Chipotle’s Steve Ells and chef Jamie Oliver have teamed up to underscore the importance of eating wholesome, unprocessed foods.  So, to help illustrate their point, they are asking you to support a good cause while getting into the spirit of the Halloween season with a special promotion that focuses on a terrifying topic: the frightful eating habits of many of our citizens who seem to be addicted to processed foods.

“We have begun a national movement to change the way America eats,” says Oliver, a celebrity chef and creator of the Emmy award-winning program, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

It’s called “BURRITO 2010: The Horrors of Processed Food,” which is a bit different than the fastfood chain’s BOORITO promotion of years past where you could wrap your self in aluminum foil, walk into a Chipotle, claim to be dressed as a burrito and get a free burrito for the trouble.

Here’s how the new promotion works: stop by any Chipotle on Halloween, Sunday, October 31 between 6pm and closing time dressed up as a Horrific Processed Food item and, as a thank you for a $2 donation, you will get a huge, gourmet burrito made to your specifications. Chipotle will then donate up to $1 million dollars to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

Not only that, there also will be an online costume contest that will win one really creative Chipotle lover $2500 for the best horrifying processed food outfit. Five runners up will be awarded $1,000 each. And, twenty honorable mention winners will each receive a burrito party for 20 guests at the Chipotle location of their choice. Take a photo of yourself in costume at a Chipotle on Halloween and post it online at chipotle.com/boorito for judging.

“We have a long-standing tradition of rewarding our customers who dress up as their favorite Chipotle menu item with a free burrito on Halloween,” says Ells, founder, chairman and co-CEO of Chipotle. “It’s always been a fun promotion, but we wanted to do more with it this year and use the opportunity. to reinforce with our customers our belief in the importance of eating wholesome, unprocessed foods.”

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It was one of those University of Virginia events where the panel discussion may have been trumped by the after-party. Certainly, the October 7 “What’s On Your Plate?” symposium gained zest from free local food, free local wine, and free local opinions.

Richard Bean, the infamously disobedient pork-maker arrested in 2007 for misusing “organic” labels, asserted during the Q&A session— when he wasn’t mentioning destitute farmers killing themselves— that instead of the approximately one percent of Americans making their career in agriculture, he’d like to see farmers constitute 25 percent of the population.

“We need 90 percent more cooks,” opined Rowena Morrel, the publisher of In the Kitchen magazine.

Nancy Hurrelbrinck then strolled up to a group gnawing on local kabobs to ask, “Do you know any local sources of rabbits?”

“For pets or meat?” cracked a wiseguy in reference to the famous Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me.

“Mainly, I want the manure for my garden,” explained Hurrelbrinck, citing (more)

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Will commodity prices rebound enough to create another hunger crisis? How will farmers adapt to the possible effects of climate change? Why not come listen to Alan Bjerga, the president of the National Press Club and journalist for Bloomberg News covering agricultural policy, as he considers the implications of food policy during a visit to the Miller Center on Monday, October 25 at 11am.

In 2009, Bjerga won numerous awards for his work in Ethiopia on famine and U.S. food aid. Previously, he worked in the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, where he won the North America Agricultural Journalists’ top writing award in 2005.

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Martha Jefferson Hospital announced today it will merge with Sentara, a regional health care system based out of the Hampton Roads area.

Like Martha Jefferson, Sentara is a not-for-profit. Unlike Martha Jefferson, Sentara already has nine hospitals, including the recently purchased Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge and the July-announced merger with Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg.

“They certainly have been on a tear acquiring hospitals,” says Tom Brown, an attorney with McGuireWoods specializing in healthcare mergers.

Especially attractive to Martha Jefferson, which has revenues of $230 million, is that Sentara, with earnings of $3 billion, has the assets to capitalize the Charlottesville hospital.

Martha Jefferson President Jim Haden says the final numbers for a cash infusion from Sentara will be worked out over the next few months, but he stresses that it was the cultural fit, not the size of Sentara’s bank account, that was most appealing in their union.

