Whole Foods Market has teamed up with renegade lunch lady Ann Cooper to create The Lunch Box, an online resource that seeks to help schools serve healthier food to students.

Knowing that schools need more than healthy menus to overhaul a bad lunch program, The Lunch Box covers all the bases (though it’s got plenty of recipes that come complete with nutritional information, too!). Featuring technical tools, financial modeling, educational manuals, and marketing materials, the website has everything schools need to lay the foundation for healthier student meals. Additionally, The Lunch Box will house a blog and discussion forum to encourage teachers, administrators, and school communities to support each other and and exchange ideas. “We hope this website is the go-to place [when it comes to improving school food,” says Chef Ann.

While there’s already plenty of information available on the website, Chef Ann says plenty more is on the way. “We have some other partners that we’re beginning to work with. We’ve really just begun on this site–we’ll be building extensively over the next 18 months,” she says.

Want to learn more about ways to make your school healthier and greener? Check out MyHealthySchool.com.

-Marygrace, KIWI Staffer

The U.S. News blog Washington Whispers recently reported that Wyntergrace Williams, the 14-year-old daughter of Montel Williams, wrote a letter to Malia and Sasha Obama asking them to support her vegetarian lunch campaign.

Wyntergrace, a vegetarian of four years, attended two hearings on Capitol Hill last week in an effort to amend the Child Nutrition Act to include more healthy vegetarian options in public school cafeterias.  While neither Malia or Sasha are vegetarians, Wyntergrace points out that Sidwell Friends, the private school that the First Daughters attend, offers well-balanced meat-free meals, and that other schools across the country should do the same.

The White House has not commented on Wyntergrace’s effort, however, she continutes to seek improvement within the National School Lunch Program.  Wyntergrace argues that more students will choose vegetarian options if they’re made available, resulting in lower levels of childhood obesity.  Look for a TV commercial in the near future featuring Wyntergrace along with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine touting their veggie lunch campaign.

My name is Keri Marshall and I am a licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in Dover, NH, and mother of two. I have a general family practice that encompasses all aspects of natural medicine including clinical nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy and lifestyle counseling. I enjoy organic gardening, cooking, snowboarding, camping, biking and surfing. Currently one of the big projects I am working on in my community is an effort to improve the public school hot lunch program. Recently, our school board unanimously approved removal of all trans fats from foods being served, no artificial sweeteners, and at least 50% of grains served will be whole grains.

With the information I provide, I hope to help you understand a few simple concepts, one of which is that childhood nutrition begins as early as conception. How we eat throughout pregnancy as well as how we introduce food to an infant will greatly impact lifelong nutrition and eating habits. I also hope to provide beneficial information with regard to decoding nutrition labels and de-mystifying contradictory information that we hear about in the media and what it means in our day-to-day life.

In general, children who consume Standard American Diet (SAD) meet the RDA basic guidelines for nutrition. Unfortunately, it appears that we have set the bar too low and the guidelines set by the government are fostering an epidemic of obesity and poor health. I look forward to creating a forum to discuss ways to raise the bar with regards to our children’s nutrition and explore ways to improve our own personal nutrition and lifestyle habits as parents.

–Dr. Keri Marshall MS, ND is a licensed Naturopathic Doctor who specializes in holistic pediatrics and women’s medicine.