Did you know that a kid who drinks two flavored milks in school a day is consuming an extra 5-8 tablespoons of sugar everyday? Does this concern you?

Next week, Food Revolutionaries around the US will participate in the Flavored Milk Week of Action to help spread knowledge like this. The goal is to educate the school community (parents, kids and officials) about the hidden forms of sugar and additives in flavored milk and to ask for the elimination of sweetened, flavored milk from regular school meals starting this school year.

The Food Revolution team has created a lot of cool tools to help parents and teachers participate in the week of action. From a Flavored Milk Calculator to sample flyers and letters, everything you need to turn from an interested bystander to an engaged participant is at your finger tips.

Join the Facebook Group >>>
Email for help and advice >>>

Inspired by Jamie Oliver’s call to remove sugary milk from school cafeterias, a fourth grade class in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has started their own milk revolution. Their aim is to get 60% of students to get white milk  with their lunch.

Check out their first video below.

Last Wednesday at TED2011, Jamie Oliver, IDEO and the TED Prize team led a lunch talk about Cooking & Company, an initiative to encourage companies to help their employees better balance work with cooking at home.

Cooking & Company is part of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Through this effort, the Food Revolution hopes to make it easier for 350,000 employees at companies across the United States to prepare healthier meals at home. The TED lunch highlighted ways organizations can participate in the initiative to get their employees excited about cooking and help make the task of preparing food at home more efficient and fun.

IDEO’s Chris Waugh presented a few cooking experiments at companies to the crowd.  He emphasized that it just takes one person at a company to start the momentum to encourage others to cook more frequently. The experiments highlighted that a combination of simple recipes and reduced prep time encourages people to prepare meals at home rather than eating out/ordering in.

Employees who joined in the experiments continue to be involved in the program through their own Cooking & Company group on Facebook, where they share their experiences through posts and photos. Check out images of the experiments, from a “cook your own omelet” stand to “Take It Home” kits, visit IDEO’s website. You can also download toolkits and a series of Food Revolution recipes to inspire healthy cooking at home.

Welcome to the new home of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. It is a hub where anyone interested in joining the revolution can find their way from concern to action. Whether a user wants to cook, change school food or simply find their revolution areas in their own hometown, this site has the answers.

A big thanks to the many companies and individuals from the TED community who made this new website possible: strategy and design by The Groop, interaction design by Michael Gharabiklou of Blueprint27, HTML design by Kyle Pickering, copy editing by Kerry Shea, downloadable toolkits by Paper Airplane and backend development by Jamie Oliver’s web team.

We also updated and expanded our Facebook community to allow people interested and involved in the Food Revolution to communicate with and learn from one another.

A big thanks to the team at Nurun for designing our beautiful new page.

“One year ago, the incomparable Jamie Olive came to TED and made a wish that kids should be taught what healthy food was. That families would start cooking again. And that people everywhere would join the fight against obesity.” Chris Anderson just said these words onstage at TED, to introduce Jamie Oliver. Who comes to TED with news!

Just this morning, Jamie Oliver and the American Heart Association (AHA) announced the formation of a partnership to open Food Revolution Kitchens -– community-based centers where people can learn basic cooking skills and how to prepare affordable, nutritious meals. Their goal is to have at least five kitchen centers within the next 18 months, with plans underway for New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore and Dallas.

Also unveiled today was the flagship Food Revolution truck, the mobile kitchen classroom Jamie envisioned to spread the grassroots movement. Designed pro bono by the Rockwell Group, the truck will travel to communities to teach kids, parents and professionals about food and cooking.

The truck will be part of a three-part program with the American Heart Association and The California Endowment to bring food education to four underserved communities in Los Angeles (South LA, Boyle Heights, Long Beach and Santa Ana).

A new community website and on-the-ground activist program also kicks off today: www.jamiesfoodrevolution.com. On this site, parents who want to change school food can download toolkits and participate in seminars and tutorials. People who want to learn to cook can also download recipes and videos. Mapping technology and Facebook will help people find their local allies and get active in their own communities.

“Jamie Oliver is a force to be reckoned with, and combined with the vision and dedication of the TED community, we are on our way to realizing his wish,” said Amy Novogratz, TED Prize Director. “In just one year, we have met benchmarks and exceeded expectations. Together we have built a Food Revolution truck, established critical partnerships, and launched the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation. With growing momentum and support, imagine where we will be in 2012.”

From Seth Nickinson, Director of the Nourish Initiative

As the harvest season turns into the holidays, watch an inspiring new film, Nourish: Food + Community on PBS. Perfect for youth and families, this award-winning special asks the thought-provoking question, “What’s the story of your food?” Find a PBS broadcast in your area.

Hosted and narrated by Cameron Diaz, Nourish features interviews with best-selling author Michael Pollan, sustainable food advocate Anna Lappé, eco-chef Bryant Terry, pediatrician Dr. Nadine Burke, and organic farmer Nigel Walker. Watch the trailer.

Nourish is also rolling out a remarkable collection of short films, including exclusive clips of Jamie. Check out Jamie playing the drums in “Food is Like Music.” Watch Jamie get excited about fresh, seasonal food in “Try Something New.” Sign up on the Nourish website for announcements of future releases.

