Check out this interesting Q & A in The Nation about Chef Ann Cooper, the acclaimed "Renegade Lunch Lady" or advocate for healthy school lunches.
Chef Cooper — who I had the pleasure of interviewing for my upcoming book SUGAR SHOCK! — is making huge inroads now over in Berkeley, Calif., where she serves as director of nutrition services for the Berkeley, Calif. Unified School District and supervises food and gardening programs serving 10,000 kids. Previously, she transformed school food at the Ross School in East Hampton, New York.
The Nation contributor/writer/author Anna Lappé (author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen) asked Cooper some insightful questions, and the chef offered appropriately blunt replies about the nightmarish school-lunch situation facing most schools across the nation. She pronounces:
"The welfare and health of our children are being mortgaged by big business. We need to see school lunch as part of a health initiative, not just as a dumping ground for agribusiness. School food service is now administered by the US Department of Agriculture, which is basically a marketing arm for agribusiness. Really, school food should be housed in Health and Human Services or the Centers for Disease Control."
And I especially liked Chef Cooper’s answer to the get-to-the-point last question about what it will take to transform the whole school lunch program. She says:
"Look, this is not brain surgery. It’s not that I’m so special that I’ve been able to figure this out; it’s just because I care that we’re able to do this. If I can do this, anybody can. I’m a high school dropout, for goodness’ sake. We just have to care enough to make it a priority. We have to have the will to stand up and say we’re going to serve our kids healthy food and that we have to do it because we’re killing our kids."
Stay tuned for information about Chef Cooper’s upcoming book, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, which is being published by HarperCollins in September.