Carrots are not a luxury item: White House will find funding for offset, Kass pledges...Update: A video of Kass's remarks, at bottom of post
The White House is thinking positively about the Child Nutrition Reauthorization legislation that stalled in Congress last month when Members of the House fled DC for an early recess, Senior Policy Adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives Sam Kass said on Monday.
"We are excited about the prospects of the bill, believe it or not, and are hopeful that it will pass the House and get to the president's desk during the lame duck session in Congress in November," Kass said, pointing out that the bill is fully offset and would not add to the deficit.
Kass expressed the White House optimism while giving the closing keynote address to a gathering of about 400 child advocates in Washington, DC, at non-profit hunger foundation Share Our Strength's Conference of Leaders. He was greeted like a rock star, frequently interrupted with cheers and applause, much as his boss, First Lady Michelle Obama is, when she makes public appearances before armies of the converted. Share Our Strength has been critically involved with the White House in the past year, and was responsible for rounding up many of the chefs who attended the White House launch of Chefs Move To Schools in June. Kass thanked the group profusely for their involvement, noting the tireless work of Executive Director Billy Shore and his co-pilot Janet McLaughlin. (Above: Kass during his remarks)
"Under no circumstances should carrots be considered a luxury item," Kass said, as he explained the details of the child nutrition legislation, and noted that the Senate passed the $4.5 billion Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act 2010, by unanimous consent, in August.
"We're all appalled every time we see or have to say the statistic that, although we are by far the most productive and efficient agriculture society in the world, we still have 49 million Americans who are food insecure, and 16 million of them are children," Kass said. "We are working tirelessly in the Administration to meet the president's goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015."
The landmark child nutrition legislation, for the first time in US history, allows the Secretary of Agriculture to set nutrition standards for all school foods, expands school breakfast programs, and slightly increases the reimbursement rate for meals in the National School Lunch program. It also has provisions in it for farm to school sourcing, and very early childhood nutrition programs. But funding has become a big political problem for the legislation. Hunger advocates and 106 House Democrats were up in arms over a proposal to suspend a temporary $2.2 billion increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in 2013 to fund the legislation, awarded as part of the stimulus bill; critics phrased their complaints as The First Lady vs. Food Stamps.
Finding the funding
But Kass had big news. There's nothing to worry about in terms of SNAP funding, he reassured his audience.
"We heard the concerns raised about this offset from Members of the House, and to respond to those concerns, the Administration has committed to work with Congress to restore the $2.2 billion snap offset in the future," Kass said.
There was silence in the room.
"Come on, that's got to get some kind of response," Kass said, and his audience realized what he'd pledged, and started to applaud.
"Jeez. That was work," Kass joked, and added for emphasis "we're listening to you."
Kass gave no details of where the money will come from, however.
There was much behind-the-scenes activity to get the legislation passed, and President Obama as well as Mrs. Obama made repeated public calls for Congress to take action, as did Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, as well as a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Mrs. Obama wrote her first Op-Ed as First Lady about the legislation, A Food Bill We Need, which appeared in the Washington Post two days before the Senate's landmark vote.
>A PDF of Kass's remarks is here.
Last month, Sec. Vilsack cited a lack of leadership in the House for the legislation's failure to get to a vote.
"We're disappointed, but not defeated," Sec. Merrigan told Obama Foodorama last week, when discussing the House's exit without a vote. "But we're still very hopeful. We need this legislation."
During his remarks, Kass further explained the need for the legislation, describing the intimate link between childhood hunger and obesity, two of the issues targeted by Mrs. Obama's Let's Move! campaign.
"These two problems seem to be opposite. One is the product of not enough, the other a product of too much," Kass said. "One gives us a dire sense of urgency; every hungry child is an emergency...the other builds slowly over time, eroding the health and potential of our citizens and eating away at a child's quality of life."
Both hungry and obese children can be malnourished, explained Kass. "This irony often plays out in the very same child. We need to both fight hunger and make sure our kids grow up healthy."
Kass encouraged his audience of advocates to break out of institutional and organizational silos in their work to battle childhood hunger.
That's something that is now a de facto action plan in the Administration: Mrs. Obama has managed to get more than twelve different federal agencies involved in Let's Move!, including such seemingly unlikely entities as the Department of the Interior (for the Let's Move Outside initiative) and the Department of Defense (a group of top retired military brass is running Mission: Readiness, which seeks to ensure that America's youth is not too obese to qualify for military service). But it has all made sense for the broad national campaign.
"It's going to take every sector of society to end childhood hunger, to end childhood obesity. We have everything we need to solve this problem. It's going to be up to you and it's going to be up to us," Kass said.
He got a foot-stomping standing ovation as he left the podium.
Chef Tim Cipriano, who heads the food services program for New Haven Public Schools, was named Advocate of the Year during the two-day Share Our Strength conference. He's one of the cabal of professional chefs who have advised the White House on Chefs Move to Schools. In July, in Dallas, Texas, he joined Kass on a panel at the huge annual national conference of the School Nutrition Association, the professional group of school nutrition directors, chefs, and cafeteria employees. They spoke about how Chefs Move to Schools would work in school settings, and the need for the nutrition legislation.
--Eddie Gehman Kohan & Helena Bottemiller
Kass' remarks, via Share Our Strength:
*Photo by Helena Bottemiller
