Every food-conscious parent should watch this from TED blog (ideas worth spreading) — US school-lunch chef Ann Cooper has been touring the US this summer, asking locals to change their approach to food in schools. Her own revolutionary school lunch program, in which kids eat local produce and fresh bread, has taken hold in Berkeley, California; Cooper just moved to Boulder, Colorado, to revamp that lunch system. [tweetmeme]

To help other school systems transform their own meal programs, she just launched a beta version of The Lunch Box, a website from her nonprofit F3: Food Family Farming Foundation. Inside The Lunch Box are budget models, menus and lots of recipes.

Watch Ann Cooper below and catch her enthusiasm for feeding kids good food:

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Cindy here : I’m proud to say that in our little corner of the world (in NZ) one of my local primary schools has just installed a pizza oven as part of their ‘Garden to Table‘ program. Students all take turns working in the vegetable garden, tending the worm farm and collecting food scraps from the playground for composting.  From next year all Year 4 kids (8-9 year-olds) will gather produce from the school garden and learn to cook. This fantastic program is the NZ adaptation of  Stephanie Alexander’s  Kitchen Garden Program founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2001. This is one of three NZ schools trialling the program.

Let’s hope it extends to many more schools soon.

Do you find it hard to figure out what the food labels say? Wish there was just one mark that told you if a food was OK to eat? Well my friend Sarah at the NZ Nutrition Foundation says they have tried to do just that with their new ‘e-mark’ website – it’s great. I punched in my height, weight and exercise level and up came a meal plan that I could easily follow. Great! Check it out.