I never imagined myself cooking for kids. I spent most of my first three decades as a chef not knowing or caring what kids ate, and not really wanting to feed them. In fact, as a restaurant chef, my worst nightmare was the host coming into the kitchen on a Saturday night, saying, “Chef, there’s a screaming kid on table 19. What do I do?”

My response: “Tell them to leave. Why did they bring kids here on a Saturday night, anyway?”

What a difference a decade makes. Today all of my work surrounds feeding kids healthy food, teaching them how to eat well, and working nationally to assure that all kids have access to delicious, nutritious food in school every single day.

Getting healthy food onto our kids’ plates (or trays) couldn’t be more important. In between commercials for fast food and over-processed junk stamped with a nutrition label, we hear news reports that conditions like obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing across America. But what we conveniently overlook is that our kids are often the ones suffering the most.

According to the CDC, over 30 percent of all children in this country (and 72 percent of Americans as a whole) are now overweight or obese. Of children born in the year 2000, one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African Americans and Hispanics will have diabetes in their lifetimes. Those same children will be the first generation in the history of the United States to die at a younger age than their parents.

No children or parents deserve such a terrible fate. We clearly need a lunch line makeover.

From designing gourmet meals in white-linen restaurants to serving on the lunch line, my route has been anything but traditional. After culinary school, I cooked for round-the-world cruises, hotels, restaurants, and catering parties of 20,000 at film and music festivals. As you can imagine, there weren’t many kids to cook for backstage at a Grateful Dead concert.

It wasn’t until many years later that I started really thinking about sustainable, healthy, local food. As I was writing my first book, A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, I met women chefs who were pioneers of the organic-local food movement–Alice Waters, Nora Poullion, Odessa Piper and so many more who inspired and educated me on the importance of organic, local, and sustainable. Gradually my eyes opened to Joan Gussow’s teachings and Michael Pollan’s words, all while I was told by sheep farmers in Vermont why I couldn’t buy lamb racks (where does the rest of the lamb go?).

And then, while I was researching my second book, it hit me: bad food is making us and our kids sick. Our food supplies are privately owned by giant corporations, with the profits taking precedence over the very health of our children.

My life as a Lunch Lady began in 1999, when I was asked to become the Executive Chef and Director of Wellness and Nutrition for the Ross School in New York. But apparently, I wasn’t supposed to be just any old Lunch Lady–someone in the press quipped that I was the Renegade Lunch Lady, a moniker that stuck. Imagine that: being a Renegade for wanting to feed kids fresh broccoli!

The well-funded, amazing meal program at the Ross School taught me how important school food is and that kids really will eat healthy food. After going on to work with Alice Waters at the Chez Panisse Foundation and as Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District, I’m now a fixture in the school cafeteria trenches in Boulder, Colorado. We’re working from the ground up to implement healthy cooked-from-scratch meals in schools throughout the district. After tremendous success in Berkeley, we’re hungry to make a big difference in kids’ lunches and lives in Colorado.

As I’ve chatted with cafeteria workers, school administrators and yes, kids themselves over the years, it’s become obvious that schools need help. If we’re going to change children’s relationship to food and segue schools from highly processed food to fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, whole grains and healthy protein, schools and districts need tools.

With that goal in mind, I founded the Food Family Farming Foundation in 2009. We know that schools face challenges–strict budgets, bureaucracy, and finicky kids–and we’re here to help.

Our major projects, The Lunch Box: Healthy Tools for Healthy Schools and Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, work towards the goal of getting healthy food into every school in America. The Lunch Box is a comprehensive web portal that has recipes, menus, financial tools, resources, technical tools, and educational videos. Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools is a platform that enables us to fundraise for and donate salad bars to schools all across the country. So far we’ve donated over 600.

