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

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Cooper is familiar with the struggles of similar healthy-lunch campaigns, such as that of Jamie Oliver in Britain, where parents have smuggled hamburgers through school-yard fences to their children who refused to eat his freshly made meals. But for the most part, says Cooper, Berkeley parents have been supportive.

High schoolers are her toughest sell, says Cooper. Berkeley High School allows students to leave campus during lunch, and many of them head for the nearby strip of fast-food joints. But some stay to enjoy Cooper's menu.

"The salad bar is becoming more popular," says Mateo Aceves, a senior, who raves about the choices of fresh ingredients, including a variety of greens, beets, and feta cheese in a phone interview. Freshman Ilana Wexler puts it this way: "I don't care if it's not cool among freshmen to eat from the salad bar – if only because they want to leave school. I love it."

Perhaps Mateo and Ilana are especially enthusiastic since they have worked in the garden where the salad-bar vegetables are grown. As students at the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, they participated in the nationally acclaimed "Edible Schoolyard," where students grow and cook the food served in their cafeteria. The program was started in 1995 by Alice Waters, California cuisine pioneer and owner of the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley.

"Somehow," says Ilana of her middle school experience, "the food tasted better just knowing that our hands were involved in making it. I felt such a sense of pride."

Many say that involving children in the process of growing and cooking their meals – and learning about food in the classroom – is essential to Cooper's goal of changing their relationship to food. But first one must enlist the support of adults.

Eric Weaver knows all about the significance of social marketing for this cause. Mr. Weaver was part of the original group of Berkeley parents who said "enough" to greasy pizza and canned peaches. About 10 years ago, when he and his colleagues on the Child Nutrition Advisory Committee first proposed their ideas about changing the school menu, they were told, especially by the food service director at the time, that "kids won't eat unless you give them [the garbage] they are used to."

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