this is tenzin and some carrots in front of our school garden; his mom helped the school start a CSA.

Today’s NYT City Room blog has a piece on parent initiatives to improve school food. Lemme walk you through it:

1. First the story looks at parents’ desire to get rid of Styrofoam cafeteria trays, which a) may leach icky chemicals into food and b) are a humungo landfill-clogger. NYC public schools generate 850,000 trays EVERY DAY, according to Styrofoam Out Of Schools.

2. Then we have the Department of Education’s ban on bake sales. (The City Room blog did a nice job covering that brain-melting story.) The DoE says bake sales can be unhealthy, but parents are allowed to sell the food the DoE itself sells in vending machines, which they say IS healthy, even though it includes stuff like Doritos and Pop-Tarts. (Probably just coincidence that they’re Pepsico products, Pepsico being the company the DoE’s vending-machine partnership is with.) Parents can go to Costco to buy these products (servings have to be individually packaged, according to the DoE’s rules) and sell them once a month. The DoE has backed off on its initial TOTAL ban on homemade food, but they’ve limited its sale to once a month. You probably know how public school budgets have been pulverized; limiting our fundraising is a serious hardship. And at my kids’ school, the biggest bake-sale hit, made by some Japanese parents, has been rice balls. You gonna tell me Doritos are healthier than rice balls? Or homemade organic banana bread?

ANYWAY: East Village Community School (EVCS), one of four progressive public schools in the East Village (my kids’ school is another) had been paying for its sugar-cane-based cafeteria trays with organic popcorn sales every Friday. A parent donated a popper. The NYT article isn’t all that clear on this point, but the trays cost a teeny bit more than Styrofoam ones…AND the DoE doesn’t compost. So the school was doing a pilot program to pay for its own composting as well as the extra cost of the healthy trays. But now they can’t, because they’re only allowed to sell the popcorn once a month, and that won’t raise enough to cover the costs of the environmental efforts. Got it?

3. There’s another initiative happening called Trayless Tuesdays, in which paper boats (like the kind hot dogs come in at ballgames, only a little wider) are used instead of trays. Those aren’t being recycled either, but at least they’re not Styrofoam.

The commenters on the NYT article are bellowing at cross-purposes. One refrain: Jeez, if your school’s biggest problem is Styrofoam, CRY ME A RIVER, my kids’ school doesn’t have BOOKS. The other: GET A FRIGGIN’ DISHWASHER, LAMEASSES.

My response to refrain #1: EVCS isn’t wealthy. My kids’ school isn’t either — I believe the latest stats were that 35% of our families qualify for free lunch. Our PTA digs deep and fundraises creatively to pay for what I’d consider essentials — art and music. Parents pay for classrooms’ PAPER. PAPER!! But that doesn’t mean we can’t also try to improve what our kids eat and what happens to the planet.

Response to refrain #2: Solutions SOUND easy when you’re on the outside, but once you’re in the trenches (as I’m sure Debby Lee of Styrofoam out of Schools and Helen Greenberg, Popcorn Lady of EVCS can attest) — you see how hard it is to make changes in the system. Our school’s food committee immediately wanted to know why we couldn’t get washable trays — and the answer is that our school building is 140 years old, and has barely been modernized, and getting the plumbing and kitchen upgrades necessary to install a dishwasher would be prohibitively expensive and would require permit-getting, and have I mentioned that we are a school that can barely pay for its own music and art? And then we’d have to deal with the DoE’s bureaucracy in getting the plumbing done. (My husband helped our school library with computer upgrades, and navigating DoE-approved vendors and devices and combination packages practically gave him an aneurism.) And yes, we desperately want to improve school lunch, but as is true of many schools in ancient buildings, our kitchen is barely a kitchen. The hard-working kitchen staff has microwaves and warming ovens; they don’t have a stovetop to cook on, so all they can do is reheat. I don’t mean to demonize the DoE in this, either — the number of students they serve is equal to the population of my home state of Rhode Island and they’re under crazy budget constraints themselves. They have to try to forge partnerships and cut deals with vendors. I get it.

So: Jamie Oliver, can we have $800,000? And a self-sustaining way to continue to pay for these healthy initiatives after you go back to your country with universal health care?

Oh, and PS. A family in our school made a documentary called “What’s On Your Plate?” in which two city kids learn where food comes from, why we should try to make healthy choices, and why it’s so hard to improve school lunch. It’s delightfully not-reductive. It’s airing on Discovery’s Planet Green and elsewhere; check the film’s web site for deets.

