Healthy Food

On Sunday from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Longview Center for Agriculture in Collegeville, Greener Partners will host its weekly Tiny Test Kitchen workshop for ages 5 to 9. The theme is Jack and the Beanstalk and the feature ingredient will be the green bean. Vegetarian farm volunteer Jacqueline Melendez will teach participants about local and seasonal eating. Kids will tour the farm, pick the vegetables, and clean and chop them on their own. After the tour kids will create their own green bean dish.

If you went to the Chinatown Night Market expecting oodles of unusual Asian dishes, you may have been disappointed. If, on the other hand, you went to explore unusual dishes from China, Indonesia, Mexico, the Caribbean, Italy, France and more - and enjoy beer, bubble tea, and Lion Dancing under a harvest moon, you would have been pleased. Thousands were. A crowd of 10,000 was expected at this, fourth night market planned by The Food Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing affordable, healthy food to neighborhoods throughout the city.

All week, celebrities have been eating at fancy restaurants: the Palm, Le Bec-Fin, Susanna Foo. VIPs have been chauffeured all over the city. Just yesterday, in fact, George W. was down the street, visiting Gerald Ford at Hahnemann. Al Sharpton was across the park, harassing the district attorney. Arnold Schwarzenegger and that junior hunk, George P. Bush, lunched three blocks away at Circa. But would anyone famous come to the King of Falafel, the Middle Eastern food cart at the corner of 16th and JFK?

"Don't come in here with no soup, 'cause that's not Thanksgiving. " That's the edict 73-year-old Gertrude Johnson, the queen of the kitchen, issues to her fellow Faith Chapel volunteers, who prepare and serve meals for over 100 Germantown residents on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. They must take it to heart, because I didn't even see a ladle. What I saw was a feast - turkey, ham, stuffing, string beans, salads, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, rice and gravy, and apple, pumpkin, and lemon cream pies.

FORMER FLYERS BRUISER Riley Cote wants you to know that just because he founded an organization called Hemp Heals, that does not make him a pothead. Cote, whose foundation is sponsoring a Saturday concert at Festival Pier featuring Cypress Hill and Sublime , says he was inspired to launch a pro-hemp charity when his sister Jaime , who has multiple sclerosis, found that eating foods with hempseed ameliorated her symptoms. Cote, who lives in Delaware when he isn't coaching the Adirondack Phantoms in New York, says he believes in the value of medical marijuana, but the hemp plant he endorses is different from the one that produces the drug, as it contains no THC, the active ingredient in pot. "People are foreign to it, but hemp is a superfood, like almonds," Cote explains.

CHICAGO - Duct tape covers a large crack in the premier booth at Hard Time Josephine's Cooking, where waitresses call you "sweetie" and customers come for the steaming shrimp bisque and homemade peach cobbler that leaves a hint of cinnamon on the tongue. Not long ago, such an eyesore at one of Chicago's top soul-food restaurants would have been unthinkable. Despite the name, times were good: Chicago was a bustling center of black America, and people in the neighborhoods savored Southern-style cooking.

The children at Thelma Peake's West Philadelphia child-care center mind their peas and cukes - and broccoli, beans, oranges and carrots. The 75 youngsters in her full-time program typically get four servings of fruits and vegetables a day before they go home for dinner, putting them a long way toward the five-a-day benchmark that most Americans fail to meet. This is no small feat in a neighborhood where most shops offer little more than hoagies, pizzas and fried foods, where the local supermarket shut down, and where residents say produce is often expensive.

Family farmers in our region grow some of the highest-quality food in the world. Unfortunately, making a living as a family farmer has become increasingly difficult. As a result, Pennsylvania is losing two farms a day. This is a staggering blow for the families who lose their livelihood - and for our region, which is losing its food and landscape. There also is an impact on public health. As obesity and diabetes continue growing as serious health threats, one has to question the logic of reducing the amount of fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables that are available to consumers.

It seems counterintuitive, like bringing in a righthander to pitch to Ryan Howard in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded: Reflagging half a busy concession stand in the concourse at Citizens Bank Park to sell turkey burgers, salads, grilled chicken wraps, hummus and pita chips, carrots and celery, and sugar-free Tastykakes. But it's here, behind third base, beneath a new green sign heralding "Philly Fresh. " Hot dogs and other stadium staples are sold in the other half of the South Philadelphia Market stand - the side, it must be noted, with the longer lines.

The cheers started, then swelled, as Casey Caruso, wearing a broad-brim hat festooned with small, dangling fruit replicas, grabbed a mike in the cafeteria at Great Valley Middle School. "The veggie ladies are back," she told her lunchtime audience of 360 sixth graders. As Caruso and her partner, Trudy Skibbe, walked between tables, eager hands reached out to grab the treats they were serving: slices of butternut-squash pizza, cooked with onions, rosemary and olive oil, and topped with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese.