course, you could do it by being vegetarian or eating less meat,” he said. “But the trends don’t seem to be going that way. With cultured meat we can be more conservative — people can still eat meat, but without causing so much damage.”

MORE

What are we going to do with all the cows?!?

 

[Mr. H.]

Let's ask Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples why 40% of the U.S. corn crop is being diverted to the production of ethanol, and why 20% of that ethanol is being exported.

Fuck Ag. In the ass.

 

[Tank]

I feel like I just adopted a bunch of Mexican kids

 

[Mr. H.]

I can't count the days I went hungry as a kid back in the 60's. Food insecurity? What the hell is that?
What the fuck is food and where was it when I was a kid?

Such a bunch of whining bitching complaining have-nots today.

Do what I did- ride it out. Gut it out. Goddamn pussies.

 

[hortysir]

Feed 'em Mexicans.

Problem solved