Lunch lady with a mission: getting kids to eat healthy

Despite hate mail and 'hunger strikes,' a California chef sticks it out to help kids build a better relationship to food.

from the March 21, 2007 edition

WE grew lunch: Ann Cooper holds a basket of produce. Kids like eating food they grow, she finds.

COURTESY OF EDIBLE SCHOOLYARD

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Ann Cooper is not your typical lunch lady. She is more likely to wear a chef's toque than a hairnet and her roasted chicken and potatoes bear no resemblance to nuggets and Tater Tots. The former chef, who spent much of her 30-plus-year career working in white-tablecloth restaurants and catering for celebrities, is now best known as the "Lunch Lady" in Berkeley, Calif., schools. In cafeterias there she has tossed out fried, frozen, and sugary foods and replaced them with fresh, seasonal, and mostly organic meals.

Driven to reform school lunches as concerns grow over childhood obesity and diabetes, Ms. Cooper gets up at 3:30 each morning to begin cooking school lunches by 5 a.m. Somehow, she also eked out time recently to write "Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children," which offers inspiration, guidance, and recipes to those wishing to duplicate her efforts in their own school districts.

Cooper is motivated by more than alarming health reports. She believes there's a direct correlation between what kids eat and how they perform at school, that knowledge of food is integral to one's education, and that all children deserve delicious and nutritious meals. Most of all, she says: "I want to change children's relationship to food." Given that kids are bombarded daily by persuasive ads selling them on a diet of fries, chips, and soda; that fast food is often part of a child's reward; and that families are so time-strapped they clamor for convenience foods, hers seems quite a lofty goal.

But she has gotten off to an impressive start. When she began working as director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in the fall of 2005, about 95 percent of the cafeteria food was processed. Today, 95 percent is made from scratch. BUSD encompasses 16 schools and about 9,000 students, roughly 4,500 of whom buy lunch at school each day. That number has been growing recently, but Cooper doesn't always get high-fives for her efforts.

"I have received hate mail," she says. "Kids speak up if they don't like something." She recalls a group of fifth-graders who told her: "Ms. Cooper, we hate your food. We're going on a hunger strike." Their biggest complaint was her recipe for grilled-cheese sandwiches, which used fresh-baked, whole-wheat bread and quality cheddar cheese. Cooper invited these students into the kitchen to learn how to make bread and taste cheeses other than the day-glo-orange variety they craved. Eventually, they came around, and by the following year, they told the incoming group of fifth graders: " 'You are so lucky. We fixed all the food here for you.' "

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