School cafeterias are swapping dino-shaped chicken fingers for carrot purees. They’re trading mac ’n’ cheese for kale salsa and replacing potato chips with green smoothies.
These lunchrooms are part of a pilot program that FoodCorps, a national nonprofit that promotes healthy foods in schools, launched in March in partnership with Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad chain. The program, Reimagining School Cafeterias, advocates for the adoption of locally grown produce in schools and offers curricula that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating. The goal is to give students more control over designing healthy school menus.
In March, Sweetgreen pledged $1 million to create scalable healthy eating and educational programming in 50 school cafeterias by 2020. Reimagining School Cafeterias builds off a previous nutrition-based curriculum of theirs called Sweetgreen in Schools. Sweetgreen in Schools launched in 2010 and reached 9,000 students. The new initiative aims to expand the number of students they reach and create demographic-specific learning opportunities for the students.
“In order for students to really want to eat healthier options, they have to be able to create the meals themselves,” Sweetgreen co-founder Nate Ru told FastCompany.
School lunches in America are frequently criticized for being unhealthy, as they tend to be high in fat, sugar and salt. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one out of every five schoolaged children is obese, a figure that’s tripled since the 1970s.
“We know that school cafeterias are an incredibly powerful place to connect kids with healthy food,” FoodCorps co-founder and executive director Curt Ellis told FastCompany. “There are over 100,000 school cafeterias in the country — seven times more than the number of McDonalds.”
Reimagining School Cafeterias is currently being piloted in three schools that all vary in terms of geography and socioeconomic status. In the 2019-2020 school year, organizers say the program will expand to 6,500 students at 15 schools. The year after, it will be implemented in 50 schools and will reach an estimated 22,000 students.
At Aberdeen Elementary School, a pilot program in Aberdeen, North Carolina, students are trying veggies cooked in new ways. For example, students traded in raw carrots for carrots that had been roasted or pureed, with the goal of showing students different ways that produce can be prepared. After each taste test, the students vote for a favorite. That winner will be incorporated into the school’s lunch menu. In the coming months, they’ll try asparagus and peas cooked in unfamiliar ways.
In New Mexico’s Navajo Nation territory, the focus is on flavor. Students at Wingate Elementary School are learning to use spices to create new tastes to complement traditional school-lunch vegetables.
Finally, in Oakland, California, at Laurel Elementary School, students look at the big picture, with a focus on how they might improve their cafeteria. Students redesign table layouts and lunch menus. They will work with Sweetgreen and partner organizations to get those ideas implemented in the coming months.
“There are 30 million children a day who walk in the front doors of our nation’s schools. Those kids are going there to learn but they are also going there to eat,” Ellis told Forbes. “If we care about the next generation of kids and their health and long-term potential, we better fix school food.”
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Tag: Childhood Obesity
How Mapping Health Data Can Reduce Childhood Obesity
There is no blanket solution when it comes to fighting childhood obesity, especially in an urban setting where diverse cultures, economic disparity and access to parks and fitness activities can create a complex web of challenges.
Add insight from an abundance of community stakeholders including educators, parents and local lawmakers and finding a single solution to combatting the problem is near impossible. But an Austin, Texas, nonprofit may have found the key to getting everyone’s attention when it comes to understanding the problem: Visualization.
Children’s Optimal Health (COH) is charged with improving health for the city’s youth, but the nonprofit discovered that identifying the problem meant looking at the issue on a neighborhood level. Thanks to a Texas law that requires public schools to record fitness data on every student, COH used the information to create maps that identify “hotspots” that include social and economic information, according to Government Technology.
“You don’t have to know English or have an education to see this and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my neighborhood,’” said COH Executive Director Maureen Britton.
Through data-sharing agreements with more than 12 central Texas education and health entities, COH aggregates student information including BMI and cardiovascular fitness scores, geo-tagged by neighborhood. Student names are removed and the data is completely anonymous — focusing only on identifying the issues families in these local communities face. As the Austin tech sector continues to bring more business and more people to town, COH is committed to ensuring low-income residents don’t fall by the wayside.
“There’s not enough attention paid to the struggles in Austin as the population outside of the tech industry grows. That’s our concern,” Britton said. “The more we bring this data to life through the maps, the more we get data-driven information to the right people.”
COH is also able to overlay the student health maps with other data sets, creating more granular narratives to show how the city can improve wellness initiatives. For example, a neighborhood’s proximity to a concentration of fast food restaurants or a community’s crime rate could contribute to the area’s obesity rate.
But perhaps it’s COH’s ability to network institutions that may otherwise not collaborate that might be most impressive about the nonprofit, as Government Technology points out. For example, getting hospitals involved in changing school physical education curriculum or schools to engage in interventions for existing infrastructure are just a few examples of how COH has found a way to get all community stakeholders on the same page.
As more cities collaborate on civic innovation initiatives, officials should take note the power of a picture and how it can reshape the conversation.
