During the ‘Blizzard of 2010 I had the pleasure of photographing Beijing-born American artist Yun-Fei Ji for the weekend arts section of NYT.

Lots of fun outdoors to be had.

This weekend NYRR put the word out and 10,000 showed up to run for Haiti, over $400,000 raised simply by tying on some running shoes.

Speaking of tying on some running shoes, I did make a certain “commitment” for later this year…a certain day in November.

Here.

This is a great presentation and something I have come to believe is necessary.

This all ties in to running and the marathon last year, to Team for Kids, and an iPhone app that Jamie Oliver created with recipes and tips.

This is a screen cap from the app, 20 Minute Meals. It’s really a great little app, lots of pictures and videos, plus updates with new recipes come too. I got the app when I was training for the marathon and decided to forego takeout as much as possible, in addition to it being cheaper. It was so fun making all the recipes that I found myself dining in nearly all the time.

If you watch the video Jamie makes the case that we have not passed to our children the knowledge they need to cook, select foods, and make healthy choices. Even adults, and I count myself in there, do not know their way around a kitchen. David Letterman can joke about “Know Your Cuts of Meat” but in truth that is about all I do know! I could not tell you the difference between a shoulder and a rib roast, chuck, round, whatever, the nomenclature is greek to me. And I come from a family where we had very (too!) regular family meals around the kitchen table, cooked by my mom and by my dad. Fast food was limited to once a week, we’d call it fend for yourself, or ersatz, usually friday.

That’s a cookbook I wrote out as a kid. I liked grilled chees with pickals and a glass of milk. Still do.

The whole Team for Kids mantra is get children moving early and often, because we have an epidemic of obesity going on. Oliver makes the same point in the video above, and he says we are not doing enough in schools to teach kids about food, not doing enough to supply healthy meals in schools, which are often the bulk of the meals kids get, and we are not doing enough to pressure fast food and the  food-industrial-complex to get the crap out of our food that they put there to increase profit.

For you out of town readers, living in Brooklyn I have always observed that the poorer neighbourhoods got the worst food, the worst vegetables, the worst meats. The closest grocery to me has great staff, but un-appealing veggies. I see them trying. It might be me single-handedly buying more veggies than anyone else!? And with more and more people turning to food stamps in this recession, it is only going to get tougher- what WIC will purchase is often nothing I would touch. So it is no surprise that when real food is unappealing, and when you don’t know how to prepare it properly, a family will turn to crap because the kids will eat it.

This is nothing that is sustainable or desirable. Oliver points out that the biggest killers in society today are not violent crime, or ‘terrerism, but the diseases of obesity and bad diet. By a huge margin.

Jamie’s mantra is pass it on, which is what I am doing.

Full story here.