Category Archives: Spork Award

Titanium Spork Award Winner!

Spork Award

And we have a winner!

Jenna Pepper, Food with Kid Appeal

I was really impressed by the strong nominations for her by multiple people (read the comments) and so I decided that I would just go ahead and give it to her without the vote. Here’s what Dana Woldow had to say about Jenna:

Jenna has been active at her own child’s school organizing and running pilot programs to get high sugar food out of the school meals and promote the consumption of fruits and vegetables. One great example is the Eat to Learn curriculum that she helped create and implement. As a result, raw broccoli consumption skyrocketed 80% and fresh fruit consumption is up 14%.

Jenna also ran a very successful breakfast pilot last year which demonstrated that breakfast participation would not decline even if the popular highly sweetened cereals and chocolate milk were replaced with a choice of either a hot breakfast or plain Cheerios, fresh fruit, and white milk. Read more about that pilot here.

In my 10 years of working as an advocate for better school food, I have met few parents as inspiring as Jenna is; her commitment to better nutrition for children, and her willingness to persevere even when faced with bureaucratic challenges, make her the perfect candidate for a Titanium Spork!

Hip, hip hooray for Jenna! I’ll be mailing you a sparkly Titanium Spork shortly!

Titanium Spork Award!

Spork Award

Shame on me — I haven’t awarded a Titanium Spork Award for a long time. You probably have been wondering why I haven’t mentioned the awards in awhile. Well, Dana Woldow from peachsf.org, who won one of the more recent awards, suggested that I work on putting some kind of logo together. What a great idea! So I emailed the designer who developed my header logo and I have been waiting for her to design some spectacular, but I think she’s too busy. If you know of someone who would be available and has graphic design experience, please let me know.

Titanium Spork Awards are given to people working diligently to change school food in big and small ways. I developed the award because I didn’t see anything like that out there and I wanted people committed to reform to receive something tangible for their efforts. However, I didn’t know enough about the school food reform movement to decide on my own who deserved this honor. That’s where you guys came in. All of the recipients were nominated and voted on by Fed Up With Lunch readers. Previous Titanium Spork Award winners included:

April 2010 – Jamie Oliver, Food Revolution

May 2010 – Lisa Suriano, Veggiecation

June 2010 – Laura De Santis, Marblehead Community Charter Public School

September 2010 – Dr. Susan Rubin, Better School Food

October/November 2010 – Ed Bruske, The Slow Cook

December 2010 – Dana Woldow, PEACHSF.org

January/February 2011 – Ann Cooper, Renegade Lunch Lady

It all started when I joked about titanium sporks in a blog post about sporks and all of a sudden I got an email from ThinkGeek (the company that sells them). It just goes to show you, you never know who is reading! They sent me some sporks and I wanted to give them away. When I said that I wanted to continue the award, they sent me more sporks. By the way, I’m a big fan of titanium sporks — they are so light and fun.

Please nominate a candidate for this summer’s Titanium Spork Award by making a comment below this post with the nominee’s name.

Titanium Spork Award Winner!

Spork Award

Congrats Chef Ann Cooper — She won the Titanium Spork Award for January/February! I’ll be sending it out soon! Thanks for everything you do to help kids get the nutrition they need to be successful in school.

(Aside: do any of you talented readers do design work? I’d love to create a logo for the Titanium Spork Award. Please email me if you are interested in creating a logo for the award. Thanks!)

Peaches and sporks

Spork Award,

Dana Woldow, winner of December’s Titanium Spork Award, has just launched a website PEACHSF.org. The website’s official title is Parents, Educators and Advocates Connection for Healthy School Food. It is THE go-to website for people with questions about school lunch reform. Dana has been working to change school food in 2002 and has made wonderful progress in San Francisco. She is putting all of her knowledge, along with the input of other very smart folks, in one place online help newbies like me.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of talking with Dana on the phone and we struck up an easy conversation. She is passionate about school food reform and I found her to be incredibly informative, friendly, and down-to-earth. Dana recently wrote her Titanium Spork Award acceptance speech and it appears below.

Thank you so much to Mrs. Q and to everyone who voted for me to win the Titanium Spork Award. I’ve spent the past 8 years working for better school food in San Francisco’s public schools, and I have had the honor of working with so many selfless dedicated volunteers – this award is really for all of them too, not just for me.

