Food Insecurity and suggestions of how we can do something about it in classrooms

I’m a big fan of the television drama The West Wing, which premiered in 1999. I remember in one episode early in the second season (2000), the character President Bartlet, while campaigning, said that 1 in 5 children in the U.S. was growing up in poverty. It is a good assumption that this also implied 1 in 5 American kids is food insecure, if not routinely hungry. 

Twenty six years later, we have nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. being food insecure. In an age of record stock markets (which have been setting all-time records since the Obama administration through the present, minus the COVID period) and humanity’s first trillionaire, we have made very little to no real progress with ensuring all of our children have ready access to nutritious food, where the 18.4% figure (from 2024 data) is over 14 million kids not knowing when the next meal is coming, at least not consistently.  

I suspect most who read this will be aware, if for any other reason than common sense, that children don’t do as well in school when they are hungry. And this is the case for those students who already are coming from lower income families, which have other issues against the school children coming from those families, which include going to schools that are likely underfunded relative to the schools kids from higher-income families attend; and lower income families and children are overrepresented by children of color. For example, Black and Latino families are about twice as likely to be food insecure than White families. Food insecurity is a factor in the academic achievement gaps we see in so many diverse school districts around the country (here are data from the Evanston, IL, school districts to show examples of academic achievement gaps), and low performance in many urban school districts.

The reasons food insecurity is a factor in academic performance and student learning are numerous. Even adults are hard-pressed to remain healthy and perform at work at optimal levels when hungry. Lower income families in general have less access to high-level nutritious food, often living in the ‘food desert’ areas of cities, where fresh produce is miles away. Hunger (and the resulting decrease in the nutrition needed for good overall health) affects concentration, physical and mental health, proper brain development of children, energy levels, behavior, mood, memory, and motor skills. 

I and countless other educators presently worry about the next few years when it comes to nutrition in public schools because of the politicization of federal aid to low income families, such as cuts to SNAP benefits and funding for free and reduced lunch programs around the US, which are already affecting millions of our children. 

One avenue to help with this situation in schools is to consider having school gardens, both outside and inside schools. Indoor farming has become more possible in classrooms over the past decade due to efforts such as the Green Bronx Machine, founded by my friend Stephen Ritz, who has taken time to write full K-12 curricula centered around growing food in classrooms. He uses primarily tower gardens, and has helped transform his school in a poverty stricken section of the Bronx, and turn around not only the school, but the entire community. He has taken this global, and helps set up school gardens and food programs all around the world. I have tower gardens in my classroom and adjacent research center, where my students and I grow fresh produce to donate to a local food pantry over the fall and winter months, when outdoor farming is not possible around Chicago. 

This past school year we grew and donated 809 bags (mostly gallon sized) of arugula, kale, chard, basil, parsley, and lettuces (166 pounds) from late September through early May, using just 5 towers, which went to dozens of families each week who rely on the food pantry. We will be expanding this with student-built grow systems both in the high school and some elementary classrooms in our feeder district. We hope to add more and more resources throughout more and more classrooms each new school year, since the need for food assistance continues to grow around the country, up to 14% of households from 10% since COVID.

The US was making some progress reducing food insecurity from highs during the Great Recession, but the percentage is rising back to those levels after the COVID pandemic. 

For educators, there are two other pieces of this I’d like to mention. One is the inclusion of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into classes and community service projects. The second is to realize the future importance of indoor farming to this generation of young children, due to climate change. 

The UN SDGs are something I have included in my classes for most of the past decade, after they were adopted by all nations in 2015. As a science teacher, most of the 17 issues defined as the SDGs will need STEM as a primary means of finding real solutions to those issues, and No Hunger, SDG #2, is one of those issues. Any type of classroom and school farming is something that can bring attention to our children, and make them aware of and able to help those classmates and community families who may not be as fortunate as others when it comes to food insecurity. 

