Obama Brings Up a New Side of School Lunch: Student Taste
President Obama has been talking about school lunch a lot lately, but last week he touched on a new side of the issue. In response to a question about healthy eating at a forum on health care, Obama brought up what I see as one of the biggest obstacles to ...
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August 24, 2009
A Call to Put Away the Lunch Box
I get Google Alerts about blog posts and articles that mention "school lunch," and lately the emails have had lots of links to stories about how to pack a healthy midday meal. I've been getting alerts about everything from packable recipe ideas to the latest stylish lunch boxes. All of ...
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August 11, 2009
When Serving Healthy Food Means Taking a Risk
It's truly sad that, these days, schools have to take a gamble to serve healthy food. The latest illustration of that comes from an editorial in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which describes the district's new meal program as "ambitious — and risky." Santa Cruz City Schools recently hired a new meal ...
2
August 4, 2009
School Lunch for the Obamas (And How We Can Make Public School Meals Just as Good)
Ever wonder what the Obama daughters eat for school lunch? It's a far cry from the packaged burritos and the slices of frozen pizza served in most public school cafeterias. Students at Sidwell Friends eat lemon herb baked chicken, tuscan white bean soup, local arugula and herb salad and shrimp ...
3
July 11, 2009
What Makes Students Buy Lunch? The Newest USDA Study Takes a Look
You would think that students eligible for free meals would show up in the lunch line every day. If they don't have to pay, they should be guaranteed customers for school cafeterias, right? Not exactly. Meal program directors say a good number of those students still bring lunch from home, and ...
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June 20, 2009
Tray Trends: As Restaurants Lean Healthier, Might Cafeterias Follow?
In February, Erik Peterson, the public awareness director for the School Nutrition Association, told me that school meals have always been a reflection of the broader American diet. Foodservice directors often visit restaurants and mall food courts on the weekends and observe what kids these days like to eat, he ...
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June 16, 2009
Free Lunch, Nachos and Junk Food: A Few Interesting Links
A sampling of today's school lunch news from around the internet: Student participation in free or reduced-price lunch programs is at an all-time high, with almost 20 million kids eligible for the subsidized meals. In the past year, enrollment has jumped over 10 percent in Utah, Arizona, Vermont and New Jersey. ...
1
June 11, 2009
Inside the Jonesboro Cafeteria: Bringing in the Money with Familiar Foods
A few months ago, Hester Dye received boxes of beautiful, plump blackberries from the USDA. She was delighted — the berries were as big as her thumb — and she hoped her students would enjoy eating them for lunch. But the kids in Jonesboro Public Schools, where Dye directs the school ...
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May 27, 2009
Can the Customer Always be Right if the Customer isn’t Given the Right Choices?
By Patricia Mulvey — The Capital Times of Madison, WI ran an article last week exploring whether the food offered by the Madison Metropolitan School District is healthy. Our food service director, Frank Kelly, is quoted in this article saying that the food “conforms to USDA nutrition standards,” and that ...
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March 14, 2009
Nutrition in Disguise
By Deborah Lehmann — Part of the vision of the School Nutrition Association is nutrition education for all students. So I was a little surprised that a big focus at the association’s Legislative Annual Conference last weekend in Washington, DC was how to get children to eat healthy foods without knowing ...
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March 5, 2009
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