What’s wrong with school food – and what’s right?
Like many other people in the world of food, we have become increasingly interested – bordering on obsessed – with school lunch. And there’s good reason for that – there are examples all over the world of people doing school lunch better than the United States does, and examples all over the United States of some places doing school lunch better than others do. And, no one would argue with this: If you want to raise a generation of adults who understand food, you have to start when those adults are children.
We haven’t done that.
And we think that it’s worth talking about school food regularly and seriously. So, to that end, we have three guests today, all of whom are working as experts in school food programs.
The first is Kendal Chavez, who is the Food and Hunger Advisor in the office of New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham. In New Mexico, Kendal is working on one of the country’s most successful and interesting school lunch situations.
Also, we have Stephanie Lip, who is the Senior School Food Operations Specialist at the Chef Ann Foundation, which specializes in school lunch advisory programs.
Our third guest is Curt Ellis, who might still be best known for co-producing King Corn, which came out in 2007 and was a surprise hit. Perhaps slightly more behind the scenes, though, Curt is one of the founders of FoodCorps – part of the AmeriCorps program – which places young people in schools around the country to do work on food. FoodCorps has been enormously successful, has grown by leaps and bounds, and is one of the important non-profits in the food world right now. So here’s a really interesting conversation about school lunches—one that I hope we all learn from.
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