Over the summer of 2012, INESAD‘s Ioulia Fenton is researching food and agriculture issues at Worldwatch Institute‘s Nourishing the Planet project. In her latest article, she discusses a new study suggesting that school food policy matters when it comes to the health of school kids in America.

New Evidence Shows That School Food Policy Matters When It Comes to Kids’ Health

Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. According to the 2011 F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens Americas’ Future report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Trust for America’s Health, nearly one-third of all American kids ages 10 to 17 are either obese or overweight. This puts them at risk of more than 20 major diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Today, The Statesman in Austin, Texas, United States published a op-ed co-written by Danielle Nierenberg, Director at Worldwatch Institute‘s Nourishing the Planet (NtP) project and INESAD‘s Ioulia Fenton, who is spending the summer researching food and agriculture issues with NtP.

Helping Poor Children Avoid Poor Diets, The Statesman, Monday, August 13, 2012.

It’s almost time for kids to go back to school. But for many children in Austin, this means a return to terribly unhealthy school lunches fried chicken, pizza pockets, corn dogs, and desserts loaded with high-fructose corn syrup that jeopardize the health and well-being of America’s next generation. This needs to change. Read More »

Action Against Hunger UK (ACF UK) recently commissioned INESAD‘s Ioulia Fenton to help write the Guatemala part of a global report on the role of rural-urban linkages in under-nutrition. What this type of research originates from is the growing recognition that people’s lives in developing countries can no longer be neatly compartmentalised into either rural or urban. Someone who lives in a village and has land will also have to get a job in the city selling trinkets to make ends meet. Meanwhile, those who live in the cities will hang on to family land, work on other people’s farms or perhaps grow food in their city dwelling, something called urban agriculture.

Even the urban spaces we live in are also increasingly ambiguous and frequently an urban city can have a very rural face. In fact, depending on whose national standards you use, each country’s urbanity or rurality can look very very different. Read More »