Ann Cooper's Bigger, Boulder Move | Civil Eats

Ann Cooper’s Bigger, Boulder Move

The world of public-school lunch reform is abuzz this week as chef/author Ann Cooper, the outgoing Director of Food Services for the Berkeley Unified School District, takes charge of Boulder’s school cafeterias. Cooper earned national acclaim for remaking Berkeley’s meals program top to bottom in three years’ time. Out: transfats, high-fructose corn syrup, anything processed and pre-packaged, frozen vegetables, syrupy canned fruit, Wonder bread, vending machine snacks. In: fresh whole fruits and vegetables (many from local organic farms), salad bars with seasonal produce, organic milk, whole grains, fresh-baked breads, composting, recycling – and breakfast.

Cooper invented her role as “renegade lunch lady” in the late 90s at a small private school in New York. Berkeley was a big step up for her, with 10,000 students in 16 schools, and Boulder is another jump in scale, to 30,000 students in 50 schools. But the challenges will be all too familiar, she says: “When school kitchens don’t have stoves, when the staff doesn’t know how to cook, there’s a lot of basic learning that’s necessary.”

A lot of her work will involve breaking the district’s dependence on the conventional school-food procurement system, which is administered by the USDA via the National School Lunch Program. Even before unpacking her boxes, Cooper has cut loose Boulder Valley School District’s four food purveyors and selected 20 new ones to take their place, many of these local producers. “There was one chicken farmer from the western slope who approached me,” she says. “But I told him, give me a year before we think about that.” Right now, she’s focused on debuting a nutritious fall-term menu, encouraging school staff, parents and kids on a new learning curve, and laying plans for a healthy-food purchasing system that’s locally attuned and economically viable.

Cooper expects this task to take her the usual three or so years. (She’s kind of like Mary Poppins that way—not, mind you, the refined-sugar version from the movie, but the amazingly bracing character in the book: confidently abrupt, sometimes irascible, always right, never in one place for too long.) After Boulder, she wants to continue on with her work at the national level, spurred by the current administration’s focus on childhood obesity and health-care reform. She’s preparing for that last leap by creating a nonprofit, F3 (Food Family Farming) that will offer online “lunch box” tutorials on how to rid K-12 programs of processed foods and cook meals from scratch instead.

In other words, Berkeley and Boulder x 11,000 (the number of U.S. school districts). “We can’t get far enough, fast enough by fixing these programs one by one,” she says. “But the models we’re putting in place—and sustaining—should send a strong message that this change can happen everywhere. You just have to be willing to figure it out.”

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Katrina Heron is Newsweek/The Daily Beast's Editor-at-Large, has been Editor-in-Chief of Wired, Senior Editor at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and Story Editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her articles have been published in Vogue, Dwell, and The New York Times. She is a co-author of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves In A Newly Dangerous World (HarperCollins, 2005), co-founder of Civil Eats and an adviser to the Atavist. Read more >

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  1. CHOW made this Obsessives video about Ann Cooper. She's a powerhouse.
    http://www.chow.com/stories/11358
  2. Gigi Knoblauch
    Wonderful to hear that Chef Ann will now tackle a larger school district. Is her Boulder project receiving as much financial support from the Chez Panisse Foundation as the Berkeley Unified School District did? Or are there other funders?
  3. Student
    Really? This is disappointing. Don't get me wrong--Ann Cooper is a wonderful, impressive, progressive advocate. BUT, I would really like to see her go somewhere where they really need her. Boulder is progressive without her. A responsible move that would make a real difference would be to an inner city district or a rural town to set precedent.
    Come on, Ann. You can do better!
  4. Donald
    Boulder is progressive in many aspects but in terms of school food it falls short. As a farm manager in Boulder County and somewhat moderate long time citizen of the republic I am welcoming Ann with open arms. We have a large population of hispanic students in Boulder County whose diets, and i'll make this generalization based on working with many latinos, is less than satisfactory. Yes we all realize that inner cities need help but i admire the one more baby step she has decided to take before the giant national step. I am amazed at the fact that our local newspapers have not reported of this, or maybe i accidentally overlooked.

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