As I said, what a difference a decade makes. When I began this work almost no-one talked about school food, and President Regan had just made ketchup a vegetable. Today I am so optimistic. We have a President that talks about children, food, and health in the same sentence, and a First Lady who has made children’s health her mission with her Let’s Move Initiative. Today we have a Secretary of Agriculture and a Secretary of Education who are working together to close the achievement gap by closing the nutrition gap, as well as advocates and foundations all across the country who are trying to support their work.

Perhaps the best news, however, comes from parents, many of whom are seeing their kids excited about healthy food for the first time. As one parent told me about our “Eat the Rainbow” program, her son “came home talking about his ‘rainbow,’ requested and ate plain lettuce with his dinner, and when he was still hungry…made himself another ‘rainbow’ with lettuce, grapes and strawberries. His 4-year old sister copied him.”

I am so fortunate to be working as an advocate for better school food and to be working with chefs, advocates, administrators, nutrition services directors, students, parents, and food service workers all across the country who are striving for delicious and nutritious food for all of our children. I’m truly honored to receive a Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council, not only for the honor bestowed, but in honor of all of the hard work of the thousands and thousands of people across the country who are working toward the same goal.

This award showcases the fact that healthy school food is becoming mainstream and that, finally, my days as a renegade are coming to an end.

Originally published on NRDC’s OnEarth

Photo: Craig Lee

Chef Ann Cooper, also known as the “Renegade Lunch Lady,” has been working to improve public school lunches from the inside first in Berkeley, and now in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. I asked Chef Cooper a few questions for our series, Faces & Visions of the Food Movement.

Civil Eats: What issues have you been focused on?

Ann Cooper: School food. The big thing around why this is so important is that one-third of all Caucasians and one of every two blacks and Hispanics will have diabetes and will die before their parents. It’s the social equity issue of our time. If we don’t change the way kids are eating, we will start to die off. If we don’t turn this around we’ll all be obese by 2040. And it’s all about money.

I wish all the people working on these issues could just come together and agree on a platform and agree on what we’re going to do. Can we all agree to do whatever it will take? What happens in our movement is everyone has their own agenda. We saw this in the write-in campaigns and everyone’s doing great things. But there’s no one thing we can agree on. We’re in too many places doing to many things. There’s something important about saying this is the one thing we want to do. If we change school lunch and teach ‘them’ the meaning of healthy people and healthy planet, then we can fix the planet.

If we can come up with one agenda that we can all stand behind, we can beat the conservatives.

The challenge is that everyone is trying to raise money. Big business doesn’t have to raise any money. We’re all going after money from the same well. Everybody is going to the same people for money. So it’s hard to have one view so you’re no different than anyone else, therefore the foundations need to take this on as well. Foundations need to come together to build a platform people can work towards to build a more powerful outcome.

CE: What inspires you to do this work?

AC: We’re killing our kids and we’re killing them in the name of profit and we have to stop doing it. And, there’s nothing more important.

CE: What’s your overall vision?

AC: Change the way we feed our kids in America.

CE: Who’s in your community?

AC: There are people all over the country doing this kind of work. And, that’s really great. I spend most of my days dealing with the day-to-day operations of a fairly large school district, 30,000 kids, and I also have a consulting company and a foundation and I’m really wrapped up in doing this on an on-the-ground basis.

CE: What are your goals?

AC: Stop killing kids with food. Stop putting profit before nurture. To put myself out a job because the country as a whole is taking care of it’s kids.

CE: What does change look like to you?

AC: Change would be having a government that’s protecting our children that would just demand that big business profit isn’t more important than kids and the planet. That people all across the country would see kids’ health as a priority and the symbiotic relationship between healthy kids, healthy earth and healthy profits.

CE: Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

AC: We’re building the web portal. It’s really our big social engagement piece and with The Lunch Box what we’re doing is trying to give people the tools they need to start making these changes all across the country.

CE: What projects are affiliated with yours?

AC: We partner with a lot of organizations from the Kellogg Foundation, The Children’s Health Foundation, the Colorado Health Foundation, Orfalea Foundation, Whole Foods Market, Barbara’s Bakery, Allergy Kids, the Environmental Working Group, Roots of Change, Two Angry Moms, What’s on Your Plate, Farm to School and many more.

