Translator: Lauren Hornsey Reviewer: Svitlana Gryn
Hi.
I came here today to tell you
what's in and what's wrong with our school lunch programs.
How many people in this room have kids?
How many of your kids eat school lunches?
I have an organic chef and food advocate for a mom.
I used to think my mom was just a little bit crazy about her issues on food.
But that changed when she recently took me to a talk on GMOs.
Just in case you don't know, GMO means Genetically Modified Organism.
What the speaker had to say really freaked me out.
Animals and people are dying from GMO food or feed.
One kid almost died because he had developed an allergy from GMO corn.
Animals eating GMO feed are getting tumours, cancer
and, grossest ever, leaky gut syndrome.
Trust me, right before lunch,
y'all don't want me showing you that slide.
This prompted me to do my own research.
What I discovered disgusted me.
It's not rocket science to figure out these animals' sicknesses
are being passed down to us and right into our school lunches.
So I asked myself, "How can I, a ten-year-old,
change the bad parts of school lunches
and convince others that eating good is a solution?"
Part of the problem is junk food in schools.
Did you know they spend up to $300 million a year on youth-targeted marketing?
For the first time since the early 1800s,
children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents.
1 out of 3 kids will have diabetes.
43 million pre-school children under age 5 were obese or overweight in 2010.
Large food corporations are taking over the government agencies
that are supposed to regulate them.
Scary!
We have heard this from many significant adults
such as Michelle Obama,
Alice Waters
and Jamie Oliver,
who all have spoken out on school lunch programs.
Recently, Michelle Obama's new school lunch program has gone into effect.
But with much controversy.
Cafeteria cooks, educators and kids themselves
have all spoken out against this new program.
"Why?" you might ask.
Because a large percentage of kids are so used to eating the problem foods
that simply offering fruits and veggies isn't the solution.
Sugar in processed food is highly addictive.
A great deal of these foods
have been going into our school lunches for decades.
It takes education along with food change to convince kids to eat better at school.
To get kids to eat better at school, it takes education along with food change.
If kids don't know, they will choose a snack shack and panic over the organic.
(Laughter)
This I know firsthand.
Let's take a look at a typical school lunch.
Chicken nuggets, tater tots, cookies and other stuff.
The chemicals sprayed on our food are names I can't even pronounce,
let alone know what most of them are and what they're doing to our bodies.
The chicken in our nuggets is factory-farmed,
meaning animals live in cages, are closed off from nature,
are fed GMO feed, and are stuck in their poo all day.
How would you like to be stuck in your poo all day?
See, I told you they're hard to pronounce.
This is used in silly putty, cosmetics and chicken nuggets.
I'm angry, I'm frustrated and I'm really sad
because what is being fed to us is not okay.
Less than 20% of American schools have organic food in their school lunches.
If kids knew about the animal abuse in factory farms,
knew about the chemicals sprayed on our food,
they would understand that we truly are what we eat,
and they would make better choices.
Some of the solutions are, first and most importantly,
stop looking at us kids like we're a profit margin.
Part of the solution is education.
We go to school to learn about Science, English, History and Math.
Now, it's time to add a Food & Health class.
It's funny, when I was little, I wanted to be a princess or a fairy
and I believed that everything was good.
Now that I'm older and more mature, I want to be a powerful voice
in food advocacy for my generation,
because I know that our school lunch system,
if not our entire food system,
has to change - and I'm here to make that a reality.
Thank you, I'm honored to be here.
(Applause)