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
Page 3 of 4
In response, his committee cooked pots of soup, made fresh salad, and bought bread from the best bakery in town and then served the meal to kids – who devoured it with gusto. The school board was convinced. Soon after, a supportive new superintendent came on board, and Alice Waters brought in chef Ann Cooper as the new food service director.
"Ann is a virtuoso chef and had never been a food service director," says Weaver. "So she threw out the whole standard operating procedure and started all over again. She is the essential element to making this happen."
Other school districts can take a page out of "Lunch Lessons," in which Cooper and her coauthor, Lisa Holmes, explain the basics of childhood nutrition and suggest recipes for breakfast, brown-bag lunches, and snacks. They also offer guidance to parents and school workers seeking to bring about program changes.
Most significant, they write, is bringing about change on the national level. Ever since Reagan's presidency, the USDA-approved National School Lunch Program, which was signed into law by President Truman in 1946, has been underfunded, they say. Public school lunches are today subsidized at a rate of $2.42 per child, which includes payroll and benefits (about 60 percent at most schools). In the end, about $1 is spent on school lunches per child. It's no wonder, Cooper says, that school districts buy meals as cheaply as possible, which typically means processed, fast-food choices sold by corporate giants backed by the USDA.
Cooper would like nothing more than to see childhood nutrition and school-lunch subsidies become hot topics on the 2008 presidential trail. Subsidies need to increase by at least $1 per child per day, she says. Currently federal spending on school lunch programs is about $7 billion per year. The Chez Panisse Foundation, which is also paying her salary through a grant, gives Cooper $3.50 per child for each of the fresh meals she serves in Berkeley.
"Sure," says Cooper, "quality food is going to be more costly, but what is the true cost to our environment and our kids' health?"
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