“Our goal has always to become a better hospital,” he says, especially in maintaining quality and safety. And to get there, Martha Jefferson needs additional help, he adds.

For instance, Sentera is ranked number one in the country for its integrated systems, says Haden. And the move to electronic medical records is looming.

“It’s not a matter of more hardware,” says nephrologist and board member Kevin McConnell. “but where you use the data.” That could mean pinpointing a cluster of flu outbreaks, or cameras in patients’ homes, a high-tech revival of the near-obsolete house call.

“How do we work out the system so that we can take care of patients in their homes?” asks McConnell, who acknowledges that the desire to provide preventative care and keep people out of the hospital offers a “cognitive dissonance” coming from a hospital.

Martha Jefferson’s Board of Directors began looking for a merger in 2008 and considered five different healthcare systems before settling on Sentara— without a request for proposal.

“Three years ago I thought it was a crazy idea,” says Dr. John Ligush, head of the Martha Jefferson medical staff. “Now I wish we’d done it three years ago.”

According to the release, Sentara has never had a layoff and has no plans for layoffs here. Martha Jefferson Hospital will retain its name and a board of directors to handle local issues. And donations to Martha Jefferson will stay in the community, assures Haden.

Approval of the deal will take about six months.

With healthcare reform, more hospital mergers are likely. “What’s happening is very common,” says attorney Brown. “Hospitals account for one of the least consolidated industries in the country.”

For Martha Jefferson, the deal represents the end of an era. Founded in 1903 as the Martha Jefferson Sanatorium and taking a site near Locust Avenue the following year, it has recently been constructing a new home on Pantops Mountain.

In 2007, several years after announcing that it would leave the city for an 88-acre site at Peter Jefferson Place office park, Martha Jefferson began inviting proposals from developers and revealed just a week ago that it was selling its 8-acre Locust Avenue site for $6.5 million.

The seemingly low price for prime downtown real estate has raised some eyebrows. “That was the best bid we received,” says Haden. And time was a factor with the impending move to Peter Jefferson Place next year. “We didn’t want to leave an empty building,” he says.

The not-as-high-as-expected sale of the property and the merger with Sentara have prompted some speculation that Martha Jefferson is facing financial difficulties.

Not true, says Peter Brooks, a Martha Jefferson board member who serves on its finance committee. “Martha Jefferson is in a very strong position financially,” he says.

Even with building a new $275 million hospital, he says costs have been below projections. Brooks, too, has heard talk that Martha Jefferson is hurting. “It just plain upsets me because it’s just not true,” he declares.

Sentara was founded in 1888 as the Retreat for the Sick in Norfolk. It now provides care at more than 100 sites in Virginia and North Carolina, and its health plan, Optima Health, has 420,000 members.

And according to Martha Jefferson’s McConnell, Sentera’s girth will serve the local hospital well. “Sentara’s size allows them to be heard,” he says. “The government is interested in hearing from health systems about what is working and what isn’t. The larger you are, the better chance to be heard.”

Updated 11:45am.
Updated 4pm.

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It was a busy week for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, losing his quest for climate change documents, asking Craigslist to yank adult ads, and issuing an equally controversial legal opinion on abortion.

“It was obviously a political maneuver,” says Tarina Keene, director of the state chapter of an abortion rights group. Keene estimates that 17 out of the state’s 21 abortion providers could not meet the stricter standards that Cuccinelli’s opinion says the state could mandate. Currently, facilities for first-trimester abortions are classified as physician offices— along with oral surgeons, eye doctors, and urgent care centers.

Keene, who runs NARAL Pro Choice Virginia, protests that other surgeries riskier than abortion, like cosmetic surgery, breast augmentation, and eye surgery, also fall under the “physician offices” category, which is regulated by the Board of Medicine. Outpatient hospitals are under the jurisdiction of the Board of Health.

“Abortion is very well regulated,” she says. “This is sort of a slap in the face to the Board of Medicine.”

