The Young Gourmet Gastronomy Competition is the only national food based competition for Australian schools. Categories include Food Literature (Poetry, Short Story & Food Blogging), Food Art, Recipe Writing, and a Farm to Table Challenge where school communities grow, produce, package, market and sell their own 'regional food' using traditional or artisan growing or
production methods.

The Young Gourmet Gastronomy Competition makes learning about food more fun for both students and teachers. The learning outcomes relate to life-skills like growing food, cooking food, shopping for food and food production. The fun requires innovative methods and preparedness by whole school communities to become involved. Food education is taken out of the kitchen when students consider and create food literature, food art and debate serious food
issues. In this way, our competition categories encompass many of the required key learning areas so teachers can make participation part of their existing teaching plans

Entries are adjudicated by an esteemed panel of professional food writers, journalists, chefs, producers and artists from both Australia and overseas.

Generous prizes are awarded to individuals, school and teachers from a number of leading Australian corporations and presented at Australia's premier food festival Tasting Australia!

We are kindly supported again by Furi Knives, Newstext, Salton Australia, SBS, Xyris Software and welcome our new association with Tomkin Australia who are offering Tablekraft and Chef Inox prizes. We would like to give away even more, so if you have something to offer a school or individual student, please let us know.

Contact: Kay Richardson 0414 678 816 or kay@younggourmet.com
Details: www.younggourmet.com

Eric Schlosser's new book " Chew On This: Everything You Don't Want To Know About Fast Food",  designed for young adults and kids, is a kind of reworked version of Fast Food Nation, the original book  that holds the food industry largely responsible for the US (and European) epidemic in childhood obesity and attendant ills such as diabetes. 

Chew on This charges the fast-food industry with seducing children through skillful marketing, tacitly supporting the mistreatment of animals, and repressing employees with low wages.  The food industry's effort to regain the initiative is more urgent. 

As Schlosser journeys around US schools in support of Chew on This, he offers a slide show of human organs poisoned by too much fat. Most importantly it is a book that gives the discerning teenager facts figures and insight.

Will Fritsch is a Tulane College freshman (ie first year student) majoring in biochemistry and philosophy.  He wrote this article for The Tulane Hullabaloo which is  the primary source of campus information for the students faculty, staff, alumni and friends of Tulane University in New Orleans USA.  This article is reproduced by courtesy of The Tulane Hullabaloo.

What's an organic meal worth?

The answer must be confined to a single, basic aspect of this question. Only one principle will be named. Despite what pretentious Tulanians think, one must regard that which preserves and advances one's well-being as necessarily worth one's money. In the world of food shopping, organic foods are the only proper kind to purchase.

Organic foods are the result of farming techniques that preserve the environment. Unlike conventional farms, organic farms do not use chemical fertilizers nor synthetic pesticides, which contributes to a cleaner atmosphere and ground water. In addition, the animals raised on organic farms are fed organic foods which, in most cases, make livestock's manure the best type of fertilizer because it isn't toxic for our lakes, streams and rivers when runoff occurs.

Organic foods are usually fresher than their non-organic counterparts because the former must be brought to market quickly. They do not contain preservatives to keep their fresh appearance and retard spoilage.

Charlene Beane is a Midwestern farmer and owner of BeanesBirds.com, a company specializing in her nutritionally balanced line of feed mixes for exotic birds. She told The Hullabaloo that the difference between eating fresh foods versus fresher foods is that "the fresher foods have more enzymes, vitamins, proteins, minerals and carbohydrates as they are at their nutritional peak and since they haven't begun to age out." Because these nutrients are vital to our metabolism, eating foods that possess more essential nutrients per serving is a better use of our time and money.

Bonnie Eskenazi, managing director of The Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology at Hackensack University Medical Center, says the number of young adults getting cancer increases in great proportions every year, and much of this can be ascribed to the lack of organic foods being consumed by Americans. "The reason is that many preservatives and pesticides are made with chemicals that haven't been tested for the harmful effects they have on people, yet the ones that have been tested on people are known carcinogens [agents causing cancer], teratogens [agents causing structural abnormalities] and/or endocrine disrupters that impair the neurological development of growing humans and fetuses," she said.

"The problem with the conventional farming techniques," said Dr. Mike McLachlan, Tulane professor of pharmacology and environmental studies, "is that they use pesticides and there are examples of pesticides that act like hormones, possessing toxic effects that especially hurt our young." He adds "Over the last 10 years we are finding pesticides and herbicides that might end up in the food chain that can change one's hormones and endocrine system."

Adolescents have enough raging hormones. Adding more, especially of the synthetic kind, is not only unnecessary but detrimental. For example, girls are getting their periods earlier than ever and studies have linked this with the chemicals that end up in our foods. The reason is that these chemicals mimic estrogen, the hormone responsible for the onset of puberty in girls. "Whenever you have hormonally active estrogen," Dr. McLachlan said, "whether in the form of food or drugs, stimulation of breast growth can occur and if it happens early enough then your risk of getting breast cancer increases, because breast cancer is linked to the total amount of estrogen a female has in her lifetime."

If health sections of teen magazines last year had a theme, it could be expressed as a fascination with organic foods. Organic foods are not a subjective luxury; instead, they are an objective necessity if we want to live as long and healthfully as possible. The next time you find yourself asking whether paying $5 for four organic apples is worth your money, think about what your money means before abandoning a world of magnificent potential.

A Sustainable World.
Can you make it happen?

The world is crying out for real leadership, for people with the passion and the intelligence to understand long term global issues as well as the political cunning and business nous to tackle these problems once and for all. It seems we can have either the passion or the power, but rarely both in the same person.

Of course we've tried to get the powerful to care - with only small progress- but we've never tried to give power and influence to people who care.

Until now.

The Future Sustainability Leaders program is an audacious experiment to grow and cultivate a whole new breed of world leader in time for a complex and fragile future.

The aim? To help people who care to gain positions of power and influence. To train green minds in the ways of power and politics, and to equip them as effective leaders for the new century.

We're looking for people with the passion and potential to take the struggle for a better future into the boardrooms and conference chambers of the world.

Apply at http://www.csl.org.au/ for the 2008 program in Sydney