Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children » (Reprint)

Chef Ann Cooper, a former Executive Chef of the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and the Putney Inn in Vermont is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She has turned her commitment to sustainable, delicious, nutritious food toward education in order to help children. Chef Cooper is the author of A Woman's Place Is in the Kitchen and coauthor of In Mother's Kitchen and Bitter Harvest.

Remember how simple school lunches used to be? You'd have something from every major food group, run around the playground for a while, and you looked and felt fine. But today it's not so simple. Schools are actually feeding the American crisis of childhood obesity and malnutrition. Most cafeterias serve a veritable buffet of processed, fried, and sugary foods, and although many schools have attempted to improve, they are still not measuring up: 78 percent of the school lunch programs in America do not meet the USDA's nutritional guidelines.

Chef Ann Cooper has emerged as one of the nation's most influential and most respected advocates for changing how our kids eat. In fact, she is something of a renegade lunch lady, minus the hairnet and scooper of mashed potatoes. Ann has worked to transform cafeterias into culinary classrooms. In Lunch Lessons, she and Lisa Holmes spell out how parents and school employees can help instill healthy habits in children.

They explain the basics of good childhood nutrition and suggest dozens of tasty, home-tested recipes for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. The pages are also packed with recommendations on how to eliminate potential hazards from the home, bring gardening and composting into daily life, and how to support businesses that provide local, organic food.

Yet learning about nutrition and changing the way you run your home will not cure the plague of obesity and poor health for this generation of children. Only parental activism can spark widespread change. With inspirational examples and analysis, Lunch Lessons is more than just a recipe book—it gives readers the tools to transform the way children everywhere interact with food.

Library Journal

Trained chefs Cooper (Bitter Harvest) and Holmes (In Mother's Kitchen) explain the vital role of good nutrition in children's well-being in this informative and alarming examination of the unhealthy offerings of most school lunch programs. As school cafeterias have increasingly been inundated with corporate-sponsored fast food, childhood obesity rates have soared, and there have been greater behavioral problems in the classroom. Cooper and Holmes provide a clear guide for understanding children's nutritional needs and convincingly argue for the benefits of meals containing locally grown organic whole foods in reasonable, kid-sized portions. They supply numerous encouraging examples of forward-thinking schools that have successfully transformed their lunchroom menus and developed hands-on programs to educate children about balanced nutrition, healthy eating habits, and sustainable farming. Like Eric Schlosser's more broadly focused Fast Food Nation, this book, which includes two chapters of nutritious recipes and a resource guide, delivers a much-needed wake-up call regarding America's poor eating habits. Especially useful for parents, teachers, or school administrators working to improve childhood nutrition; highly recommended for most public libraries.-Ingrid Levin, Florida Atlantic Univ. Libs., Jupiter Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.