With one in three school-age children considered obese, Chef Ann Cooper wants critics to stop delaying improvements to student health
BOULDER, Colo.— September 23, 2014 — Chef Ann Cooper, a leading national advocate for school food reform and childhood nutrition, is on a mission to ensure that every school child throughout the country has access to benefits of the 2012 USDA School Meal Nutrition Standards. Some critics have said the new standards are too much, too fast and that some schools are struggling financially to meet them. Cooper and her team decided to meet the challenge and introduced an updated version of The Lunch Box, a suite of free tools that can help schools meet the guidelines creatively and cost-effectively.
“We’re not waiting to see what Congress will do”
This past June, the House introduced the 2015 Agricultural Appropriations Bill, which allow schools an extra year to comply with the guidelines if they can show financial difficulty. The Bill, which was subsequently tabled, is still awaiting action despite the start of the school year.
“We’re not waiting to see what Congress will do,” says Cooper. “The one-year waiver they propose will only ensure that schools that need the most help will fall even further behind, and their students will suffer. We need to help struggling schools, not give them a reason to further delay healthy change.”
The Lunch Box is the cornerstone program of Cooper’s Chef Ann Foundation, which also offers grant programs to help schools defray costs. Cooper, a veteran school lunch chef known as the Renegade Lunch Lady, understands first-hand the challenges that the new requirements pose, but she also knows how effective changes can be made with the help of the right resources and tools. According to Cooper, the answer to school food challenges lies not in waivers or rollbacks to the new USDA guidelines, but in scratch cooking and helping schools transition away from processed food.
“School food programs have been required to make a lot of changes with very little financial or technical support,” explains Cooper. “The Lunch Box shows districts how to meet the guidelines outlined in the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act by reshaping their nutrition programs to include scratch-cooked and fresh food.”
To efficiently meet the new requirements, The Lunch Box offers schools step-by-step guides for food purchasing practices and policies and a management section that includes fiscal analysis tools, reorganization strategies, HR resources, and baseline assessment tools to guide strategic planning.
The most popular section of the site is the recipe and menu cycle database. The Lunch Box offers hundreds of school food recipes that meet USDA guidelines. The menu cycles offered include USDA certification documentation. The recipes can be sized up or down depending on how many students are served, and they include nutritional analysis. They’ve all been kid-tested, so school food staff can be confident that students will like them.
About The Chef Ann Foundation
The Chef Ann Foundation (formerly Food Family Farming Foundation) was founded in 2009 by Ann Cooper, an internationally recognized author, chef, educator, public speaker, and advocate of healthy food for all children. To-date the Foundation has reached over 1,792,080 children across the country and seeks to provide tools that help schools serve children healthy and delicious scratch-cooked meals made with fresh, whole food. As a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization, the Chef Ann Foundation is grateful to their generous supporters and friends who help them carry out this mission.
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