Chef Ann Cooper: Renegade School-Lunch Lady

If you’ve asked any­one who has gone in and tried to solve this prob­lem, you’ll have found that solu­tions don’t come eas­ily. It’s a self-sustaining prob­lem: The school sys­tems have very lim­ited bud­gets for lunches, and the only food afford­able is cheap, non-nutritious, and laden with chem­i­cals and fats. There are plenty of local farm­ers, organic food pro­duc­ers and the like who are more than will­ing to pro­vide healthy foods for schools—but they can’t afford to do so at the rates schools are forced to pay.

It was recently announced that President Obama’s new pro­posed bud­get includes an addi­tional $1 bil­lion for 10 years for school lunches. But if you do the math, you’ll dis­cover that this amounts to an extra 10 to 15 cents per lunch, which hardly makes a dif­fer­ence, and if adjusted for infla­tion over time will likely make no dif­fer­ence at all.

Not long ago, a celebrity chef named Ann Cooper actu­ally con­fronted the nutri­tional issues fac­ing our chil­dren in school. Not only has she taken the entire prob­lem to heart, she is now fully ded­i­cated to bring­ing healthy lunches to our schoolchildren.

Meet Chef Ann

A grad­u­ate of the Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, New York, Ann Cooper has been a chef for more than 30 years. She has held posi­tions with Holland America Line, Radisson Hotels and Telluride Ski Resort and as Executive Chef at the renowned Putney Inn in Vermont. With such a résumé, one might won­der what brought her to fight for nutri­tious school lunches for kids.

“I’m about as unlikely a can­di­date to be a school food advo­cate as you could find,” Chef Ann told Organic Connections. “I never knew what kids ate and never cared what they ate. I was a white-tablecloth ‘celebrity chef.’ The worst thing that could hap­pen was on a Saturday night the host would come run­ning in and say, ‘Chef, Chef, we have scream­ing chil­dren on table 19. What should we do?’ And I’d be likely to say, ‘What are they doing in my restau­rant? Don’t they know better?’”

The story of how Ann became involved in children’s nutri­tion actu­ally began before she had the idea to do so. In 2000, Ann pub­lished a book enti­tled Bitter Harvest: A Chef’s Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Foods We Eat and What You Can Do About It. The book was the cul­mi­na­tion of her own inves­ti­ga­tion into mod­ern food pro­cess­ing and the ben­e­fits of locally and sus­tain­ably grown food, to which she had com­mit­ted herself.

After she had com­pleted the book, but before it was released, she got an unex­pected phone call from Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and was asked to apply for the job of Executive Chef and Director of Wellness and Nutrition. Her response was, at first, less than enthu­si­as­tic. “I lit­er­ally looked at the phone and said, ‘What do you want? You’ve got to be kid­ding!’” Ann related. “But they said, ‘Come down and see what we’re doing.’”

Ann did go over to the school, where she met with Courtney Ross, the school’s founder and widow of Steve Ross, for­mer CEO of Time Warner. One of Ms. Ross’s firm mis­sions was to change the way American chil­dren were fed, and one of her core val­ues was well­ness. In lis­ten­ing to her, Ann became enam­ored with the idea and decided it was time to make a difference.

“If you’re in fine din­ing, you’re feed­ing the upper 5 or 10 per­cent of the finan­cial demo­graphic of the world,” Ann said. “I got to won­der­ing why it was that every­body didn’t get this great food. I decided to do as a num­ber of my col­leagues had done in dif­fer­ent ways and fol­low my heart. In the end I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m going to drop out. I’m done being a celebrity chef and I’m going to be a lunch lady.’ That was in 1999 and it’s been more than a decade now.”

Taking It to the Parents and the Government

Over the next 10 years, Ann’s activ­ity base widened as she vig­i­lantly fought for school lunches for chil­dren. She has taken her mes­sage far and wide and has been fea­tured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Time mag­a­zine, as well as hav­ing a healthy list of tele­vi­sion and major con­fer­ence appear­ances. In 2006, Ann (along with co-author Lisa Holmes) pub­lished an award-winning book enti­tled Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.

Now, with a broad net­work of par­ents and food activists, Ann’s work has cul­mi­nated in a remark­able web­site called Chef Ann Cooper: Renegade Lunch Lady.

Why, one might rea­son­ably ask, would serv­ing healthy and nutri­tious food to chil­dren be con­sid­ered “renegade”?

Ann laughs in response and says, “What is that? What is it about serv­ing fresh broc­coli that would be seen as rene­gade? You know, it’s because it sort of flies in the face of agribusi­ness. It flies in the face of Kraft and the American Beverage Association and, frankly, in the face of the National Dairy Council with their choco­late milk cam­paign. There is so much money to be made in these 5.4 bil­lion lunches we’re serv­ing every year that big busi­ness stands to lose money if we serve healthy food.”

