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My Journey in School Food, Part 1
By Ann Cooper —
Not a day goes by without the media addressing America’s growing obesity crisis, and lately the discussion has settled on our children. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that if American children don’t get their weight in check, their anticipated health problems will significantly shorten their lives, making them the first generation in our nation’s history to die at younger ages than their parents.
For children born in the year 2000, the CDC projects that one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African Americans and Hispanics will contract diabetes in their lifetime, most before they graduate high school. This means that within 10 years — by 2018 — up to 40 percent of all school age children could be insulin dependent. The potential health ramifications are overwhelming, and even more so because this is all preventable.
On top of this, the state of our nation’s food system is unconscionable. Agribusiness controls 90 percent of our food supply, and most Americans know little about how the food they consume is produced.
As a chef and an advocate for children’s health and life-long wellness, I hope to inspire action on the part of parents, administrators, health care professionals and advocates to make change — before it’s too late.
Why focus on children’s health? Because they’re the ones most easily influenced to change. If children are educated from the start to make better food choices, they will carry these “lunch lessons” well into adulthood.
Today, as the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District, I coordinate 90 employees in 17 locations, who serve over 8,000 meals per day and touch the lives of all of the 9,600 students in the district. We are responsible for producing and serving delicious, nutritious food in the cafeterias, as well as for the implementation of the district’s hands-on cooking and gardening curriculum. Our vision is to “teach every child to seek, grow, prepare and eat nourishing, delicious and sustainably grown food, empowering them to make choices that have a positive influence on their personal health, family, community and surrounding environment.”
My journey began at the Ross School, a private school on Long Island, where we transformed the lunch program by hiring professionally trained chefs, redesigning the dining area, and, most important, expanding the menu to include regional, organic, seasonal, sustainable fare. Meat moved off the center of the plate, and vegetables, grains, and legumes took center stage. Salads became a school favorite, and, best of all, wellness and nutrition education were adopted as permanent elements of the school’s curriculum. The program was a huge success, but everyone wondered if something like it could be established in public schools.
Alice Waters was the first to bring such changes to public schools with her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California. When I was offered the opportunity to implement change throughout the food system that serves the Berkeley Unified School District, I decided it was time to jump into the “belly of the beast” — public school food.
The challenges we continue to face in the Berkeley public schools are many, but over the past three years we have transformed the lunch program of the entire district. The next few posts in this series will take a look at how we have addressed food, finance, facilities, education and marketing to create a successful program. Finally, I’ll lay out the changes we need on the Federal level to promote the health of our children. Stay tuned for the next installment.
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