Eating At School

In Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat, historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it was (and, to some extent, has continued to be) so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry. Through careful studies of several key contexts and detailed analysis of the policies and politics that governed the creation of school meal programs, Ruis demonstrates how the early history of school meal program development helps us understand contemporary debates over changes to school lunch policies.

When school teacher Mrs. Q forgot her lunch one day, she had no idea she was about to embark on an odyssey to uncover the truth about public school lunches. Shocked by what her students were served, she resolved to eat school lunch for an entire year, chronicling her experience anonymously on a blog that received thousands of hits daily, and was lauded by such food activists as Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, and Marion Nestle. Here, Mrs. Q reveals her identity for the first time in an eye-opening account of school lunches in America. Along the way, she provides invaluable resources for parents and health advocates who wish to help reform school lunch, making this a must-read for anyone concerned about children's health issues.

French Kids Eat Everything is a wonderfully wry account of how Karen Le Billon was able to alter her children’s deep-rooted, decidedly unhealthy North American eating habits while they were all living in France. At once a memoir, a cookbook, a how-to handbook, and a delightful exploration of how the French manage to feed children without endless battles and struggles with pickiness, French Kids Eat Everything features recipes, practical tips, and ten easy-to-follow rules for raising happy and healthy young eaters—a sort of French Women Don’t Get Fat meets Food Rules.

This publication contains the report of the European Forum, organised jointly by the Council of Europe and the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and held in Strasbourg, France in November 2003 with participants from 27 countries. The aims of the Forum were to promote healthy eating in schools as an integral part of healthy lifestyles; to review different European approaches to provision of school meals; and to make proposals for follow-up activities to be pursued by the Council of Europe.

For anyone who has kids in school or who cares about what kids eat, Eating at School is essential reading. It is a warm, reality-based, and entirely practical guide to why school food should set a healthy example, and how to approach fixing it when it doesn't. The authors understand what schools and caretakers are up against and provide all the evidence anyone needs to make healthy school food a priority. Marion Nestle Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and author of Unsavory Truth (Uma Verdade Indigesta in its Brazilian edition). The authors talk about school food in an informative, accessible, and sensitive way. This book reminds us that we are the protagonists of our lives, and that small changes are often the first step toward deeper transformations. I hope this reading encourages us to take action to transform schools into healthier spaces and make children's eating experiences more meaningful. Inês Rugani Ribeiro de Castro Professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

In this national bestseller based on Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health research, Dr. Willett explains why the USDA guidelines--the famous food pyramid--are not only wrong but also dangerous.

It is a daily undertaking – a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we’ve not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

It has never been so difficult to raise a healthy eater in America.Along with the picky eating and public tantrums that have forever tested the limits of parental patience, today's parents also fend off sophisticated assaults from outside their kitchens: unhealthy food-marketing campaigns aimed at kids; misleading product labels aimed at parents; and a school-foodprogram so starved for cash that it sells name-brand junk food to grade school students.In Kid Food, nationally recognized food writer Bettina Elias Siegel (New York Times, The Lunch Tray) explores the cultural delusions and industry deceptions that have made it all but impossible to raise a healthy eater in America. Combining first-person reporting with the hard-won understanding of afood advocate and parent, it presents a startling portrayal of the current food landscape for children - and the role of parents in navigating it.Siegel also lifts the curtain on shadowy food industry front-groups, including clever marketing techniques that intentionally confuse parents about a product's nutritional value. (Did you know that "made with real fruit" may mean a product is less healthy?) What emerges is the industry'sdivide-and-conquer strategy, one that stokes kids' desire for junk food while breaking down parents' ability to act as responsible gatekeepers.For anyone who frets over what their child is eating, Kid Food offers both essential reading and a deeper understanding of the factors at play in their child's food environment. Written in the same engaging and relatable voice that has made The Lunch Tray a trusted resource for parents for almost adecade, Kid Food offers a well of compassion - and expertise - for those fighting the good fight at home.