But Ann is deter­mined. On her site, par­ents can find tools to assist them in chang­ing children’s diets both within their areas and in their homes. There are recipes and fun items for kids and par­ents, such as the Healthy Kids Nutrition Report Card and Meal Wheel, as well as detailed guides to the nutri­tion chil­dren really need. This site also makes it easy for par­ents to write their mem­bers of Congress to inform them that stan­dards need to be raised for the school lunch pro­gram. A sub­scriber can remain informed through Ann Alerts, and by tak­ing the School Food Challenge can make his or her activ­ity count toward the over­all goal.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

A sep­a­rate site, The Lunch Box, is designed to directly assist schools in mak­ing their meals more nutri­tious. “After work­ing on the project for some time, I got a plan­ning grant from Kellogg Foundation, and then sub­se­quent to that I started my own foun­da­tion and decided to build this Web por­tal TheLunchBox.org,” Ann said. “In May of this year I part­nered with Whole Foods Market and four other foun­da­tions, and we raised a mil­lion dol­lars in 100 days. We are now hard at work build­ing the site and get­ting it out of beta test­ing. Our objec­tive is to put out there in the pub­lic domain, free of charge, all the tools, resources, menus and recipes that a school dis­trict would need in order to change their food. In that way we’re tak­ing away some of their roadblocks.”

In addi­tion to food prepa­ra­tion direc­tions, there will also be a Technical Tools sec­tion pro­vid­ing bud­get man­age­ment mod­els and pro­cure­ment resources; a Resource & Education sec­tion con­tain­ing case stud­ies of schools that have already made a tran­si­tion, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques to inform par­ents and stu­dents about the new lunch pro­gram as well as other food, health and nutri­tion pro­grams; a Community sec­tion that acts as a meet­ing place for par­ents, schools, stu­dents and advo­cates; and much more.

Let’s Get It Done

As can be seen, a great deal of Ann’s effort is being spent bypass­ing the less-than-adequate mea­sures cur­rently being taken by the gov­ern­ment to raise school lunch standards.

“If the president’s bud­get is approved for a bil­lion dol­lars over the next 10 years, it is a real sad attempt at doing any­thing,” Ann remarked. “If we get that bil­lion dol­lars, it will only end up being some­where around 10 to 15 cents per lunch per day. That’s less than half an apple. Further, they’re talk­ing about imple­ment­ing the Institute of Medicine Standards in three to five years.”

The stan­dards she is talk­ing about were recently pro­posed by the Institute of Medicine, a non-profit group that advises the gov­ern­ment and con­sumers on health issues. Companies that sup­ply a major­ity of school lunches have pledged to meet these stan­dards in the next three to five years by includ­ing more grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles and to also meet stan­dards for fat, sugar, sodium and whole grains.

But, under­stand­ably, three to five years is not fast enough. “The cur­rent guide­lines for nutri­tion are so low that chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, choco­late milk, high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, pop­si­cles, Pop-Tarts and corn dogs can all be fed to our chil­dren on a daily basis, and then we won­der why we have a prob­lem,” said Ann. “The Institute of Medicine Standards may not be the be-all and end-all, but they are so far above what we have today that we ought to adopt them right now. I mean, if it were your child who had high blood pres­sure, who had dia­betes or was obese or had hyper­ten­sion, and the doc­tor said it was crit­i­cal, you wouldn’t say, ‘I think I’ll start deal­ing with this in three to five years.’ You would say, ‘We’re going to start deal­ing with this in three to five min­utes.’ And the rea­son we’re not will­ing and we don’t have the polit­i­cal will to adopt these things sooner is because big busi­ness doesn’t want to have to make changes that fast. If we pull soda or fla­vored water out of schools, then how are they going to make money? If it were their kid, they’d do some­thing today. The idea that they’re not going to do some­thing for three to five years is just unconscionable.”

Ann con­cludes with a request for par­ents every­where. “I would hope that all the read­ers would check out TheLunchBox.org and use it as a tool to help their schools change, because schools need all the help they can get. We need public/private part­ner­ships; we need par­ents help­ing; and I know The Lunch Box is also one more tool to help schools over­come the bar­ri­ers to their being able to make the pos­i­tive changes our chil­dren all need.”

To learn more about Chef Ann and dis­cover addi­tional ways to help, visit her web­site at www.chefann.com.

To pre­view The Lunch Box test site, visit www.thelunchbox.org.

Copies of Ann Cooper’s books can be pur­chased through the Organic Connections book­store.