On Wednesday May 25th I recieved an award from Slow Food for my work on school lunch. Alice Waters presented the award which read: To celebrate her work as a chef, a author and nutrition educator, Slow Food USA honors Ann Cooper – Renegade Lunch Lady. In recognition of Ann’s dedication to integrating the lunchroom into the classroom, to sharing the seasonal bounty of local farms, to improvong the quality of school meals and to helping children understand why good food matters.

WOW – I feel so honored — the following is the gist of my speech.

SLOW Speech

I feel like such an unlikely candidate to be honored by Slow Food for my work on school lunch – I could never have imagined a culinary journey that would have led from white tablecloth restaurants to becoming a lunch lady. But after becoming a passionate supporter of sustainable agriculture and becoming inspired by chefs and farmers across the country who envisioned the symbiotic relationship between farming – farmers – chefs – cooking and eaters – I began the journey that ended in a lunch room with me as the head lunch lady. And I believe that this is the most important work I will ever do.

Awards and honors are funny things – there’s a person who receives them and then all of the other people that supported, helped, mentored and made possible that person’s work. My case is no different. The award that I am receiving was truly made possible by others, others who by all rights should be sharing it with me today.

First off I’d like to thank Courtney Ross – founder of the Ross School – without her support, vision and passion, I wouldn’t be here today. She and I shared a dream which became the Regional Organic Seasonal Sustainable food of the Ross school – a program which became the bar and inspiration for numerous other programs across the country.

The dream of Ross was made possible not only through Mrs Ross’s dedication – but through the hard work of my team of chefs headed by – Deena Chafetz — Coleen Donnelly and most importantly Beth Collins who took over as Executive Chef when I left and who has thru hard work and passion transformed the dream into a sustainable reality.

The Ross model impassioned others as well. Toni Liquori with Food Change here in New York City began dreaming at Ross and with the help of the Kellogg Foundation those dreams became School Food Plus– a collaboration that is working on a multi-year plan to improve the food for all NYC’s school age children.

FoodChange’s dreams then fostered a collaboration with Harlem Children’s Zone’s Promise Academy and Hiram Bonner and Andrew Benson have worked tirelessly to bring healthy regional food to the children of this local Harlem School.

And finally, I owe a debt of gratitude and thanks to Alice Waters, who I met when I wrote my first book, A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen. Alice inspired me then to begin to understand sustainable food choices and today she inspires me in my work with her in the BUSD – working to feed every child in the district healthy sustainable food — working to make the cafeteria a classroom and make school lunch part of every child’s education. Her dedication and passion are unequalled.

So this award really belongs to all of those mentioned as well as the many farmers, parents and community activists who have supported the work of bringing healthy food to children all across the country.

But the award aside – which is truly about past work – I’d like to talk about the work ahead – not only why it is of the utmost importance – but what all of you can do to help.

We all know that as a nation we’re getting fatter and sicker by the decade. Over 2/3rd of us are overweight and fully 1/3 are obese – even more disheartening is the fact that over 1/3 of our children are overweight and the CDC says that of the children born in the year 2000 – 30 – 40% will become diabetic in their lifetime – yes 30 – 40% will contract type 2 diabetes – formally known as adult onset diabetes – because of what they eat – because of what we feed them.

As if these statistics weren’t enough to get us motivated to make change – we have now raised a generation of children who believe that safe wholesome food is handed to them through a window in a white paper bag by someone they’ve never met and then eaten in a car. One of every 4 meals in America is eaten at a fast food restaurant one in 4 is eaten in a car and one in 3 in front of a TV or computer – what lessons are we teaching here… what lunch lessons are our children learning?

And who is teaching our children about their food. Corporate food giants like Attria (formerly Philip Morris), Coke, McDonalds and Mars M&Ms spend over 15 billion dollars a year on the 10,000 food ads most of our children see and almost all of which are for high fat – high sugar – high salt food with little or no nutrient value. It seems like those are the very companies who are teaching our children about food – it appears that we have abdicated our children’s food education to the very companies that are hastening their demise.

And demise isn’t too strong a word. The CDC has recently stated that our life expectancy is going down for the first time in our history – yes our children are expected to have a shorter life expectancy than we will – all because of what they’re being fed and taught about food – and not just by corporate America – but in our schools as well.

The food that our children are fed in most schools in America is appalling. Fried, highly processed, high in fats and sugars with barely a fresh vegetable or piece of fruit to be found. From full fat milk to preservatives to transfats and high fructose corn syrup – what our schools are teaching our children about food is adding to the ever expanding girth of America.

And we do have to understand that whether overt or not – what our children eat in schools becomes part of their education – a part that many school administrators have washed their hands of – as if that part of the school day just doesn’t exist – but of course it does.

When fries, hamburgers, Kentucky Fried and Pizza Hut are the fare, when salad bars if they exist at all, are filled with canned fruits and vegetables, when soda and candy machines populate the halls – we’re teaching our children and the lesson is killing them.

But we can change all of this – we – all of us here can turn this around. We can feed children healthy food – we can teach our children to make healthy food choices – we can teach them where their food comes from – we can save their health – their future and perhaps along with it their planet.

But as with all change – it’s not going to be easy. First off we need to make healthy food accessible to all children – universal breakfast and lunch must become the norm in all schools. And we need to spend more money on our children’s food – because their food choices equate to their life-long health. Today most schools are reimbursed by the government $2.24 for lunch of which 80 – 90 cents is spent on the food – 80 or 90 cents for 700 – 800 calories and hence we get what we pay for – cheap food — bad health.

And for those who say we can’t afford to spend more on school food – we need to make them understand that we’re paying no matter what – its just a matter of when. Diet related illness is already costing us – our taxes – $115 billion a year to support our health care system which is already teetering on bankruptcy. To put this in perspective – we spend $7 billion on the entire national school lunch program – as a country $115 billion on diet related illness & last year alone over $200 billion on the war. Perhaps we need to rethink our priorities.

But spending more money on food is not enough – we need to re-train the food service workers – most of them are years or decades away from cooking in their schools and most of the schools don’t even have working kitchens – so infra-structure needs to be put in place. School administrators and food service workers need our help and support if the food they feed our children is to improve.

But even these additional monies aren’t enough – we must rethink the government system that funnels commodity foods into our schools – we have to make sure that highly processed over-produced food from agri-business is no longer “dumped” into our children’s lunches. In fact I believe that over-sight of the national school lunch program must be moved from the USDA – which is a marketing program for agri-business to Health and Human Services – we need to make school lunch part of health – not part of agribusinesses profits.

So what do we do – how can all of us – every one of us sitting in this room make a difference.

What we can do is get involved.

In the reauthorization of the National School Lunch Act, policy was included which dictated that every school district in our country must have a wellness policy in place by the first day of the school year 2006/2007 & that these policies would be decided upon by a committee of stakeholders that should include parents and concerned community members. So I urge all of you to get involved. Reach out to your local schools and work with them to write and enact wellness policies that truly protect our children’s health and their future. Reach out to school administrators and work with them to make healthy universal school meals a priority. Reach out to our government officials and make them understand that they must make our children’s health their number one priority.

Know that you make a difference. Every single person in this room makes a difference & that difference may truly be the future health of all of our children and their children and their planet as well.