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We must reform our school lunch program

She has gone from being a white-tablecloth restaurant chef to the Renegade Lunch Lady. She is Ann Cooper and she is leading a campaign to change school lunch menus across the country. It all started in 1999 when she agreed to take over the school lunch program at the Ross School in East Hampton, New York. Since then she has reformed programs in New York City, Harlem and Bridgehampton, New York and now in Berkeley, California.

Her main push is to teach kids about healthy foods and then feed them healthy foods. “What that means to me is fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, no trans fats, no high fructose corn syrup, very little if any processed foods, no foods of minimal or no nutrient value.” In a nutshell, “feed kids real food.”

One of the biggest challenges is that the school lunch program along with all federal feeding programs is intertwined with farm commodity programs. For example, USDA has purchased a lot of nonfat dry milk and pork recently in an effort to shore-up farm prices. Cooper thinks the programs need to be untangled, “There’s too much conflict of interest there.” She says farm support programs commodify crops and animal products and then push them into the food programs, “That’s really not helping kids.” Cooper believes farm programs should focus on farm products and food programs should focus on food.

A big factor in this whole entanglement is the school lunch budget; schools get government commodities at a much lower price than if they were buying local produce. Cooper says most school districts will get $2.70 reimbursement from the federal government this year for free kids. “Of that $2.70, two-thirds will go to payroll and overhead, that leaves less than a dollar in most districts for food, what can we feed kids for a dollar?” She contends we must increase spending on food now, “Make no bones about it, we’re going to pay now or we are going to pay later on health care.” She notes that right now, we are spending between $147 and $200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness; the national school lunch program only costs $8.5 billion. “I think it is disingenuous to say we can’t afford it.”

Cooper says given the money they currently have, schools can start to make some changes and she has created the “Lunch Box Project” to help school food service managers make the transition. “In this web portal will be all of the things a school district needs to make these changes. Menus, recipes, nutritional analysis, costing, financial guidelines, financial models, facilities guidelines.”

The two biggest challenges in child nutrition these days are calcium deficiency and obesity. Cooper says both are addressed in her plan, “We need to teach kids and food service workers and everyone else all the different ways you can get calcium.” She agrees that dairy is an important source of calcium but other sources of calcium need to be utilized along with dairy. As for obesity, “One of the best ways is to reduce and eliminate highly processed foods.”

The Lunch Box can also help school food service people find food sources closer to home, being able to talk to local purveyors and other food professionals to find sources. It may not be from just down the road but it will be from the region. That also means seasonal foods, you won’t have peaches in January but you can look for other stone fruit.

“I believe this is the social justice issue of our time and we have a moral imperative to really look at this.” She points to life-expectancy gaps and achievement gaps growing between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in this country. Kids that come from poor families don’t do as well in school and have shorter life spans. “Kids cannot learn if they are malnourished, kids cannot think if they are hungry.” Cooper believes it should be a birthright in this country that no child in our schools is hungry, “I think we can do that in our country and I think we must.”

AUDIO: Ann Cooper talks about the lunch program 11:00