When he was in the General Assembly, Cuccinelli tried— unsuccessfully— to pass legislation regulating abortion providers. But in his capacity as AG, when pro-life Delegate Bob Marshall asked for an official opinion on that matter, Cuccinelli determined (more)

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On September 1 a group of seniors from JABA’s Scottsville Community Center hopped on JAUNT buses and headed out to Maple Hill Farm, the 75-acre certified organic farm operated by the nonprofit Local Food Hub and owned by Dave Matthews.

The new program, underwritten by a $10,925 grant to JAUNT by Virginia Senior Transportation, plus $575 in matching funds from the Jefferson Area Board for Aging (JABA), hopes to give older folks better access to fresh local food. The program will allow seniors in Charlottesville and Albemarle, Fluvanna, Louisa, and Nelson counties to shop at local farms, grocery stores and farmer’s markets.

In addition to promoting healthy aging and supporting the local food movement, JABA officials also say the program will give seniors the opportunity to “exercise, socialize and, for the many who grew up on farms, reminisce about raising their own food when they were young.”

Indeed, while foodies crow about the local food movement, many seniors, who grew up around World War II, remember growing and raising their own food as a way of life, first to survive the Great Depression, then as a way to aid the war effort, as “Victory Gardens” were promoted to boost morale and increase the nation’s food supply.

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UVA’s newest hospital building acknowledges a cruel fact of life: Americans are getting fatter— much fatter. At the swanky new Ivy Road facility designed for long-term acute care, 11 of the 40 rooms can handle patients weighing up to 1,000 pounds, thanks to heavy-duty beds and overhead electric lifts.

“It is very innovative,” says Michelle Hereford, associate chief at UVA’s new Transitional Care Hospital. “It decreases injuries and helps with patients being mobile.”

On a reporter’s recent tour of one of the so-called “bariatric” patient rooms, it’s evident that the room is bigger than usual. So are the beds, which are reinforced and capable of holding patients who might qualify for the record books.

Overhead, a monorail-like ribbon of steel snakes across the ceiling. That’s the track for the  Pinnacle brand overhead lift, an electric winch-equipped device that can lift a half-ton patient out of bed and all the way to the bathroom.

Bariatric medicine is booming locally. An estimated 20 to 24 percent (more)

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It was a classic case of she-said/he-said. She said the farewell hug included a grope of her right buttock. He said it was a rub on the back. In Albemarle General District Court Wednesday, Judge Bob Downer found dentist George Tisdelle, 51, guilty of sexual battery, a Class 1 misdemeanor, and gave him 90 days, all suspended.

The young Ruckersville woman who filed the complaint testified that the groping took place on June 3, her last day working at Tisdelle’s Ivy Road practice, where she’d worked for a year.

“He came in to say goodbye,” Kristen Hanlan recalled. “He had his arms out and said, ‘Can I get a squeeze or a hug?’”

Defense attorney Rhonda Quagliana noted that the written complaint filed six days after the incident only mentioned a request for a hug, not a squeeze. And throughout the 90-minute trial, Quagliana portrayed a mere “A-frame hug” that her client allegedly used, with hands on the shoulders in a position far north of the derriere.

Former employee Hanlan disagreed. She portrayed a devilish dentist who pointed out that she was thin and then awkwardly reached southward.

“He came around and grabbed my right butt cheek,” she testified. “I was not expecting that.”

She also testified about an uncomfortable interlude, a months-earlier incident in which (more)

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If you’ve never had a chance to experience renegade farmer Joel Salatin expounding on the values of locally grown food and the government regulations keeping it from you, well, now’s your chance. Salatin will be speaking on the “right to local food” on Saturday, September 4 at ShenanArts at nTelos Theatre, Gypsy Hill Place, located at 300 Churchville Avenue in Staunton.