CE: What projects have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

AC: The Food Corps is a really great idea and is something I think is going to be really good. School Food Focus is working on school issues as is Farm to School.

CE: Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

AC: I don’t know. Some days I’m optimistic and some days I’m not. There’s so much money inherent in the system. Look at Michele Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, there’s no mention of kids, food or heath, there’s no money behind it. We are such a partisan politics country that I just don’t know. Though there really is a movement here. We’re working towards the next Farm Bill and CNR. There’s a lot of reason to be optimistic and partisan politics and money are just difficult to overcome.

CE: What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

AC: Depends the season I was living in. In The summer I might be walking out to the field and picking fresh tomatoes and basil and coming inside to make the perfect salad with oil and salt and pepper. But if it was in the middle of a Colorado winter: braised buffalo ribs with polenta. I’d have to pick the day and then I can answer the questions better.

Photo: Chicksspeak/Flickr

TED is a non-profit devoted to broadcasting innovative ideas spoken by persuasive thinkers. Its website spreads information through “TED talks,” a video component that spans a wide range of topics. Here is a selection of TED videos focusing on issues from the political food world—child obesity, industrial meat production, school nutrition programs, ecologically safe fish farming, food access within an urban landscape, re-envisioned permaculture—presented by some of the top enthusiasts and specialists.

Jamie Oliver is a chef who is intent on inspiring families to reintegrate cooking into their lifestyles while empowering children to learn the importance of healthful eating. His TED talk examines the epidemic of child obesity in Huntington, West Virginia, a  city that was voted the most unhealthy place in the US in 2008. The “tipping point,” as Oliver explains, is a triangular trap of Home, School and Modern Day Life (dubbed Main Street). Home is no longer about cooking; school lunch programs are centered on corporate gain rather than nutrition; modern day life is riddled with fast foods and deceptive food labeling. As we spend increasingly more money on health bills related to heart disease and obesity—a number that will double in the next ten years—Oliver delivers an urgent call for action.

The New York Times writer and cookbook author, Mark Bittman, writes accessible recipes, often with locally sourced ingredients. He is also a mindful eater who sees an imbalance in the Western diet, one that has been heavily reliant on meat, dairy and carbohydrates, since the advent of highway expansion in the 1930’s. Now our industrialized meat industry (with the emergence of CAFOs in the mid-20th century), emits the second largest amount of greenhouse gases, behind energy production only. Bittman argues that we can find other ways to get our protein. His recommendation: eat ½ lb of meat, or less, a week; eat more plants and in doing so, encourage change in our dietary and lifestyle choices.

How do we reform childrens’ image of food? This question fuels the work of chef Ann Cooper. who has committed herself to restructuring our nation’s school lunch program. Cooper’s fight for an increase in federal funding for the National School Lunch Program is discussed in light of an imperfect social justice issue. She begs that teachers, administrators, government officials–people in power–teach children that food is a real, unprocessed, tangible resource. If we start seeing food as a form of health, then the value attributed to consuming it grows. Much like Oliver, she proposes educational programs—hands-on cooking and gardening duties, an academic curriculum tied to land work, nutritious cafeteria foods, a school compost and recycling program—and public and private spending for the sake of the betterment of our childrens’ health.

It isn’t atypical for aquafarmed fish to be fed chicken in their fishmeal. Dan Barber, the executive chef at Blue Hill, probes this reality by examining a farming system that rejects practices like this, in favor of an “extensive” system. In the south of Spain, Veta la Palma boasts a landscape that includes a 27,000 acre fish farm, where biologist Miguel Medialdea produces 1,200 tonnes of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. The restored wetlands are home to many aquatic species but also over 600,000 birds—the largest private bird sanctuary in Europe. While flamingos flock there to eat shrimp, shrimp in turn eat photoplankton. As Barber suggests, the health of predators and an organic food chain makes this ecological balance possible. His proposal for a restorative farm system in which communities around the world could feed themselves is presented through a symbiotic relationship with the land.