The Nourish film is part of a major educational initiative designed to open a meaningful conversation about food and sustainability. In the coming weeks, Nourish will announce the release of the Nourish school curriculum, developed in partnership with the Center for Ecoliteracy. Stay tuned!

Follow Nourish:

Find a PBS broadcast in your area: http://www.nourishlife.org/pbs.html
Buy the Nourish DVD: http://nourishlife.org/store.html
Sign-up for Nourish announcements: http://www.nourishlife.org

Go into Chipotle after 6pm this Halloween dressed as a horrifying processed food product and they’ll give you a burrito, bowl, salad, or an order of tacos filled with freshly cooked, naturally raised ingredients for only $2. That money (up to $1 million) will be donated to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

Check out the winning concepts from OpenIDEO’s Jamie Oliver Challenge! Or download the book IDEO produced which outlines this challenge, the process and the 17 winning concepts as voted by the OpenIDEO community and Jamie.

The Huffington Post recently conducted an exclusive interview with Jamie Oliver answering your questions about his Food Revolution.

Watch Jamie Oliver discuss food education in the US, dealing with resistance to change, creating a vegetarian cookbook and more.

Guest piece from TEDster Katy Klassman –

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families tocook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity “–Jamie Oliver

As I sat in the audience listening to Jamie Oliver make his wish, I had the same reaction that I did in 2008 when I heard this one:

“I wish that you — you personally and every creative individual and organization you know — will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area, and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so thatwithin a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships.”-Dave Eggers

On a mission to do something small that could have a big impact on kids who have a great desire to learn to write well through the exploration of something they think is cool, I decided to spend this summer doing my part to try and fulfill both wishes at the same time.

Partnering with 826CHI in Chicago, as I have for the past three years with the Travel the World Through Chocolate workshops, I created Super Foods Superheroes, a workshop that would band together the newest type of Superheroes: kids on a mission to make and eat healthy food!  As a team they would learn recipes to share with their friends and family, learn the history of various Super Foods, how to use them in creative ways and eat their way through their own delicious adventure.

With my colleague and partner in TEDPrize wish fulfillment, Gabrielle Kammerer, we set about creating a curriculum that would explore the healthful possibilities at breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert (after all we work for THE most magnificent chocolate company in the world, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, so we couldn’t deny our troops the pleasure of a bit of dark chocolate.)

Along with fifteen curious Superheroes, we spent our Saturdays making yoghurt parfaits, gazpacho, tofu stir-frys (kids love a bit of fish sauce if you hide it!,) whole wheat pancakes, healthful quesadillas (you can add squash and lo and behold, they will eat that, too) and cabbage salad with black sesame seeds, amongst other sweet and savory delights.

The kids cooked, ate, and each week spent time writing.

They critiqued their own culinary capabilities and shared recipes:

Written by Skye, Fifth Grade

“I liked the guacamole best.  It smelled and tasted really good.  I also liked the quesadillas.  They were cheesy, pardon my pun, and the squash was really good, plus it was an unique touch.  In the guacamole, I like the distant dash of onion—it perfected it.  The gazpacho wasn’t my favorite, but I liked how it tasted like natural flavors.  Or at least how I thought natural flavors would taste.  It reminded me of everything natural.  I’ll definitely make it at home—I’ll make everything at home!  For those who want to make something yummy, try the quesadillas!

They are made with…

*Whole grain tortillas

*Yellow and green squash

*A tiny bit of Chihuahua cheese

Grill the tortillas

Add the cheese and make sure to get the edges especially

Shred, grill and then add squash to the tortilla and cheese

Enjoy!

For the guacamole…

*Avocados

*Limes

*Onion

*Cilantro

*A dash of salt

Take avocados and put them in a bowl

Add chopped onions and chopped cilantro

Squeeze lime into the bowl

Mash with a spoon, or your hands

Enjoy in moderation, because avocado is only good in small amounts!”

This story and recipe, as well as the others will be made into a small chap book that will get sent to the participants in the class and sold in the 826CHI store to benefit the continuation of their exceptional programming.

We helped create chefs and authors this summer.  Perhaps the future Jamie Oliver’s and Dave Eggers’ were in our midst.

We armed students with culinary triumphs that they can carry back to their friends and families.

We gave more, expected less and got it all back a million times over.

Maybe more importantly than any of this, we made one little girl, Joan, smile.  Upon her arrival at 826, her mother told me that she “didn’t like anything” and it was pretty clear by the look on her face that she was none too jazzed about spending her summer  Saturdays with us.  But had you the opportunity to watch her read her writings in front of the group, dance the tango with abandon (a little dancing is always necessary even if it has nothing to do with Super Foods,) or heard her mother tell me that she wouldn’t let her turn the car around when they were an hour late because of a flooded out freeway, the assessment that she doesn’t like anything would have sounded like the finest fiction to have ever come out of 826.

Since I’ve been given this chance to share my project with the TED community, I’m going to take this big opportunity to tell you what I learned in 2008 after teaching my first 826 workshop and what I continue to believe:  We all have the capacity to make both of these TEDPrize wishes come true and we should all want to.  Each of us has an interest, culinary or otherwise, that can be shared at the local level, at your city’s 826 (if your city is fortunate to have one) or in your public schools.  I’m taking my passions and passing them on and I’m going to keep trying to get others to join me.  I’m counting on all of you TEDsters to keep both wishes going.  If you need an incentive, look at Joan’s smile.