Salatin, 53, is a full-time farmer in Swoope, just outside of Staunton. His family’s farm, Polyface Farm has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Gourmet, and in two popular documentaries, Food Inc. and Fresh. He was also profiled on the “Lives of the 21st Century” series with Peter Jennings on ABC World News, and his after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date. Polyface achieved iconic status as the grass farm featured in the New York Times bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. And more recently, he was the Hook’s 2009 Person of the Year.

“Why can’t you buy raw milk, ice cream with eggs in it, or home-made sausage? America’s food system, enslaved by a global corporate bureaucratic fraternity, offers less choice amid the perception of abundance,” says Salatin, calling for a lifting of restrictions on local, organic food that give industrial, mass-produced food an unfair advantage.

Salatin, a self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer,” is perhaps the local food movement’s most vocal advocate. Indeed, when he gets started on the topic, its hard not to get inspired by his rebel spirit.

“The only reason the framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights did not guarantee citizens freedom of food choice was because they could not have conceived of a day when private treaty neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce would be demonized and criminalized,” says Salatin, who plans to explain how citizens can reclaim the right to buy food from local, smaller-scale producers at the September event.

Advance tickets are $19.50 for adults, $15.50 for seniors/students, and $8.50 for children 12 and under and are available at several stores in downtown Staunton and online. Tickets at the door will be one single price of $25. Information and tickets are available at transitionstaunton.org.

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Eight months after beloved musician Johnny Gilmore perished in a house fire, the official investigation is complete: the blaze was accidental and likely ignited by a dropped or improperly discarded cigarette. Gilmore died of smoke inhalation, and authorities now cite a high blood alcohol content as a contributing factor in his death. But the answer to one question remains elusive: Could a different type of smoke detector have saved him?

The 45-year-old drummer was home alone in the Green Leaf Townhouses in midtown on Fifth Street, SW on Thursday, October 22, when a smoldering fire ignited in his bedroom. His then 75-year-old father, Curtis Gilmore, with whom the musician lived, arrived home right after 9pm to find smoke emerging from his son’s locked bedroom and called 911. By the time firefighters arrived five minutes later, however, the room had “flashed over”— as the temperature reached 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit and materials spontaneously combusted— and the elder Gilmore, whom the Hook was unable to interview, was injured attempting to break down the door to reach his son. He was treated for smoke inhalation and burns and released from the hospital that night.

In the days following the fire, (more)

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During the last January’s Restaurant Week, $10,156 was raised for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which was exactly $1 from everyone who enjoyed one of the participating restaurant’s prix fixe meals. This time around, $1 from every $26 prix fixe meal sold between July12-18 will go to the The PB&J Fund, which connects Charlottesville youth with the resources and knowledge necessary to help develop a healthy diet. The money raised during RW will go to expanding an impromptu holiday giving program the organization started last year.

By working with community partners to provide healthy meals and teach (more)

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C’ville Foodscapes, one of a trio of new businesses offering home gardening services, will be handing out grants in conjunction with Quality Community Council to help low-income Charlottesville-area residents enjoy their own vegetable gardens in time for the fall growing season.

“When we founded C’ville Foodscapes, it was our goal to provide the knowledge and know-how people need to grow healthy foods in their own yards,” said Patrick Costello, co-owner of the company. “We recognize that for some this is an unaffordable luxury.”

To help fund the new program, the company is seeking donations to the QCC Garden Grants fund. The amount of money raised will determine the amount of the grants.

“We’ll work within those boundaries to do something,” says C’ville Foodscapes co-owner Wendy Roberman, “but we can’t know what that will be until we see the funds and the needs.”

So far, there are plans to hand out one grant this summer, with C’ville Foodscapes working with the winning recipient to build a garden tailored to their needs. In addition, C’ville Foodscapes will visit the grant recipient in the spring to get them started on their spring garden.