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3 Newcomers That Are Finding a Better Way to Feed the World
While young people often have the reputation of being picky eaters and filling their plates with only chicken nuggets and French fries, that’s hardly applicable to all teens and twenty-somethings. In fact, in 2014, many youth are working to solve the crucial problems of our food system — including childhood obesity, food deserts and high prices.
Enter Food Tank, a think tank that’s working to build a global community for healthy eaters. It has set its sights on young people who are developing and employing local ideas that can, and already are, having a widespread impact where it really matters. Here, three foodies that make Food Tank — and us — excited about the (edible) future.
Can you imagine having an online cooking show and publishing a cookbook all before you turned 15? That’s exactly what Remmi Smith did — and that’s not all the Tulsa, Okla. resident is doing to inspire her fellow teens to cook nutritious meals. She’s also a student health ambassador for Sodexo, a food service company, and is a member of Future Chefs, which helps urban teens find work in the restaurant industry after graduation.
Tyson Gersh, 25, is playing the long game with Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI), a nonprofit organization he founded that works directly with communities to convert empty lots into working produce farms. With an aim to “promote education, sustainability and community,” as its website says, MUFI’s 2,500 volunteers are creating a new generation of self-sufficient, local food producers, while also making people more aware of the origins of their food.
We all know that kids love sweets, and it’s okay to indulge them once in a while. At the young age of 13, Nicky Bronner wasn’t about to lay down when his parents tried to deprive him the processed junk foods he loved. So he and his father started Unreal Foods, a brand of sweets made from sustainable palm oil, grass-fed dairy and traceable cocoa and excluding corn syrup, GMOs and preservatives. Today, at 17, Nicky’s candy is now available at big chains like Target and Kroger, putting healthier snacking delights into mouths all over the U.S.
Read about the other innovators at EcoWatch.
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No Wheels, Just Feet, on This School Bus
What cuts down on costs, helps the environment, and most importantly, keeps kids in shape?
Walking to school.
With childhood obesity rates at historic highs, there is significant demand to fix this harmful epidemic, and this solution is as simple as they come.
A unique program, called the Walking School Bus, collects kids along a route and together, they make their way to school as a group – not totally dissimilar to the bus experience, but with the added benefit of exercise and fresh air. With no bus driver needed, transportation money instead goes towards a chaperoning adult who not only leads the children and ensures their safety, but also can act as a mentor and role model for them.
Although walking programs can be found running independently of each other throughout the country, many of them are funded by the National Center for Safe Routes to School, a program established to help find alternative routes for children to get to school.
Walking School Bus programs vary in size – in Providence, Rhode Island, only 14 kids participated last academic year, whereas in Columbia, Missouri, 450 children from 13 different school districts took part.
Sadly, Columbia’s program has lost funding, but the Walking School Bus program still exists and can be set up in your community. Here’s how.
These Coaches Make Recess Work for Kids
Recess can be chaos.
As a result, disciplinary problems can lead schools to reduce playground outings significantly — if not eradicate them altogether. Just look at Seattle, where a new report from KUOW found that schools serving the poorest students might offer 15 minutes of outdoor play a day. And that’s if the kids are lucky.
The adults say it’s just too much trouble to let the children play on their own. But that’s backwards, experts say.
Nationally, almost 18 percent of kids ages six to 11 years old are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Factor in adolescents, and the number of overweight or obese kids rises above one third. Physical activity during recess can help combat this. And adding to the importance of recess are studies that have found it can improve academic performance.
“Those students are the ones we also know have higher rates of obesity, and for whom academic achievement in school is even more important,” pediatrician Paula Lozano told the Seattle station, speaking about kids from low-income areas.
Across the county in the Bronx, New York, the group Asphalt Green may have a solution — turn recess into structured exercise time. Don’t call it physical education, like the dreaded gym class. This is supposed to be all fun and games, just with a very serious mission.
The nonprofit works with some 27,000 kids and can squeeze fitness fun into any hallway or corridor, a big plus for city schools often strained for space, organizers told the station. “Any space you give us, we can be active in,” says Arlen Zamula, the program’s Associate Director of the Recess Enhancement Program.
Asphalt Green’s programs may not look like the free-for-all tag games of yore, but organizers say they’re helping kids have fun while practicing fitness — and hopefully learning a truly life-long physical lesson in the process.
Yoga for Youths?
Yoga isn’t just for grownups anymore. In Detroit, Danialle Karmanos came up with a plan to fight the childhood obesity epidemic by establishing a yoga program for young kids. She’s working with physical education instructors and other pros to build a network of volunteer yoga instructors for the Work It Out program, which brings yoga classes to kids at underserved schools in the area. She started in 2005, formed a non-profit organization in 2008, and since then has brought yoga to more than 3,000 kids in and around Detroit. The lessons of the class go far beyond basic stretching. Kids are learning breathing exercises, so they’re coping better with stress and anxiety. And they’re also developing healthy eating habits; 69% of students are already reporting changes in their diet.