I’m happy to tell you that this week we are talking again about one of our favorite subjects — school food. It’s an area of the food world that is rapidly evolving, and one that has deep meaning to many of us. You’ve heard Mark and me talk about it often, both casually and in interviews.
The Chef Ann Foundation was founded in 2009, when chef and “renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper joined forces with Mara Fleishman, a nationally recognized leader in food systems transformation and parent of three who’d spent more than a decade at Whole Foods as their Global Director of Partnerships.
Mara, our guest today, is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, which helps schools replace ultraprocessed foods with fresh and cooked-from-scratch meals — meals that are better for our kids and better for our environment. Since its foundation, Chef Ann has reached more than 19,000 schools, 35,000 school food professionals, and almost 6 million students with their initiatives to make school food healthier, tastier, and more sustainable.
As you can probably tell, Mara is an inspiration, and I’m thankful every day that we have people like her and like Ann who are leading such a crucial charge.
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