After so many years of working in the trenches, I have decided to share everything I’ve learned about fixing school food with everyone across the country who wants to get started making changes in their own communities. On March 26th, my new website, PEACHSF.org, made its debut. PEACHSF stands for Parents Educators and Advocates Connection for Healthy School Food; the website is a place where people can find how to guides, everything from ‘how to talk the talk’ to ‘how to do a pilot’, from ‘how to make friends with your student nutrition director’ to ‘how to figure out if your school or district can do what another school or district is doing’. It’s a place where people can share their successes and bring their questions about how to move change forward.

It’s hard to navigate between the naysayers, who claim that school food can’t be improved because it is controlled by Big Food and Big Ag, or that it should not be the government’s responsibility to feed kids at all, and those on the other side who focus exclusively on the “miracle workers” who are doing great things in their own schools, but without revealing how those improvements are paid for, or whether they are scalable or sustainable. We believe that the truth lies somewhere in between – that a dedicated group of concerned citizens can get informed, get organized, and get going on fixing school food, and achieve success which, even if not miraculous, is at least replicable in other communities, and benefits the kids who are our future. PEACHSF is an open source guide to doing just that, written by volunteers to inspire other volunteers. I hope readers of Fed Up With Lunch will come visit the site at http://www.peachsf.org/ and be motivated to push school food reform forward in their own communities. Thanks again!

Book Club and Titanium Spork Award

Spork Award,

How many of you have decided to join me in reading Free For All? What do you think of the book so far?

I learned facts and statistics just from reading the introduction. My yellow highlighter is by my bed…wait a moment, my toddler has absconded with it… At first I thought it would be heavy reading, but it really isn’t. But I have only gotten through the introduction and the first chapter.

The first chapter covers when Dr. Poppendieck, the author, volunteers in a school cafeteria for a week. If you ever doubted how much work lunch ladies do, you should read this chapter (it’s no surprise that she puts it in the first chapter). For me it wasn’t new information: I see lunch ladies working hard all day, every day. Although I don’t know the machinations of what happens behind the counters, I see enough of the lunch line to know two very important things: 1) It’s a tough job 2) Lunch ladies care about the kids. Period.

Dr. Poppendieck goes on to talk about Breakfast in the Classroom, which she witnessed firsthand. I have not seen it yet, but according to recent news reports it’s coming. I don’t believe having breakfast in the classroom will mess up the morning routine greatly and I really want the kids to eat something first thing in the morning. Dr. Poppendieck explained in the book that there were positive benefits like reduced visits to the nurse in the morning, decreased tardiness, and reduced disciplinary action in the morning (p. 36). The teachers were unanimous is their concerns about the quality of the food (exactly as I blogged about last week). I’m excited to see how this will play out in my real life…

Dr. Poppendieck also covers a little bit about the offer vs serve approach (p. 40), which I’m sure she will go into in more depth later into the book. It is mandated in high schools (came about in the 1970’s to reduce waste, which makes me laugh) and that is how kids can choose to eat pizza and fries every day and still have a federally reimbursable meal.

I like how Dr. Poppendieck says “I knew so little to begin with…” — that’s exactly how I feel and why I’m excited to read the book. She’s taking me down a road that was new to her once too. This should be interesting!

***

The winner of December’s Titanium Spork Award is Dana Woldow! She won by a landslide! Ms. Woldow is a mom on a mission in San Francisco. Read up about her on CNN.com, on greatschools.com and an essay contributed on The Lunch Tray last fall. Thank you so much for what you have done for children!

Please comment below for your nominations for January’s Titanium Spork Award!

Titanium Spork Award – Two Acceptance Speeches and One Poll

Spork Award,

Titanium Spork Awards are given monthly to people working towards better school lunches in the best way they know how. The readers nominate recipients and then vote on the winners.

I have put up a poll based on your nominations for December’s Titanium Spork Award. Please vote!

I’m running a little behind schedule. Here are the acceptance speeches from two of last year’s winners:

September 2010 Winner – Dr. Susan Rubin

I want to thank you so very much to all of you who voted for me to receive the September Titanium Spork award. It feels good to be recognized for the work I’ve done with raising awareness of the school food issue.

Having more than a decade under my belt doing this work, I guess you could say I’m an elder in the school food movement. It’s not a glitzy or glamorous position to be in, but it is worthwhile and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t have a salary, Better School Food is an all volunteer 501c3 organization. My work as a school food activist has been very idealistic and altruistic. I never got a book deal, or even a day’s worth of pay, for the Two Angry Moms movie that featured my work. What I did receive was satisfaction of knowing that I inspired and supported people across the country to take a stand for children’s health.

