By Danielle Staunton | Development DIrector
350 kids attend West Oak Middle School in the suburbs of Illinois and almost all of them eat school lunch. Shockingly, 266 of those kids are on the Free/Reduced Lunch Program. That means their family’s income is at or below poverty level. Children from low income homes are at higher risk for obesity and diabetes due to poor diets.
West Oak Middle School is a recipient of Chef Ann Foundation’s Project Produce: Fresh Fruits and Veggies Grant. The school’s lunch menu is partially made up of scratch cooked meals, and the food service team is dedicated to making sure their kids eat real food at school, taste out of the box recipes made with less common produce, and develop healthy eating habits early.
The school’s food service director partnered with a local farm to procure produce not typically provided by the USDA, which comes frozen or in cans, for the “Chef’s Tasting Table”. Their goal was to engage students, parent volunteers and school personnel in a series of in cooking unique recipes for school-wide tastings. According to the district’s VP of Operations, the program was “extraordinarily successful”.
Teams of students, parents and school staff used creative recipes highlighting a variety of locally harvested produce to demonstrate there is more out there than just apples, carrots and cucumbers. While cooking, the food service staff discussed the nutritional value of each item and random facts about each ingredient so they could have meaningful dialog with the other students during the tastings. Many of the events included take home recipes to extend the nutrition education into the home.
The team made great use of the funding from the grant, hosting 11 tastings with some pretty creative ingredients and recipes:
The results of the Product Produce program greatly impacted what the children started requesting on the school lunch menu. The desire for more seasonal produce has increased the school’s local procurement by almost 20%.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