And PPS: On Thursday March 18th there will be a protest against Regulation A-812, limiting the sales of home-baked goods at public school bake sales. It’s from 4-6pm at City Hall. Activist parents will have two tables: one with home-baked goods, and another with the “approved” items: Doritos, Fritos, Pop-Tarts, and Snapple. Yum-O. Find out more at NYC Green Schools.

Latest Tablet column is about Jonathan’s impending German citizenship and my feelings thereon. The commenters think I am a loony person. What else is new.

Public art of awesome: A few weeks ago, German artist Jan Vormann and a team of volunteers scattered around New York and filled in holes in the city’s walls with LEGO. He’s done similar construction projects in Berlin, Tel Aviv, Quito, Berlin, Zurich, several other cities. If my kids spotted one of these installations on a stroll around the city (the one above is from the General Theological Seminary’s outer wall in Chelsea), they’d scream like overjoyed little banshees. I love the contrast of the brightly colored bricks with the muted old-school facades. Some examples below (as seen on Vormann’s site), from Greenwich Village, the Brooklyn Public Library, Bryant Park, Central Park, and the Times Square subway station.

Sadly, as the New York Post reports today, all the installations are already gone.

I was tipped off to the project by one of my favorite blogs, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York (who in turn credits NewYorkology) (see, NYT, how hard is it to credit sources?) — Thanks! As a Jewy-Jew, I know that Jeremiah has taken his name from the kvetchy, ignored prophet of Tanach; this modern bloggy Jeremiah preaches about the quirk and personality of NYC headed for extinction. In this case I don’t share his concerns about this project being safely cute, part of the infantilization of our culture in general. I think if you look at Vormann’s work in different cities, the LEGO insertions make you look harder at their contexts. The work is accessible and witty and inclusive, but it also helps us appreciate the architecture surrounding it and makes us think about the inevitable process of decay. Using LEGO — plastic, ubiquitous — also makes us think about how everyone has the potential to be a builder instead of a destroyer…something the original Jeremiah would have appreciated between his bouts of performance art. (Perhaps it’s ironic, too, that Vormann’s works in NYC have already been destroyed or removed. Jeremiah’s Book of Lamentations is read on Tisha B’Av, the holiday that commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Plus ca change.)

My kids, my nephew Jonah and my brother-in-law Jacob are all utterly obsessed with LEGO. This is an obsession I applaud. LEGO is awesome — creative, visual-plus-math-y, gender-neutral, full of infinite design possibility.  (It’s not LEGOs, incidentally. Only LEGO. Singular and plural all at once. The name comes from the Danish “leg godt,” play well.) But right now LEGO seems to be at a crossroads, much like Jeremiah’s own New York. For decades LEGO was all about your basic blocks. Now the company is spinning off into a dervish of movie-tie-ins, kits, blocks that are not infinitely flexible but rather designed for specific purposes. Plus oy, the gendered LEGO that nearly made me cry when my girls took it out of the box at Grandma’s — tiny ladies, make this wee domestic tableau with flowers and pink and purple bricks! Boys, you get all forms of transportation, the sky, technology and THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! Girls, you get a house.

Where was I? Off on a Jeremiad, apparently. Oh, right: So if your market share is shrinking, is this what you gotta do? Screw history, and the open-ended play that’s always been your toy’s signature? The WSJ covered this McKinsey-consultants-dictated change in LEGO’s philosophy really well. I don’t have answers — maybe change is inevitable if you want to live. And in the cyclical way of most things, you’re perpetually moving forward and backward, like the tide. You have the Bowery becoming a glittering canyon of ungapatchka rich people attractions, while you also have an increasing number of empty storefronts on Avenue A. You have the Disneyfied Times Square (a phrase we say so often it’s like a Zen koan now) but you also have more artists being able to afford to live  in our economic-downturn-reeling NYC. There’s no stasis. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it’s bad, and often it’s both at once. And I’m gonna guess that eventually trendy LEGO will fall out of favor as the kids all embrace the next big thing (I hear Mattel is working on furry robot marmosets with human lungs) and the little nerd kids continue to play with the old-school LEGO, in the old-school way. And the cycle will begin again.

