Lunch Lessons from the Renegade Lunch Lady

• Children born in the year 2000 will be the first in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents.
• More than 35 percent of our nation’s children are overwieght, 25 percent are obese, and 14 percent have type 2 diabetes, a condition previously seen primarily in adults.
• Current research shows that 40 percent of all cancers are attributable to diet.
• 78 percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA’s nutritional guidelines.

These are just a few of the sobering statistics in Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, a new book by Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes. Luckily, most of the book is meant as an antidote to the gloomy prognosis. It offers both inspirational tales of making a difference and practical advice for parents and teachers wishing to do so in their homes and schools.

Ann Cooper was kind enough to speak with me about her book and her vision for changing children’s relationship to food. Cooper is a former executive chef and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA)—no culinary lightweight. She is now director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District, but calls herself a “renegade lunch lady.” Together with Holmes (also a CIA grad), she is working to make schools not just places where children can eat good food, but where they can learn healthy habits for life and understand the interactions among food, producers, and the environment. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” she explained. “Healthy food, healthy planet, healthy kids.”

The first chapter of the book covers basic childhood nutrition. It’s not just a “recommended servings” guide, though, but also describes what parents can do to instill good eating habits. Cooper told me, “It’s really important not to be a ‘short-order cook.’ Kids need to be exposed to cooking and food. They need to go shopping, to a farmers’ market or farm, plant a seed in a cup.” Simple things, like sitting down and eating at the table together, or letting kids help you choose what to buy at the supermarket, can make a difference. By middle school, kids can even assist with menu planning—give them one day a week that’s theirs, she suggests.

Cooper and Holmes then turn to the meal most often out of parents’ control: school lunches. They give a brief history of school lunches from their origins in 18th-century Europe, and then look at several modern schools that have built exemplary lunch programs. The chefs and directors of these programs are breaking the image of school cafeterias provisioned by semi-trailers full of canned goods and heat-and-serve entrées. Instead, they are forging supply chains with small-scale local farmers and planting gardens themselves. Not only is the food better, but the children gain a better sense of where their food comes from. In many cases, the farmers send letters and pictures of themselves to the classrooms or have the children visit their farms.

Cooper’s first lunchroom success was at the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, a private school in a wealthy area. Her book describes similar transformations, however, in schools from Berkeley, California, to Appleton, Wisconsin, to Harlem in New York City. These schools aren’t simply eliminating vending machines and shipping in fresh apples. They are also integrating food education into the classroom. When students were studying ancient Greece, one kitchen staff researched and prepared foods the Greeks may have eaten. They even brought the kids into the kitchen and had them roll grape leaves while listening to the staff talk about the importance of pickling as a way of preserving foods long ago. At King Middle School in Berkeley, all students take turns tending the garden and later cooking the food they have grown. “It’s a three-legged stool,” Cooper said. “Delicious, nutritious food, cooking and gardening classes, and incorporating food into the academic curriculum.”

Cooper and Holmes aren’t naive enough to believe they can solve the problem of school lunches just by planting some gardens and making friends with local farmers. They recognize there’s an infrastructure problem, with many schools having no kitchen equipment other than “hot boxes” for heating premade meals. They call on the government to spend more money on food. The current average reimbursement from the USDA for a “free” school lunch is $2.34, they say. Only 80 to 90 cents of this is spent on food, with the rest going to payroll and overhead. Take off another 18 to 20 cents for milk, and you have only 50 or 60 cents left for a 600- to 700-calorie lunch. Cooper wants to take matters right to the top. “I would like to see these issues elevated to be part of the 2008 presidential debate,” she said to me. “They need to be understood in a broad perspective.”

In the meantime, she and Holmes caution in their book, “We have to stop relying on the government to do the right thing for our kids.” Parents and caregivers must involve themselves in local schools and districts to implement and monitor good food policies. At the end of the book, they reprint the Model Wellness Policy Guide from the Center for Ecoliteracy, which parents and educators can use as a template to develop their own. They also provide a good hundred pages or so of recipes for lunch and snacks—great for home use, but originally developed at the various schools profiled earlier, and suitable for incorporation in other food programs. None of this works, however, if parents don’t support at home what kids learn in school. “You can start by not buying things you don’t want your kids to eat,” they write.

Nutrition and recipes are only part of the equation, and Cooper and Holmes also delve into the need for us to reduce, reuse, and recycle as well as be conscious of the chemicals we use on our gardens and around the house. It’s a lot to cram into 250 pages, making for a dense, all-natural energy bar of a book. Like an energy bar, however, it needs to be supplemented by other foods, and the authors provide, with a long list of organizations, programs, and other resources. Cooper suggested to me that parents start by looking at the Center for Ecoliteracy and the School Lunch Initiative. I’d also recommend Cooper’s own Web site, Lunch Lessons, which includes a similar list of resources, recipes, her blog, and more.

Lunch Lessons should be required reading for any parent with school-age or pre-school children. If you take even a few of its many suggestions for improving your children’s (and your own) relationship with food, they, and you, and maybe even the planet will be the better for it.