A panel of three, including someone from Charlottesville’s Department of Social Services, QCC, and C’ville Foodscapes, will review applications. The deadline for applying for a grant is July 15, and the award(s) will be announced on August 15. More detailed information, as well as applications, are available at www.cvillefoodscapes.com

In the meantime, those wanting to support the program can send their tax-deductible donations to “QCC Garden Grants” either by mail or in person to “Attn: Garden Grants Program,” Quality Community Council, 327 W. Main St. Suite 101, Charlottesville 22903.

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On Saturday, June 5 the Charlottesville City Market will host its first annual ‘Dots Day’ forum, i.e. ‘Connecting the Dots in our Local Food System,’ which will allow City Market-goers to learn more about our local food system. Shoppers and chefs alike will find resources to identify local growers, home gardening and poultry-raising tips, community garden information and volunteer opportunities, seasonal cooking demonstrations, food preserving tips, and much more. The goal of the events, say City Market organizers, is to “encourage greater participation in strengthening our local food system.”

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Police have arrested 22-year-old UVA men’s lacrosse player George Huguely and charged him with first degree murder in the death of Yeardley Love, a fellow UVA fourth year and a member of the women’s lacrosse team. Love was discovered in her apartment at 222 14th Street on May 3 at around 2:15am by one of her two roommates, who called 911.

Speaking at a press conference Monday afternoon, Police Chief Tim Longo says that while emergency responders initially believed they would be dealing with an alcohol overdose, upon arrival they realized the situation was more serious.

There was “obvious” trauma to Love’s body, Longo says, and efforts to revive her failed. Longo says he doesn’t believe a weapon was involved, and says a cause of death will be determined following an autopsy.

Love and Huguely had been in a relationship, Longo says, however the nature of that relationship and its status as of the fateful night are focal points of the investigation. Longo said he did not believe Huguely has a criminal record and says Love had not sought a restraining order against Huguely— nor had police been called to the apartment for previous domestic disturbances.

The crime has stunned the university community, which for the past week had been celebrating the men’s lacrosse team’s ACC Championship victory. (more)

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Local blogger Waldo Jaquith asks the question: Where can I find healthful food? Jaquith is in the process of moving (don’t worry, it’s only a few miles), and so cooking at home won’t be an option for awhile. So he’s asked his readers to help him out. It’s a good question. Where are the best places to eat out healthy-style? Over at Jaquith’s blog, some nominees are Rev Soup, Eppie’s, Zazus, Whole Foods, Bodo’s, Sticks, and even Chipotle with its Joel Salatin pork.

“This is something I’ve been meaning to ask about here for awhile,” writes Jaquith.”My wife and I allow ourselves to eat out together one time each week— a lunch or a dinner on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday— and one lunch out during the work week, and quite frequently I’m looking for something that I’m not going to feel guilty about later.”

So let’s help him out; what’s your favorite healthy food destination?

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Former Charlottesville-area resident and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, 53, has breast cancer, the New York Times reports. The cancer was discovered in February, and she’ll undergo radiation in May.

“I call this my personal 9/11 because I realized my life would never be the same,” she tells the Times.

However, this is not Navratilova’s first brush with death, at least according to a 1992 book which tells a harrowing tale from Albemarle County.

In Lady Magic, basketball star Nancy Lieberman alleges that nearly 30 years ago Navratilova dodged a gunshot fired by her then lover, writer Rita Mae Brown, at the house shared by the couple just west of Charlottesville.

Lieberman, now an ESPN/ABC sports commentator, details in the autobiography how she (more)

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Michael Hunt nearly didn’t go to the Food Lion with his wife that Sunday afternoon. He reluctantly agreed to go, and then said he’d wait in the car. And those two choices are why three-year-old Victoria Snow is alive today.

In the same Scottsville parking lot on March 21, Jarred Snow waited in the car with Victoria, who had been ill, while his girlfriend ran in to the store to pick up something for dinner.

“I put Gatorade in a cup, and she drank it really fast,” Snow, 22, recounts. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Victoria was throwing up and then went into a seizure.

“I got her out of the car and she was shaking in my arms and went limp,” says Snow. “I was yelling, ‘Please somebody help me.’” (more)

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