'Lunch Lady' promotes healthy eating, local grown food

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‘Lunch Lady’ promotes healthy eating, local grown food

“Life expectancy gaps and achievement gaps are growing,” Ann Cooper, author, chef, educator and healthy school lunch advocate, said.

Sometimes known as the renegade lunch lady, she launched her presentation at the Edible Education speaker series this week with a simple slide. On one side “Hungry kids can’t think.” And on the other “Malnourished kids can’t learn.”

“This is an equity issue,” she said, noting that in Boulder, Colo., her food budget leaves her with 85 cents to $1 for each child per day. “We don’t want to live in a world where only the rich survive.”

“Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, whole grains, healthy proteins … that is what I want to serve kids instead of chicken nuggets, tater tots, eXtremo burritos, corn dogs and the like,” she added.

In Oakland – one of the most innovative urban farming cities of the West according to Sunset magazine – changing student lunches is not only about adding nutrition as is Cooper’s focus, but about using smaller distributors and locally grown food – and of serving an increasingly healthy, needy student body.

Of Oakland’s 101 schools, 90 have breakfast programs, 90 provide after school snacks, 22 use fresh fruits and vegetables during snack periods, 23 have on-site farmers markets that accept EBT and 90 will soon be part of a supper program following a pilot launch this month. In addition to providing more healthy meals for district students, the Oakland Unified School District will roll out “Harvest of the Month” this year. The program will feature local healthy produce grown within 250 miles of Oakland.

Today, 68 to 70 percent of students qualify for free and reduced lunches in Oakland’s school district, according to Jennifer LeBarre, director of nutrition services with OUSD.

“Schools are where many students are getting their healthiest meals,” she said.

According to Cooper, working in a school district where 25 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch, is no easier than working in one where more are eligible, such as in Berkeley. Cooper has worked to install salad bars in both districts and says that the process of changing school lunches is tough work that needs to happen. Often, she said, the process is as much about talking with parents as it is about adapting children’s paletes.

Speeding through the inefficiencies of the national school lunch program and highlighting the nutritional impacts on children during Tuesday’s session , Cooper’s alarmed voice rang out statistics on diabetes, calcium deficiencies (and deficiency myths), the farmer to prisoner ratio and Capri-Sun among other school lunch subjects. Along the way she detailed why students need more time for lunch and why school lunches are everyone’s responsibility. In a non-politically correct, this is how I see it way, she described why kids need healthier lunches and how getting more vegetables in a child’s diet can be achieved. She also shared why her experience shows that they will eat healthier options.

“We need to make changes,” Cooper said. “We just need to teach kids what real food is. We can do it. All of us. We need to come together as a community to really think about what we are feeding our kids.”

Cooper also stressed that allies need to focus on one goal at a time. Is OUSD spreading itself too thin? This is one deliciously ambitious task that we will all have to follow.

Catch the next sessions in this 13-week Edible Education course at the University of California, Berkeley. Watch it live online or see it in person. Tickets are available via TicketWeb.

Oct. 18 – Global Economies of Food: GMOs, and Feeding the World, Raj Patel

Oct. 25 – Agriculture and Social Justice, Eric Schlosser, Greg Asbed and Lucas Benitez

Nov. 1 – What is an Edible Education?, Alice Waters

Nov. 8 – Food and the Environment, Frances Moore Lappé and Gidon Eshel

Nov. 22 – TBD, Van Jones

Nov. 29 – Place Based Models of Change, Brahm Ahmadi, Hank Herrera

Read a school lunch blog:

http://fedupwithlunch.com/

http://www.thelunchtray.com/

http://betterdcschoolfood.blogspot.com/

http://unpackingschoollunch.wordpress.com/

http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com