While school food has been a big piece of my life for many years, this year, 2011, I’m feeling called to a bigger, even more scary issue. The combination of climate change/ peak oil and economic instability will impact everything. Especially everything we eat. I am extremely concerned that food security will be a far bigger issue than childhood obesity in the years to come.

It is my lot in life to be ahead of the curve. I remember trying to convince school administrators that declining children’s health and childhood obesity would be front page news and could bankrupt our healthcare system. I was one of the few people speaking publicly about these unpleasant topics.

Years later, they now realize my prediction was not so crazy after all.

Today, as I read about the floods in Australia, last summer’s record heat in Moscow and massive flooding in Pakistan and so many other instances of “global weirding”, I realize that this weather will ultimately impact our food supply.

Last year as I wondered why the heck BP would drill for oil 2 miles underneath the gulf of Mexico, and now as I watch oil prices climb above $90 a barrel, I ask myself at which point our food system will collapse? Our food system is heavily dependent upon easy, cheap fossil fuel, but the oil left in the earth is no longer easy to get and no longer cheap.

Just like with school food, I now see the writing on the wall: We have to create a smaller, diverse and more resilient food supply. To create that better food system, we need to raise the Food IQ. This is not about calories, fat grams and carbs, it never really was. Nutrition has been a distraction from the really important piece: We’ve gotten too disconnected from real food and where it comes from. We need a garden in every school for more reasons than obesity. Gardens are the answer to our current and future problems.

The more kids and teachers who can learn how easy (and fun) it is to grow food, the better chance we’ll have of feeding ourselves locally in the years ahead as climate change becomes obvious and fossil fuels become even more expensive and not so readily available. I know that may sound crazy, just like childhood obesity did 10+ years ago when I talked to school administrators.

As a reader of Mrs Q’s blog, I already know you care about our kid’s future. What can you do to take the next step to help pave the way for a more food secure system that will nourish them? Here are a few ideas:

Check out the Nourish curriculum ( link: http://nourishlife.org/curriculum.html ) that Mrs Q blogged about. Download the curriculum, buy the DVD and create a school or community event to share the info.

Read and/or watch The No Impact Man (link: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/ )

Get involved with your local Slow Food chapter. (link: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ )They are working towards a food system that is good, clean and fair. Start a Slow Food in Schools project in your school or community.

Get growing! Grow some herbs in a sunny window. Dig up part of your lawn and grow some veggies. Join a community garden, support your local farmer.

Thank you again, MrsQ and your readers for the lovely spork! It will bring a smile to my face every time I use it.

October/November 2010 Winner – Ed Bruske

I am extremely grateful for being awarded not one, but two titanium sporks by readers of the “Fed Up With Lunch” blog. Being a citizen journalist engaged in covering school food issues on a daily basis is a lonely business. Being recognized for the work that I do is more important than you know in fueling my ongoing pursuit.

I fell into this role accidentally when I was given a chance to observe first-hand how the food was being prepared at my daughter’s elementary school here in the District of Columbia. It was quite a shock to me to see how bad the food was, just blocks from the White House where Michelle Obama is waging her anti-obesity campaign. After seeing kids as young as five being fed Apple Jacks cereal, strawberry milk, Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and Otis Spunkmeyer muffins–the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar–first thing in the morning, I had to wonder what kind of adult minds thought this was appropriate food for children in the middle of an obesity epidemic.

I was also disappointed to see how little interest the mainstream media show in school food issues. Unfortunately, the general public has a rather simplistic idea that all the program needs is more money from Washington. In fact, there are many serious and nuanced aspects to the federal school meals program that deserve our sustained, in-depth attention. School food consultant Kate Adamick, for instance, is showing how to capture millions of dollars in school district programs simply by eliminating a multitude of inefficiencies. Other districts have made school food healthier without spending any extra money by eliminating sugary products and other junk food. Still others have found ways to marshal local community resources to make vast improvements to their cafeterias.

In short, I think precious time and effort is wasted waiting for Washington to solve the school food dilemma. Michelle Obama and bloggers such as Mrs. Q are doing invaluable work maintaining public awareness. We all need to educate ourselves on the subject of what really makes the school meals program work–or not work–and imagine new ways to make it better.

Titanium Spork Award Winner for October/November (and a call for nominations)

Spork Award

I can’t believe I never announced who you voted for as the recipient of the October/November Titanium Spork Award Winner….

Ed Bruske!

I went through my posts from December and wouldn’t you know it, I never announced that he had won (even though the poll results hung out there on my sidebar forever…).

