School Food
The new guidelines define key agreements for providing a safe, nourishing environment for teaching and learning. The guidelines booklet includes clearly written and colorfully illustrated descriptions of each guideline.
It offers helpful suggestions about what works and what doesn’t work in practice toward making schools “a place where our values...
CFPA is dedicated to increasing access to nutritious, affordable food for low-income Californians. Its school-food related areas of focus are school breakfast and lunch, meal enrollment, afterschool nutrition, early childhood nutrition, summer nutrition, and REAL (Real Eats for Academics and Life) school food.
The website features nutrition action...
The guide offers recipes, tested in schools, to support the inclusion of local, fresh, California specialty crops in the school lunch menus. It includes instructions for professional development. The recipes are presented in family-size portions appropriate for professional development and also scaled up for school-sized production.
In response to the childhood obesity epidemic, much research has been conducted on school-based obesity prevention and healthy eating and physical activity promotion and intervention. The Centers for Disease Control's new guidelines in this report synthesize the scientific evidence and best practices during 1995-2009 and combine healthy eating and...
This website provides links to a multitude of resources, (PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and webinars) that support health and wellness. Topics include CalFresh, Urban Agriculture, Working with Farmers' Markets, Food Recovery, and School Wellness.
The Shaping Healthy Choices Program is a multi-component, school-based intervention that was developed to improve children’s health. The program integrates activities within four components: nutrition education and promotion, family and community partnerships, foods available on the school campus with an emphasis on regional agriculture, and school...
The Chef Ann Foundation is dedicated to helping schools take action so that every child has daily access to fresh, healthy food. Its programs include Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, Project Produce, Parent Advocacy Initiative, and Healthy Breakfast for Kids, as well as The Lunch Box, an online resource that provides free step-by-step guides, tools, and...
This cookbook, menu planning resource, and professional development guide helps meal services devise appealing menus around dishes that children already prefer. It offers ideas for adding more fresh, local, healthy foods to school lunches; honors California’s rich history and cultural heritage; and describes a tested plan for effective professional...
This article reviews the benefits and challenges of farm-to-school efforts, describing some of the innovative ways that food service directors on California’s Central Coast are working to overcome challenges by forming effective partnerships with other school districts and with food banks and produce distributors.
It also describes how efforts to...
This farm to school policy brief was written to inform policymakers and farm to school educators and advocates about the benefits and challenges faced by school food service managers as they attempt to purchase food from regional farms. It concludes with some possible practical and policy options to consider to support farm to school activities.
The Good Food Purchasing Program transforms the way public institutions purchase food by providing a metric based, flexible framework that encourages large institutions to direct their buying power toward five core values: local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. The Good Food Purchasing Program...
This manual presents a general overview of how to implement a salad bar program in an elementary school cafeteria.
Based on lessons learned while launching salad bars on several Los Angeles campuses, it is designed for schools, cafeteria personnel, parents or other community members and covers the full process from planning to maintenance and...
This research contains an assessment of the impact of legislation that established nutrition standards for foods and beverages that compete with reimbursable school meals in California. This study concluded that regulation of competitive foods improved school food environments and student nutritional intake.
On-campus foods and beverages meeting...
This series of videos, four to five minutes each, covers a range of topics including the future of school lunch, organic farming on UC campuses, wage justice, wild bees, edible wild plants growing in cities, and the impact of ocean acidification on marine invertebrates.
Our Food Chain promotes healthy eating by using media to educate and inspire parents, children, communities, and policy makers to get involved in their school lunch programs and improve the food options in their homes and in their communities.
Its award-winning hour-long documentary, which can be viewed on its website, is based on innovations in...
Public Health Advocates (formerly the California Center for Public Health Advocacy) helps neighborhoods and schools become places that nurture health and well-being. They believe that neighborhoods and schools can be places where the physical, social, and economic conditions make health a reality for all people.
Their website features innovative...
A positive vision informs this planning framework: healthy children ready to learn, “food literate” graduates, invigorated local communities, sustainable agriculture, and a healthy environment.
The Guide is a downloadable PDF that explains the rationale for reforming school food and explores the ten pathways that constitute the planning...
This article includes an assessment of the potential and challenges of the elementary school cafeteria as a setting and resource for nutrition education, with evaluation of the development and implementation of a toolkit for nutrition education by elementary food services staff.
The goal of the project was to take advantage of the potential of...
How can you improve the preK-12 dining experience and inspire healthy habits in schools? This two-page PDF summarizes projects from the University of California and it's Global Food Initiative aimed at improving school food and nutrition.