Anyway! The LEGO street art! LOVE IT! On his site, Vormann thanks (but misspells the name of) this guy, Henk Holsheimer, an auto and LEGO designer — which has to mean that LEGO supports the use of its bricks for public art as well as for producing Millennium Falcon kits that sell for $499.99 each. I like the way Vormann’s work makes us reevaluate plastic, a material that we associate with all things bad — yet in this project, plastic makes us ponder communal action, permanence, the inevitable lack thereof.

That paragon of journalism, Life & Style magazine, recently offered a cover story about Shiloh Jolie-Pitt’s haircut. According to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD), the story claims that actress Angelina Jolie is turning Shiloh into a boy. The story asks whether the 3-year-old’s short haircut, pants and polo shirt are “harming” her and consults an expert from Focus on the Family who says, unshockingly, “They need help…it’s important to teach our children that gender distinction is very healthy.”

Um.

In GLAAD’s words: “When a magazine like Life & Style slaps this mixture of intrusive tabloid sensationalism and judgmental stereotyping on its cover, it can make life difficult for young people who are in the process of coming to terms with who they are. The magazine needs to send a message to its readers — many of them parents — that they should not reject their children simply because they don’t happen to conform to Life & Style’s narrow gender stereotyping.Targeting children for ridicule about the way they dress is unacceptable, regardless of their parent’s celebrity status.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality told The Advocate, “The length of Shiloh’s hair or the clothes she wears are really matters for her and her parents to decide; this is a family that is known for their fashion…What’s important here is that every child, including Shiloh, has the opportunity to express herself and explore her world in a way that is safe and nurturing for her. Our society needs healthy, well-rounded children whose interests and tastes are as diverse as the children themselves. Shiloh — and all other children — deserve the right to be themselves in ways that feel right to them as they learn and grow.”

GLAAD reports that Lindsay Ferraro, Life & Style’s Publicity Manager, was “dismissive” of GLAAD’s concerns.

Feel free to discuss your dismay with Dan Wakeford, Life & Style’s Editor-in-Chief, at dwakeford@bauer-usa.com, or with Lindsay, lferraro@bauer-usa.com. Be sure to tell them you rilly rilly love trashy magazines and you intend to give your business to Us Weekly in the future.

My latest Tablet column — a discussion with three kids (including mine) about the nature of God. Hoo boy.

So, according to School Library Journal, Texas’s Board of Education removed the classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? from the K-12 public school curriculum. Pourquoi? Because they thought the (dead) author, Bill Martin, Jr (a WWII vet and proud author of a children’s book about the pledge of allegiance) was the (not-dead) author Bill Martin (a professor of philosophy at DePaul University who wrote a book for big people called Ethical Marxism).

Veyizmir.

My latest Tablet column is here. It’s about the huge tonal differences between the ads shown during the Olympics and those shown during the Super Bowl. The Olympics is seen as a girlie event, and the Super Bowl is viewed as super-peenular. Yet the demographic data we have about who watches both these events (flawed and incomplete though this data is, I say with a loving and respectful nod to my media-measurement researcher husband who can explain at length why Nielsen’s systems are a moronathon) indicate that the two audiences are not crazy-dissimilar, and wow, that sentence is just barely clinging to coherence by the tips of its fingernails! Good thing no one is paying me to write this!

Um, so anyway, my point is that this year’s Olympics advertising: good! This year’s Super Bowl ads: cringe-inducingly vile!

I theorized at the end of the Tablet piece about why that might be. KJ Dell’Antonia at Slate, who kindly linked to the Tablet piece, has a different take. She makes the interesting point that each sporting event offers a different sort of wish fulfillment, and the advertising speaks to it: “The fantasy of football is, for men—and for men only, unlike Olympic sports—one of the road not taken, an irresponsible life of tackling on the field and debauchery off,” she writes. “The fantasy of the Olympics…is that somehow, that could be any of us up there (which is the only possible explanation for the popularity of curling)—and now, in four years or eight or 12—our kids could be the ones thanking us in a Visa ad.” Hm.

To take this a step further, I suppose that because Olympics are associated with values like global cooperation (Visa’s “Go World” slogan taps into that), generosity and a lack of jingoism, ads featuring pure aggression and vaj-hatin’ meat-headedness would feel tone-deaf. The Olympics are supposed to be noble. But again, given the sameness of the two events’ audiences (and the lack of effectiveness of the Super Bowl ads, which I pointed out, thanks to Jezebel’s number crunching), it’s unclear why advertisers felt the need to portray men and women and their respective roles in the world so differently AT ALL. Dudes. Come on.