Carolyn Steel notes that in most cities, one’s interaction with food involves an intricate relationship with its production, transportation, purchase and sale, preparation, consumption and disposal. In ancient times, cities mapped their layout according to access to food. People were aware of where their food came from and the farmers and butchers who sold it to them. With the introduction of trains and cars, food became separated from the city-view; it became “anonymous.” Steel envisions a re-conceptualization of city planning—a “Sitopia,” or a renewed way of seeing food as central to a city—through nutritional education, local consumerism and a reinvigorated organic framework, in touch with the land.

The farther we drift away from the land that reaps our food, the more we view ourselves as a competitor against nature. Michael Pollan explains our superiority complex through the rising influence of industrial agriculture; our mentality is that “we are winning against nature.” He also offers a counter world-view through the eyes of plants and animals that manipulate nature for their benefit as well. Pollan argues that if we focus on Darwinian evolution, we can begin to see our world as a cooperative mechanism, where plants, animals and humans harmoniously act within an ecologically-sound system of production and consumption.

The new Dining Commons at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California – feeding students since August – opened its doors to the community on Saturday to show off the latest phase of a revolutionary approach to school lunch. For the first time, several hundred parents, teachers, local food activists and assorted politicians – including Mayor Tom Bates, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier and Congresswoman Barbara Lee – could sit together in this extraordinary new building and share an ordinary school lunch: lentil soup, grilled chicken with roasted root vegetables, green salad and bread, fresh fruit. They paid $100 apiece for the privilege (the proceeds going to support the program). Students pay anywhere from 40 cents to $3.50 for a comparable meal (depending on family income).

Alice Waters first proposed the dining commons, sited between the gym and the baseball diamond, almost 10 years ago. It was originally slated to open in 2005 – which was probably unrealistic all along. Then 2006 rolled by, then 2007….I had started documenting construction with time-lapse ambitions, but I could go months at a time without clicking the shutter and not miss anything. The project reflected all the contradictions and hopes of school lunch as an emblem of our food culture: the absurdity of the official “nutritional” rules; the dire funding and related staff shortages; the increasingly scary links between diet and health, especially for children – and the weird knowledge that what had to change quickly wasn’t going to. Not even at the King school, which is home to The Edible Schoolyard, a hands-on organic gardening and cooking program that’s supported by Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (of which I’m a board member). It had come to seem almost normal that sixth, seventh and eighth graders who were learning about biodiversity, the science of composting, and the central role of agriculture in ancient civilizations, not to mention planting, harvesting and cooking food from the school’s one-acre garden – were getting a school-district-wide menu of microwaved chicken nuggets.

No more, thanks to the incredible efforts of Ann Cooper – aka Chef Ann, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady, and officially Director of Food Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. In addition to offering breakfast and lunch to King’s roughly 1,000 students, the Dining Commons is also the new central kitchen for the entire BUSD, comprising about 10,000 students. “We’re serving 8,300 meals a day from this kitchen,” Cooper told the Saturday gathering. “No trans fats, no high fructose corn syrup, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.” So far, about 70 percent of what she purchases comes from the West Coast corridor, and about 30 percent from within 150 miles. Almost everything is cooked from scratch. (For more info, go to http://www.schoollunchinitiative.org)

On Saturday, the mood seemed one of euphoric disbelief (sound familiar?) as Cooper and her staff, plus devoted volunteers, began bringing out lunch and Waters and Congresswoman Lee took the microphone by turns to tell the story of how the funding and the vision for the project came together. We were sitting in front of an open kitchen, in a dining room saturated with natural light (and windows that open!); under a vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling; on reclaimed-wood benches and stools at reclaimed-wood tables (nothing nailed to the floor!); with a china plate, a glass and silverware in front of each of us. We were at the children’s table. It felt remarkable. In fact, said a woman sitting next to me, it felt “like a miracle.” Of patience and determination, surely.