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LEADING SCHOOL FOOD ADVOCATE CHALLENGES CLAIM
THAT SCHOOLS NEED TIME FOR FOOD CHANGES; CHEF ANN FOUNDATION
OFFERS SOLUTIONS
With one in three school-age children considered obese, Chef Ann Cooper wants critics to stop
delaying improvements to student health
BOULDER, CO – September 23, 2014 – Chef Ann Cooper, a leading national advocate for school food
reform and childhood nutrition, is on a mission to ensure that every school child throughout the country
has access to benefits of the 2012 USDA School Meal Nutrition Standards. Some critics have said the
new standards are too much, too fast and that some schools are struggling financially to meet them.
Cooper and her team decided to meet the challenge and introduced an updated version of The Lunch
Box, a suite of free tools that can help schools meet the guidelines creatively and cost-effectively.
This past June, the House introduced the 2015 Agricultural Appropriations Bill, which allow schools an
extra year to comply with the guidelines if they can show financial difficulty. The Bill, which was
subsequently tabled, is still awaiting action despite the start of the school year.
“We’re not waiting to see what Congress will do,” says Cooper. “The one-year waiver they propose will
only ensure that schools that need the most help will fall even further behind, and their students will
suffer. We need to help struggling schools, not give them a reason to further delay healthy change.”
The Lunch Box is the cornerstone program of Cooper’s Chef Ann Foundation, which also offers grant
programs to help schools defray costs. Cooper, a veteran school lunch chef known as the Renegade
Lunch Lady, understands first-hand the challenges that the new requirements pose, but she also knows
how effective changes can be made with the help of the right resources and tools. According to Cooper,
the answer to school food challenges lies not in waivers or rollbacks to the new USDA guidelines, but in
scratch cooking and helping schools transition away from processed food.
“School food programs have been required to make a lot of changes with very little financial or
technical support,” explains Cooper. “The Lunch Box shows districts how to meet the guidelines outlined
in the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act by reshaping their nutrition programs to include scratchcooked and fresh food.”
To efficiently meet the new requirements, The Lunch Box offers schools step-by-step guides for food
purchasing practices and policies and a management section that includes fiscal analysis tools,
reorganization strategies, HR resources, and baseline assessment tools to guide strategic planning.
The most popular section of the site is the recipe and menu cycle database. The Lunch Box offers
hundreds of school food recipes that meet USDA guidelines. The menu cycles offered include USDA
certification documentation. The recipes can be sized up or down depending on how many students are
served, and they include nutritional analysis. They’ve all been kid-tested, so school food staff can be
confident that students will like them.
About The Chef Ann Foundation
The Chef Ann Foundation (formerly Food Family Farming Foundation) was founded in 2009 by Ann
Cooper, an internationally recognized author, chef, educator, public speaker, and advocate of healthy
food for all children. To-date the Foundation has reached over 1,792,080 children across the country
and seeks to provide tools that help schools serve children healthy and delicious scratch-cooked meals
made with fresh, whole food. As a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization, the Chef Ann Foundation is grateful
to their generous supporters and friends who help them carry out this mission.