As an aside: I think my fave ad is the Dan Jansen one. It’s not just the wonderful narrative; it’s that Morgan Freeman can sell me anything. (My other fave voice-over salesdude: Jeff Bridges.) Yummy, yummy slightly scratchy baritones.

New Tablet column is here.

This was a hard column for me to write. In general, I hate laying down rules for anyone who doesn’t live in my house. And I’m uncomfortable dissing other people’s choices unless they are people exactly like me (urban Jewy bobo), in which case WHOO! OPEN SEASON! So I tread delicately when I repeat that most rules (or guidelines treated as rules) concerning modest dress, in Orthodox Judaism and Islam, tend to be aimed at girls. In theory, “modesty” may be the standard for everyone, but in practice, the litany of “don’t” is for the ladies. Anyway, read the piece and let me know what you think.

Oh, also? An aside about classism got cut. Princess-mania and dressing-your-baby-girl-like-a-ho mania tend to be the province of people who do not share my cultural background. As a commenter on daddytypes, one of my fave brainy self-conscious modernist-art-obsessed agonizingly self-aware emphatically-non-working-class dadblogs, once said, “We hipster parents dress our kids like arts and crafts projects. Unless yarn is the new Lycra, I think the over-sexualization is going on somewhere else.” Exactly. Our people’s sins tend to involve viewing children as narcissistic reflections of our own exquisite taste. We dress ‘em in Keith-Haring-print sneakers and ironic vintage cowboy shirts from eBay (and rend our garments when the kid says they’re itchy and refuses to wear them) and dwell on which sleek bouncy seat best reflects our aesthetic values. Tell me why that’s nobler than taping a big polyester bow on your newborn’s head? Maybe being less judgmental about other people’s choices – sartorial, sexual and parenting-related – should be key to Tzniyut 2.0.

Finally: I’m guessing Tablet couldn’t get the rights to some of the more eye-opening pix of Noah Cyrus. It would have been funny to use a sound file of her singing Smack That in an endless loop with a little animation of her smacking herself. Oh wait, no it wouldn’t.

I love Re/Dress, NYC’s only size 12+ vintage and resale shop, and I loved doing this piece with Deb Malkin, the proprietress. The Tablet audio/video team rocked it out. I do wish we’d had enough time to shoot pictures over several days or weeks so we could show a trunk show, a zine party, a class, a book reading…I worry that the piece is a little too marketing-y/sell-y, whereas I wanted to show the political aspects of celebrating fat beauty and outsider-dom in general. And I wish we could have shown more of Deb’s alt-beauteous staff. But hey, gotta go with the Voltaire: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. The best is the enemy of the good. This piece is good…enough.

My pal Gayle and I agree on most things. (I don’t think smoothies are as great as she does. Other than that.) But she outdid herself with this blog post comparing Shiver (aka the YA novel that’s been called “Twilight with werewolves”) and Twilight (aka the YA novel that is full of sparkly sparkly SHUT UP ABOUT THE SPARKLY). The two books have very different not-so-coded messages about teenage sex and sexuality. Go read Gayle’s post.

I recently read Shiver. I thought it was SO well done — lyrical without being LYYYYYRRRICAL, and I loved the conceit of starting each chapter with the temperature — in degrees Fahrenheit — for reasons that soon become clear. Also, kickass cover. And then I read Twilight, because I figured my book-devouring 8-year-old will want to read it eventually so I should be clueful, and because the Twilight team optioned Gayle’s book so I should probably see the movie so I can form an opinion about Catherine Hardwicke’s mad skillz or lack thereof, which I still haven’t but it’s on the TiVo and I’ll get around to it I swear, and hey, if I’m gonna evaluate the movie properly I should probably know the book, so, yadda yadda: I read Twilight.

Dude, that book is BAD.

I’m not a YA novelist so I don’t have to be diplomatic. The heroine’s defining qualities seem to be (SPOILER ALERT) knocking things over, falling down, and insisting she’s nothing special. Oh, also obsessing and pining — she’s good at those too. I was struck by how NOT-EROTIC the book was. Girl touches boy’s ice-cold cheek. Later she kisses his ice-cold lips. The characters in Shiver — and the passionate connection between them, which is about more than how awesome the heroine’s blood smells (??) — seemed far more emotionally authentic to me. And I think Gayle’s points about sex in these books are just dead-on.

Also, Twilight has enough adverbs to make an adverb rug out of.