To defend our way of life abroad we may need to reconsider how much junk food it involves at home.

It’s not every day that former generals and admirals speak out about children’s health and education. But last Thursday was one of those days. According to Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization led by retired senior military leaders, 75 percent of 17 to 24 year olds cannot enlist in the military because they fail to graduate high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.

One trend called out in the report deserves special attention: America’s obesity epidemic not only limits the military’s recruiting base, but is a growing drain on the Department of Defense budget and hurts the readiness of our forces. The numbers are alarming. Since 1998, the rate at which active-duty servicemembers received a medical diagnosis of being overweight or obese increased more than 2.5-fold.

We all know Americans are gaining weight. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, double the rate in 1980; around two-thirds are at least overweight. (An adult with a body mass index between 25 and 29.9 is overweight; 30 or higher is obese. Someone 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing 169 lbs, for example, is considered overweight. If that same person weighed more than 203 lbs, he would be obese.)

There’s no mystery behind this phenomenon. Less than 10 percent of high school students consume the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables daily. Less than one-third meet the recommended levels of physical activity. Children and adolescents average several hours of TV, DVD, and movie-watching daily. Sugar-sweetened drinks are everywhere, including schools.

These lifestyles, however, are reflected in our military, and the costs are considerable. One-quarter of DoD beneficiaries (which includes servicemembers and their families, and retirees) are obese, little better than in the general U.S. population, while 40 percent are overweight. As in the civilian sector, the military health system is spending a lot of money treating conditions that obesity promotes, like heart disease and diabetes. The DoD estimates its healthcare costs attributable to obesity at $2 billion per year, more than for alcohol- and tobacco-related conditions combined. The cost is sure to grow under an expanded DoD entitlement program for retirees (the Congressional Budget Office projects a near-doubling of DoD healthcare costs, from $46 to $85 billion, during the next 30 years), and could constrain other critical DoD medical treatment and prevention programs.

Then, of course, there is the impact on individual military members. The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center reports that rates of joint and back disorders—among the leading causes of lost duty time—in overweight or obese active duty servicemembers are three times higher than the overall active duty rate. Nearly one-quarter of servicemembers diagnosed as obese or overweight last year also were diagnosed with a joint disorder during the previous year.

Obesity may even play a role in the mental consequences of war, a link we’re only just beginning to understand. This year, a large DoD epidemiological study that includes many personnel who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan reported that servicemembers who don’t see themselves as healthy—which we know correlates with being overweight or obese—were at significantly higher risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The link between America’s obesity epidemic and national security is becoming clear to public health experts like Dr. Richard Carmona, who is especially qualified to recognize the connection. He enlisted in the Army, served in Special Forces, and was a combat-decorated Vietnam veteran before beginning his medical career and going on to serve as President George W. Bush’s Surgeon General. Dr. Carmona said recently that “Obesity is not just a health issue” but “affects our national and global security.”

The DoD is launching new initiatives against obesity. The military health system recently completed a pilot project using an internet-based program to help beneficiaries lose weight. Commissaries now have shelf signs with dietary tips based on U.S. Government dietary guidelines. More important, probably, is to help children establish healthy lifestyle habits. Investing in early education on food and health is a good bargain for America whether or not these children choose military service later.

And that’s something that healthy lifestyle campaigners and supporters a strong military—not always a natural constituency—can agree on.

The ocean is an important factor in absorbing and mitigating Earth’s carbon emissions, but it is becoming overloaded with carbon. Between 2000 and 2001, its absorbtion rate decreased by 10 percent.

For the full recap of this week in GOOD, head here.

Photo by Richard Mosse, from this week’s Picture Show, “Breach.”

The University of California is an awesome institution. Its ten campuses give 150,000 college students a high-quality public education every year and UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Boalt Hall can compete with any super-expensive private school on quality and reputation. UC Davis is largely responsible for California’s fantastic wine, and for some reason UCLA is crazy famous in Asia. It’s a model for public higher education.

But the University of California has been getting less awesome because it’s been getting less affordable. The state has been giving the University of California less money, and the UC system is passing the favor along by hiking up rates for students. This year, the UC’s Board of Regents is raising college tuition another 32 percent. A year at UCLA will now cost $10,300, three times the price in 1999. Students are rightfully outraged.

But you know what California has managed to find the money for? Warehousing people in prison. This chart from Kevin Drum shows the parallel between tuition hikes at the UC schools and money spent on “corrections” in the state.

Do you think making the UC schools less affordable will create more or fewer future criminals? That’s a rhetorical question. The budget issues are complex, but it’s ridiculous to be spending this kind of public money on prison and denying it for education.

