CHILDRENS' HEALTH
Ann Cooper's Non-negotiable Lunchroom
Real Lunch Reform, "The social justice issue of our time."
Arlie Maylin
Garden of Healing®
Ann Cooper is "the renegade lunch lady". Armed with vegetables, organic milk and a non-negotiable additude toward high-fructose corn syrup, Cooper's crusade is to transform 11,000 school districts nationwide, one lunchroom at a time.
Cooper is every parent's dream, setting the tone for their child's food-consumption future, by serving them real food, at that most impressionable age. Memories die hard, especially when it comes to bad, unhealthy and/or unappetizing foods from childhood.
Ann Cooper came on the scene in 2005, when she joined the Berkeley Unified School District in California as Director of Nutrition Services. Once having transformed the diets of 9,000 students in Berkeley, she set her sights on taking her mission and menu to school cafeterias nationwide.
"We can either pay for lifelong wellness now, or pay later for a tsunami of diabetes. And (these) kids can't learn if they're not well nourished," says Cooper.
When Cooper took the Director of Nutrition Services job in 2005, she found that the district's food-service system had completely retreated from actual cooking. "When I arrived, 100 percent of the food arrived in plastic, was reheated in plastic, and served to the kids in plastic," she says.
Overcoming an absurdly stringent budget and severely limited cooking infrastructure within school cafeterias, she has already eliminated what she calls "plastic food" and is now serving fresh, made-from-scratch meals.
"High-fat, high-sugar, high-salt diets with very few fruits and vegetables and no whole grains will lead to a generation of kids who, for the first time, will die at a younger age than their parents," she added.
In June 2009, Cooper took her campaign for school lunch reform nationwide by overseeing the nonprofit F3 Foundation (Food Family Farming), which offers a lunch box of free tools covering menu planning, student nutrition, recipes, and sourcing techniques.
Cooper's demands are non-negotiable - all-organic milk, no high-fructose corn syrup, and whole grains. But she does recognize that each school district is its own distinct entity with unique challenges.
"We just make the best choices we can," she explained. "But I'd like to affect policy on a national level. That's where the big change will come."
3F Foundation:
http://www.foodfamilyfarming.org/
© 2009 Arlie Ian Maylin/Garden of Healing®. All rights reserved.