Things like possible population growth, and most importantly, the effects climate change (SDG #13) will have on global agriculture, will make outdoor farming more and more challenging, and likely less productive as top soil loss and nutrient level degradation in our most fertile farmlands (especially outside the US) continue to decline. The growing fresh water crisis in many parts of the world plays into this complex system. Indoor farming is something my students and I talk about as a part of the solution to feeding their world several decades from now, and it already is having an impact here and in other parts of the world, where they are investigating industrial indoor farming (mostly hydroponics). I think this is something educators can use in multiple ways of applying STEM knowledge and applications, as well as developing community service projects that begin introducing this important concept to the children who will be seeing this type of farming in their lives, and as one of the pieces of solutions to climate change the world will need to consider and develop on bigger and bigger scales, such as this massive indoor farm in New Jersey, from AeroFarms. 

It is possible to link indoor farming in classrooms, regardless of STEM subject one teaches - I’m doing this as an AP Physics teacher, and the students love having the tower gardens in the room and helping feed community members, despite it being outside of our curriculum. 

It is important to make students aware that not everyone is able to have consistent and predictable meals. It is important that we get nutritious food to those kids who need it, in order to help them grow and develop as healthy as possible, which in turn will optimize their learning in school. It is important this generation understands that these newer farming techniques and technologies exist and are developing here and abroad because it will become more important in the future due to climate change. We owe it to them. 

CONGRATULATIONS to the CLASS OF 2026!!

 As my 28th class of seniors has now graduated, I am once again impressed and inspired by the sheer amount of talent they collectively have, and also saddened by their departure. Amongst them are true scholars, humanitarians, leaders, musicians, singers, actors, athletes, community servers, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, programmers, travelers, potential politicians, journalists, and so much more. They possess good minds along with good hearts, and that is a combination I tell them will take them places in life...and we need people like this. 

May they find joy and purpose in the next few years, as they discover their true selves and begin to find the pathways towards their futures! I am proud of them!

Happy Star Wars Day!

 MAY THE 4th BE WITH YOU...ALWAYS!! 

Here's a Chem/Phys story, and what it can mean for students, ETHS

 A former student wrote to me out of the blue. It was incredibly sweet and humbling, as it is every time I hear from former students who are appreciative and grateful for their time with me in high school, and how it helped determine how their academic & professional lives evolved years after graduation. This student has just completed his PhD at Stanford in environmental economics, and will soon cross the country to be an assistant professor at MIT. This alone is beyond impressive, but not surprising because of his interests and abilities in high school that allowed him to do research and actually DO science and other activities most students don't get the chance to do...and it made that long-term road to where he now is possible, because he realized he was passionate about discovery and figuring complexity out. 

But then what he told me is how this approach to go beyond textbooks and the confinements of typical course curricula has made a much bigger impact on students, as well as on society. Zane roomed with two other PhD students that were also from my classes back in Evanston. They knew of others from our program who were also currently at Stanford, about to get their doctorates in STEM (and one in English, but also from Chem/Phys). They knew of 9 or 10 ETHS students who were getting their Stanford PhDs; they then checked something else, and this is the same as the number of STEM PhD candidates from the whole of the United Kingdom! If this is accurate, I'm shocked, since we are talking Stanford, and countries form the EU certainly encourage many of their best and brightest to study at Stanford and the other powerhouse STEM US universities. 

There are hundreds of former students who have went on to get their Masters and Doctorates in so many STEM fields, as well as MDs and MBAs and law degrees. This is the tradition and possibility this program is designed to do for students, by not only giving AP curricula, but more importantly, offering a couple dozen different ways of pursuing their individual interests and passions, discovering what they want to do and allowing them to work on it prior to college! 

Check out what our students have done while in high school.  And see where they have gone to college over the last quarter century. 

Quantum Computing - an update

 This is a recent video regarding the quantum computing effort at Google. These types of computers are already real, but just in their infancy stage compared to where experts expect them to go. Keep in mind that these will not replace your everyday computers and cell phones, but are valuable in advanced research and meant for highly complex calculational problems. And one application that I don't think anyone understands yet is what happens when these computing systems are used with AI and advanced robotics systems. Time will tell...

My 'brother from another mother' was on the Kelly Clarkson Show today

 I have a number of amazing friends around the world, and I am one of the luckiest people alive to be able to say this. Right up there at the top is Stephen Ritz, who teaches in the Bronx, and found his way to having classrooms revolve around tower gardens, and emphasizing good nutrition as one of the absolute essentials for kids to do well and thrive in school. With his Green Bronx Machine organization, he has some 1100 schools with 370,000 students using his curriculum and ideas in their classrooms everyday. 