Photo from Flickr user Epioles (cc).

Serenity now!

Cookbooks often read better as literature than as technical lab manuals. That shouldn’t stop us from reading them, or from improvising our recipes.

We no longer learn to cook solely from generations-old oral traditions. Our recipes don’t tend to get handed down from village bakers, local brewers, or blood relatives. So, when the holidays hit, chances are we’ll head to the bookshelves for ways to make stuffing or cranberry sauce. This approach is not without its pitfalls. As John Thorne—the “outlaw cook” known for his renegade newsletter, Simple Cooking, which has developed a devoted cult following—wrote, “Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don’t like bringing them to the stove with me.” The same could be said for laptops or iPhones.

Cookbooks, it seems, sometimes serve better as bedtime reading than they do as lab manuals for cookery. Adam Gopnik writes in this week’s New Yorker: “Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved.” After all, cooking well involves a knack that you can’t pick straight off the page.

So why not forget about following recipes altogether and watch the the Food Channel’s girl next door whipping up a luscious tomato salad. And then order take out? When blogger Jason Kottke discovered that the mouthwatering recipe for ramen in David Chang’s new cookbook required kombu and five pounds of pork bones, he said the book acted less like a cookbook and more like a Trojan horse for luring new customers into Chang’s restaurants.

Another problem with cookbooks is that following recipes to the letter inhibits the impromptu adaptive stuff that happens when you have to substitute, improvise, or fix your mistakes. The British food writer Nigel Slater compared recipes to wearing a straight jacket or compromisingly tight Spandex. Exacting recipes transform the engaging, romantic alchemy of cooking back into a laborious, anxiety-ridden chore.

There’s little doubt that certain recent cooking tomes of biblical proportion (some weighing in at up to 12 pounds) don’t really seem designed for kitchen instruction. They’re meant to tell stories, whether those stories are about perfecting techniques or about creating unreproducible seared duck breasts. Except for the exacting science of molecular gastronomy, which takes persnickety-ness to its furthest extreme with spheroid balls of solidified tea and freeze dried lobster tails, more cookbooks are shedding absolute, codified recipes in favor of instructions designed to inspire culinary improvisation.

Which brings us to one of the biggest recipe food fights in recent memory: The battle between Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated, on one side—representing the professional tried-and-true, thoroughly tested recipe measured down to the last ounce, in one corner—and the online food wiki, Food52, on the other—representing the open-source, evolving, experimental recipes from any home tinkerer’s kitchen. Kimball has been criticized for dry, bloodless writing, whereas Food52 can come across as just another collection of half-baked recipes—a modern form of the community cookbooks put out by the Ladies Auxiliary. Next month, the two are hoping to stage a showdown that will settle which method makes the best recipes.

The primary point of their standoff may—like cookbooks themselves—be entertaining storytelling. Cooking ultimately comes down to the cook—not a recipe. Home cooks who can’t derive a good meal from a cooking magazine won’t do better using intuition alone—or a wiki model. But, hey, if there’s conflict and resolution, it’s a good recipe for a book, a home-for-the-holidays meal, or a protracted online food fight. I know I’ll be watching.

Luckily for me and all travelers, the TSA knows how complicated deciding what fits into the ever-nebulous “gel, aerosol, and liquid” category, especially with holiday specific items, so they’ve published this helpful list of holiday foodstuffs not to bring on the plane:

• Cranberry sauce
• Creamy dips and spreads
  (cheeses, peanut butter, etc.)
• Gift baskets with food items
  (salsa, jams and salad dressings)
• Gravy
• Jams
• Jellies

• Maple syrup
• Oils and vinegars
• Salad dressing
• Salsa
• Sauces
• Soups
• Wine, liquor, and beer

Also, no snow globes. Remember, knowing is half the battle.

Via TPM.

The test drive found some kinks still to work out (sometimes the generator becomes not silent, but very, very loud), but this is a pretty exceptionally good review of what could be the car that changes a lot of things—both for the environment and the American automotive industry—when it’s released in nine months.

And here is an accompanying slideshow of Volt porn.

Ped Shed over Drive Shed

This is part 19 of a continuing brainstorm on the future of cities, inaugurated at the CEOs for Cities Velocity conference in September, 2009. We’ll post a new idea each day until we run out, at which point we’re counting on you to come up with something smart. Do you have a good idea for improving your city? Add it in the comments below, or tweet it to @GOOD with hashtag #cityideas—we’ll publish the best ones. Monday’s idea: Google Analytics for Government.

Today on Twitter we asked our followers when they last went to see a doctor or dentist and whether the visit was covered by health insurance. We collected some of our favorite responses below. We ask a question to our Twitter faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________