I have been a big fan of his ever since he spent a week in the kitchen of his daughter’s school reporting on the school lunches in Washington DC as well as his trips to both Berkeley, California and Boulder, Colorado to dig deeper into how things work in model school lunch programs. He blogs in two places: The Slow Cook and Better DC School Food.

Congrats and a big thank you for all of your hard work! Because it was a combined award, it’s a double prize of two titanium sporks. Ed, I hope they arrived safely!

Please nominate a candidate to receive the Titanium Spork Award for December (in the comments).
Past recipients have included:

April – Jamie Oliver
May – Lisa Suriano
June – Laura DeSantis
September – Dr. Susan Rubin
October/November – Ed Bruske

There are many people working in the school lunch reform movement who haven’t received any recognition for their hard work and that’s why I want to continue giving out prizes to people making a difference. Please leave a comment with your nomination(s)!

June’s Titanium Spork Award Recipient: Laura DeSantis

Spork Award,
June’s Titanium Spork Award Winner, Laura DeSantis, agreed to write a little acceptance speech. Her words appear below. I appreciate everything she does on behalf of her school kids every day! Thank you Chef Laura for your dedication and hard work!
Thank you to all who voted for Marblehead Community Charter Public School (MCCPS). It’s an honor to receive the “Titanium Spork” It’s great to be recognized for all the hard work and great things we do in the nutrition department. We couldn’t do it without the support and help from the faculty and parents. Our schools mission states,”We are a community that empowers children to become capable, self determining, fully engaged individuals who are critical thinkers committed to achieving their highest intellectual, artistic, social, emotional and physical potential. We are dedicated to involving, learning from, participating in and serving our school community and the community at large”. We all realize that this statement covers a lot of territory but one thing is for sure, we believe that nutrition and healthy habits are something our students will use for a lifetime.

I grew up in a large Italian family who owned a catering business, so you could say I ate very well. I always thought the whole world ate like we did, until I went to college. I attended and received my BA in Culinary Arts from Johnson & Wales University. I realized that we are what our parents/ adults expose us to. Chefs in training were eating things like Spaghetti O’s! Yuck! It was very eye opening for me and nutrition became a personal issue. Eventually, I did a fellowship with the university and taught intern students from all over the country. This was great to meet and teach, as well as take skills from others. I always enjoyed teaching/instructing and wanted to return to that kind of environment. I worked as professional chef for 15 years with many experiences, mostly in fine dining. I starting at MCCPS about 2 ½ years ago. I never dreamt all these years later I would be teaching middle school students how to hold a knife, how to make pizza from scratch or Asian noodles with vegetables from the local farms. Most students embrace it and for me it has been extremely rewarding. To watch the students absorb these life skills is amazing.

My background as a chef has really made the difference at the school from a financial standpoint. Chefs by nature are very cost conscious. Also knowledge of recipes and how to utilize every item without much waste is common restaurant/kitchen practice. Everything we do is with costs in mind. We use seasonal produce because it’s cheaper. This enables us to support the local farms and utilize what we produce in our gardens. This also allows us to be creative with our monthly menu. We do participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). We process all these “commodity” foods in house. There are many regulations some of which I don’t understand but we need to comply with. For instance you may already know that French fries (potatoes) are considered a vegetable?!

We have a few rules in our kitchen. We don’t serve fries, chicken patties, nuggets or fingers (once a year we make them from scratch as a treat). We only use fresh chicken, meats and vegetables to produce our menus. Once these items were gone, the students eventually stopped asking for them. Most students are willing to try new foods. If they want all those other things, their parents can make the call. Our participation is over 50%. We use our fresh salad bar for trials or we give out a free sample. That’s right – FREE! It’s amazing what kids will try when it’s free. That’s how I got them to eat curry. We also offer seasonal whole fruit for free. This is our effort to promote eating fresh fruit. We put out a big bowl of fruit 2 to 3 times a day. We work these items into our budget. A little something free helps to gets students to try new things.

Using food in the classroom to learn about different cultures. The students take foreign language so we do things like French and Spanish Buffets. We have the students do the research and translate the food items. We then have them test the recipes in the kitchen. My staff (2) and I produce and serve these items for lunch. We also encourage students to help and participate in the kitchen. They are assigned to rotating lunch clean up crewand are responsible for doing dishes, cleaning tables, and composting leftovers and waste. Our teachers actually eat the same lunch the students eat and even sit with them.

We are very proud of the school and our nutrition program. The program has come a long way and we keep building on it and continue to try and be innovative. We have all “ drank the Kool-Aid “ as they say. We are passionate about what we feed and offer our students and faculty. We admit that we can’t change everyone completely but a little goes a long way.