He was on the 'Kelly Clarkson Show', and his segment aired today. I encourage you to check it out, and my own classroom is fortunate to use our tower gardens to help dozens of families in need of fresh produce every week in Evanston, thanks to Stephen introducing me to all this nearly a decade ago!

Artemis II page - A very successful NASA mission!!

 This is the Artemis II homepage for NASA. What an incredible mission, with splashdown happening to the minute that was planned and predicted! Congratulations to the tens of thousands who were part of this project! 

   Photo from Artemis II mission...remarkable!

Interesting Lightning phenomenon - Schumann Resonance

 There are 50-100 lightning strikes around the world every second! This is because at any given moment there are around 2000 storms taking place. Every bolt of lightning creates electromagnetic radiation in the form of EM waves, but an interesting thing happens between the ground and the ionosphere, which is a layer in the atmosphere consisting of a global layer and shield of ions - it forms a resonance cavity for those EM waves (i.e. the em waves are trapped between the ground and ionosphere). 

Some of the waves, at certain frequencies, can overlap and add up, sort of like sound waves can overlap and resonate in musical wind instruments, forming what's called the Schumann resonance. This is something scientists can measure anywhere around the world! And the resonance depends on the number of lightning strikes. By measuring this at different times of the year, and over many years, it is another measure of global warming, since the frequency of lightning strikes is dependent on the average air temperature. The measurements are yet another confirmation of increased warming, because this is reflected in the comparisons of Schumann measurements over many years.

Nature is cool! 

A new, heavy version of a proton discovered at CERN

 In my classes, we do think in terms of protons and neutrons being composed of smaller particles, called quarks. Specifically, protons are two ups and one down, and neutrons are one up and two downs. 

The new particle that's been observed and measured is called a Xi baryon (baryons are particles composed of three quarks), and is two charm quarks and one down. This has a +1 charge like a proton, and is four times more massive. This was done at the CERN lab, which is in Europe between France and Switzerland. 

Goes to show that there are always new discoveries waiting to be made, even with theories like the Standard Model that's been around since the late 1960s. Cool! 

 In my classes, over the past two weeks, the topic of other life in the universe became a topic everyone is interested in. Students asked for my opinion, and I don't hesitate in telling them that for me, and most serious scientists I know in all fields, I would be shocked if there WASN'T simple life all over the place throughout this universe! I'm talking bacterial or single-cell type life. Now, 'intelligent' - or I use the term 'complex' - life, like us or animals or plants, that is a different story that I don't think anyone has a good grasp of. This is because complex life requires hundreds of millions of years for evolution to do its thing, and that then requires very long periods of time of relative stability, which does not happen for most stars and planets, so that will be a much more challenging thing to wrap our heads around. 

But bacterial type life? We estimated there could be some hundred billion trillion planets in the observable universe! And already many exoplanets have been observed in 'Goldilock's zones where there can be liquid water and other chemicals necessary for life (as we know it). The ingredients for life are all over the place when astronomers look, including water everywhere and even amino acids floating around! If there is any level of environmental and planetary stability for relatively short periods of time, simple life would have a chance to naturally evolve from basic organic chemistry. 

Below is a snippet I found about the first potential evidence suggesting there could be other life on exoplanets: 

James Webb Space Telescope has just delivered the strongest hint yet of alien life! Scientists studying the distant exoplanet K2-18 b (about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo) have detected methane, carbon dioxide, and a possible trace of dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—a molecule that, on Earth, is produced almost exclusively by living organisms such as marine plankton.

K2-18 b sits comfortably in the habitable zone of its star and may be a vast ocean-covered “Hycean world,” a type of planet scientists believe could host microbial life beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The discovery was made by analyzing the planet’s atmosphere as starlight passed through it during a transit, allowing researchers to identify its chemical fingerprints.

While scientists stress that this is not yet definitive proof of life, the presence of these molecules together makes K2-18 b one of the most compelling candidates ever found for extraterrestrial biology. Future observations by the James Webb Space Telescope will attempt to confirm whether the dimethyl sulfide signal is real and determine if biological processes could truly be responsible.

If confirmed, this discovery could mark the first real evidence that life exists beyond Earth, a finding that would forever change our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

                                         From viewspace.org.