Let's Move!: Healthy Food Access and Fighting Obesity in Kids

This week First Lady Michelle Obama launched a new initiative, dubbed "Let's Move!", to fight childhood obesity in our country, with the support of Growing Power's Will Allen and others. Mrs. Obama began a national conversation about children's health last year when she broke ground on the White House Kitchen Garden with students from a D.C. public school. Through the garden, she brought national media coverage about the benefits of eating healthy, seasonal produce and local farmers' markets.

That discussion grew into the Let’s Move campaign, which will focus on a number of areas, including increasing access to healthy, affordable food; serving healthier food at schools; and increasing the number of farmers' markets. President Obama's 2011 budget proposes an additional $5 million investment in the Farmers Market Promotion Program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which provides grants to establish, and improve access to, farmers markets.

The campaign also launched the Food Environment Atlas, which is intended to assemble statistics on food environment indicators to stimulate research on what determines food choices and the quality of people's diet, as well as to provide an overview of a community’s ability to access healthy food and its success in doing that.

Will Allen, who visited the Triangle last fall, said, "We have to institutionalize good food in our schools, and not only in the cafeteria, but in our teaching every day," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "We also need to be able to grow food year-round where it's needed, despite the climate, the way we are doing it here at Growing Power in Milwaukee. We need to scale up these efforts, growing good soil, growing good food, growing the relationships necessary to distribute and deliver this food to people."