Serving Suggestion

With Sasha and Malia growing arugula in the White House garden, and with more and more farmers' markets on our streets, it seems shocking that prefab Tater Tots and canned fruit cocktail should continue to rule the lunchrooms of our public schools.

Until October 2005, the Berkeley Unified School District in California was no exception. Its 9,000 students were served the usual highly processed, highly subsidized heat-and-serve dreck that passed for the noontime meal. That is, until Ann Cooper became director of nutrition services, making a radical shift from chicken nuggets to real chicken, fresh produce instead of ketchup packets, and whole-grain, real bean and cheese nachos with not a can of cheese sauce in sight. Now Cooper, who first made a name for herself on the celebrity-chef circuit, is taking her mission and her menu to school cafeterias nationwide.

"High-fat, high-sugar, high-salt diets with very few fruits and vegetables and no whole grains will lead to a generation of kids who, for the first time, will die at a younger age than their parents," says Cooper, citing Centers for Disease Control statistics that a third of our nation's children are overweight or obese. Because minority students are most affected by what's on the daily cafeteria tray, real lunch reform is "the social justice issue of our time," Cooper says. "We can't spend another dollar per day per child to feed them healthy food?" she yells in exasperation. "We can either pay for lifelong wellness now, or pay later for a tsunami of diabetes. And these kids can't learn if they're not well nourished."

Cooper first turned school lunch into real food at the private Ross School in East Hampton, New York, in 1999, then consulted for a number of public schools in New York City. After Berkeley, her next challenge will be to feed the 29,000 students of Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. Yet for all Cooper's accomplishments, she knows she has touched only a minute fraction of the more than five-billion school lunches served in 11,000 school districts nationwide each year.

She is painfully aware of the obstacles, including paltry budgets and untrained cafeteria workers who need to learn that preparing lunch means more than just reheating the food and slapping it on the plate. Cooper has taught them to chop vegetables, cook beans, and master simple, flavorful recipes from her files, like Asian Chicken Salad with Miso Dressing.

Sometimes she struggles to find ingredients local to each region, "like any chef would," Cooper says. "I see what's in the restaurants and the farmers' market. I talk to chefs and farmers. I talk to local caterers and get the names of local purveyors." All this, mind you, while adhering to the mere $2.59 per child per day allotted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just a third of which will actually be spent on food after administrative and staffing costs.

In June, in addition to transforming the diet of kids in Boulder, Cooper will take her campaign for school lunch reform nationwide. She will also be overseeing the launch of the nonprofit F3 Foundation (Food Family Farming), which will offer a lunch box of free tools covering menu planning, student nutrition, recipes, and sourcing techniques. With a copy of her fourth book in hand (Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children), she will further develop her for-profit consulting firm, Lunch Lessons LLC, visiting individual schools or school districts to tailor her advice to their specific needs and desires.

While some of Cooper's demands are non-negotiable -- all-organic milk, no high-fructose corn syrup -- she recognizes that compromises are inevitable. After all, some public schools don't even have kitchens. "We just make the best choices we can," she says. "But I'd like to affect policy on a national level. That's where the big change will come."

Related:

• "The National School Lunch Program: Time for a Makeover!" Chef Ann Cooper writes for OnEarth about how to overhaul school lunch. 
• "Lessons from the Lunch Lady"  On Simple Steps, Wendy Gordon offers some of Cooper's tips for helping kids develop good eating habits at home.