Join the School Lunch Revolution

Whole Foods Market and Chef Ann Cooper, the nation’s “Renegade Lunch Lady,” have joined forces and launched a new “School Lunch Revolution” campaign along with a helpful website, The Lunch Box. This is a national campaign created to help parents and schools revolutionize and improve the way children eat. According to the CDC, “One in three children born in the year 2000 will have diabetes, and 30 percent of them are overweight, and that the cost of treating diabetes in the United States is estimated at $174 billion each year.”

Our schools aren’t helping. Over 30 million children eat federally funded school lunch daily but only about 90 cents per lunch is spent on food. According to Chef Ann Cooper and Whole Foods, “That, combined with free commodity foods, like cheese and ground beef, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Distribution Program and many children are eating mostly frozen, processed, packaged foods. With no national standardized limit on sugar or other ingredients like artificial colors, flavors or preservatives, it is not uncommon to find hamburgers, French fries chocolate milk and popsicles offered as a typical school lunch.”

We seriously need to step it up.

This is not the first campaign of it’s kind. The Organic Consumer Association has been advocating for healthier lunches for a good long while now, but the new Lunch Box website is super user friendly and a great way for parents and schools to gain valuable resources that can help schools replace frozen processed foods with fresh, natural, made-from-scratch foods in a realistic, cost-effective manner.

This comprehensive FREE set of resources includes:

• Recipes that kids will love and that will work for schools of all size and all recipes can be nutritionally analyzed and tested.
• Resources for finding real, natural foods, regionally and locally, from smaller vendors to create local food economies and get the freshest food to our kids.
• Training videos that cover topics ranging from cooking techniques to food safety
• Educational tools for parents and some clever tools made especially for children.
• Community activism resources that can help any single person, group or task force to initiate healthy and nutritious change in a school system.

Right now the Lunch Box is in beta test mode, so not all the resources are up and running. There are still some working though plus word is, that by August 15th the entire site should be pumped up and going strong.

Visit The Lunch Box to see what’s new and to learn how to keep school lunches healthy and more eco-friendly.