Pick your own for free in Manchester parks

I like the sound of this! Apparently parks in manchester are planint fruit trees and vegetables in all of their parks. The public will be able to simply harvest what they like. You can read a report of this here

We need someone in manchester to let us know how it is working out. I wuld be really interested to hear from anyone who has seen this in action.

Food advertising works

A study by researchers from Yale University of 7 to 11 year old children found that 45% of them ate more snack food while watching a cartoon that included food commercials than those children who watched the same cartoon but with non food commercials. 45% - that is so shocking! With the obesity problems facing children I am appalled we still tolerate food advertising to children.

Any government that is serious about adressing the obesity problems facing our children is going to need to get a lot tougher with the food industry

Please have a closer look at this study which was published at the end of July by clicking here

Drinking fountains in the city

I had a great meeting with Henry Smith who works for the City of London. There has been some thoughtful well researched work going on in the city to cut down our carbon footprint. Adding water fountains to a area of the city which has thousands of visitors and tourists makes perfect sense.

Henry was able to show me some terrific designs which look sleek and elegant whilst being almost impossible to vandalise. The water supply comes downward so no one could contaminate the water supply. I will have a look for some pictures that i can post but in the meanwhile you can read about the city project here

Drinking water in parks

No school dinner pictures for a while as it is school holidays. Will need to wait til September when the schools are back.

In the meanwhile have been working very hard with Christine and The Children's Food Campaign to highlight lack of drinking water provision in parks.

The Guardian have just printed an article for us on their Comment is free website please post a comment if you get a second.

Am now off to central London to talk to a very nice man about a project to install 50 drinking fountains in the City of London

School dinners better for the planet?

There is a short report here about Chorley winning an environmental award for their school meal service.

It looks like the procurement manager has been able to cut delivery miles and increase the amount of local food they serve. This needs further investigation. May be an interesting case study for my colleagues at Sustain.

Cost of dinners

Pleased to see that Rotheram have frozen the cost of their school meals. you can read a full report here

Griffin School, Hull

As part of the think tank on children's health and education I got to visit Griffin Primary School and meet the school council. They were able to tell me about a very enterprising dinner lady at their school who had designed a notice board displaying the menu as a series of photographs. Hull Council are so impressed with this they have awarded her a prize.

I loved meeting the school council who gave me a great tour of the school. Well done to the Head teacher and the rest of the staff for creating such a lovely school.