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In Berkeley, Calif., lunch at school has become a learning experience

Chef Ann Cooper is a lunch lady with a mission. She heaves another 10-gallon pot of marinara sauce onto a worktable as she prepares lunch for more than 2,000 elementary school students at the Berkeley Unified School District Kitchen. On the menu: baked pasta primavera.

Ms. Cooper ladles the sauce over a bin of rotini noodles and mixes it all together. The noodles disintegrate in her hands, and lunch turns into, well, red mush.

"I’ve been looking at it all morning," Cooper says, "and I’ve just been in tears because … this is what we’re feeding our kids."

Though she made the sauce from scratch, the low-quality "commodity noodles" ordered through the US government’s national school lunch program are a good example of what’s served in schools across the country, she says.

Cooper hopes to change that. Her arrival last October as the new director of nutrition services for Berkeley’s public schools coincided with the district’s new School Lunch Initiative, an ambitious long-range plan to put the district’s 10,000 students on a path of lifelong healthy eating habits. In California, 28 percent of schoolchildren are overweight or obese, reflecting a nationwide problem.

Berkeley’s School Lunch Initiative aims to replace low-quality "heat and eat" processed foods with fresh, locally grown food. The plan also teaches kids about how food gets from seed to plate by establishing school gardens and kitchen classrooms that integrate lessons about food and cooking into the academic curriculum. Organizers hope children will not only learn about the art and science of food, but also adopt nutritious eating habits.

"Teaching kids about food is as important as math or science," Cooper says.

By Chad Heeter | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0309/p14s03-legn.html?s=hns

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