>> great, so welcome to this special editionof the "authors at google" series. today we are specifically focusing on the nationalschool lunch program reform and we have ann cooper in conversation with our very own oliviawu here, and ann cooper is also known as the "renegade lunch lady". she is a chef, nutritionservices director, consultant, author, public speaker, and advocate for practical nutritionreform. and, did you know that our very own chef, olivia wu, before becoming the executivechef at oasis was actually a journalist? she is a staff reporter for the san franciscochronicle. she is a food consultant and public relations specialist. she specializes in asiancuisine and culture and fusion cuisine, seafood and sustainability and believe it or not,they were actually both roommates. so you
may remember that alice waters came here lastyear to share her vision for the delicious food revolution and ann cooper's actuallythe person that alice waters and the chez panisse foundation helped hire to make thatvision a reality so she helped eliminate nearly all the processed foods that were served withinthe berkley unified school district. she introduced fresh and organic foods into the daily menuand all while staying within the food district's budget and then she has since moved to boulderto keep spreading the change so please welcome chef ann cooper and olivia wu. [applause] olivia wu: welcome. it's an honor to haveyou here. you've been to google many times
and we've sat around and talked so much abouthow your day went, what the kids ate and what they didn't eat, and what your staff did soi hope to just replicate some of that and there is a small enough group here that maybeeverybody can come up to the fireside with your questions. we have lots of questionsfor you in the next three hours but i'm just going to kind of turn you on and let you talk[laughs] but you turned the food chain around here at berkeley and now you are at boulderdoing all of boulder county. what are some of the similarities? what are new challenges?what are the 'ah ha' moments that make you go "this is what i've been able to do andi'll do it all again or this is new" so talk to us about that.
ann cooper: well, when i came to berkeley,i came because alice waters asked me to come and i had been doing this in new york andshe said come to berkeley. i had also had been asked to go to harlem and work in harlemso i said yes to both and i was working half time in harlem and half time in berkeley,commuting back and forth and trying to redo some schools in new york city as well. andi didn't actually think i'd ever take over the district. i thought i was just going tobe a consultant but after being a consultant for a year, i eventually took over the districtand because alice and her foundation had been working here for ten years and also the centerfor equal literacy, there was a real strong movement in berkeley to make change. however,the food was spectacularly bad. i mean, the
kids had a five day rotating cycle of chickennuggets, extremo burritos, pizza pockets, corn dogs, and grilled cheese sandwiches,all preprocessed, all prepared, all in plastic and that's what the kids ate and so you'dthink alice, berkeley, you know, there's a real disconnect but that's the kind of foodwe had. it took four years and it was a real hard process and even though we had a lotof parent's support in some areas, we had a lot of push back in others and we had atremendous amount of push back from the kids but you know, it was a process and it tookfour years but berkeley was small. it was sixteen schools, 9,600 kids, and i could actuallygo to every school in one day. i had this huge support system, both financial and resources.the foundation raised a million and a half
dollars over the time i was there to helpthe school district make the change, then now the school's districts nutrition servicesis totally budget neutral and financially viable, sustainable, systemic and all nowbut it took a long time. i also had a superintendent in the school board who are very supportiveand superintendent who basically stood in front of me and said, you know, and protectedme and said, "we are going to make these changes, it's going to be painful, it's going to work."so when i get asked, i get recruited to go to boulder in a sort of very similar communityand they said, "yeah! we've got all this parent support and we've got a community that's goingto support us. we've done this great survey and everyone really wants this." and the superintendentin the school board was like, "yeah, yeah.
everybody's ready and we're going to do this."and so i took the job there. it's much bigger. it's 48 schools spread over 550 square miles.i have a 175 employees and none of which, or very few of which, were really motivatedto make these kind of very difficult changes. even though they have surveyed the parents,most of the parents who answered the survey i think were from boulder proper but we, thedistrict, encompasses ten communities and literally 65 miles from one end of our districtto the other. so even though the boulder parents thought this was really great and they raisedhalf a million dollars and they were doing all this great stuff, there was all theseother parents and so i'm getting pushed, i've been there since july and i'm getting pushedback like that, "i feed my kids chicken nuggets
at home. who the hell are you to tell me notto? why do you get to decide our kids can't have chicken nuggets or tater tots or highfructose corn syrup or popsicles or pop tarts or you know, candy, we use it." and then otherchallenges, the same boulder parents who would write checks of ten and twenty thousand dollarsat the drop off a hat won't make their kids eat the food, you know? because their kidswould rather have sushi or you know the kids say, "i don't really want that, i want this.i want you to get me this." you know, so i'm struggling with the same parents who wantme there are the same parents who raised a half million dollars to get this program offand running aren't actually having their kids eat so we run in there believing that we couldraise participation which is how you make
these programs sustainable and we've onlybeen able to raise it five percent which is just not enough. so, in some ways, you'veeither got the similar demographic but in other ways, it's very different and it's sospread out it's really hard. i mean, i now have five managers and they can't even getto every school every day so we try and get to every school every other day now but it'sa lot of transition work. olivia wu: how many schools are we talking? ann cooper: 48. olivia wu: 48 schools? ann cooper: yeah.
olivia wu: yeah, that's a lot. you're themost wired digital lady that i know. you have so many toys so the obvious question for meis you know google. we want to be involved and we want to make a difference. what dowe do? do we find five hundred other anchor boosts? do we go in on the policy level? dowe help raise money? do we help market? what can we do? ann cooper: there is so many things and ilove that question because i need so much help. you know, berkeley or boulder or anyof the local communities you might have kids in or know where kids are, we cannot fix thisone school at a time. there is a 125,000 schools in this country. we cannot fix it one schoolat a time. there is almost fifteen thousand
school districts. we can't even fix it onedistrict at a time. it's impossible, we have to change it at the usda level. for the veryfirst time in my whole career on school food, i'm very optimistic and then we have a presidentwho actually talked about kids and food and health in the same sentence. the last presidentwho talked about kids and food was reagan who made ketchup a vegetable so i'm very optimisticwith obama. we now have a first lady who not only planted a garden at the white house thati have been fortunate enough to go to but has a great personal chef whose invested inthis and now they have food policies, and she has just announced to council of mayorsthat she is taking on, and even in president obama's state of the union, they are takingon childhood obesity and she specifically
said in her speech to the mayors that whathad to happen in schools. i've met with the deputy secretary of agriculture, kathleenmerrigan, who used to be on the national organic standards board and i was on the nationalorganic standards board but i went on right after her, and she is very interested in thisstuff and i met with the undersecretary that's over school lunch, janeythornton, and she's interested in making change. i think the most optimistic thing or the thingthat makes me most optimistic is arne duncan. i haven't met with him but i've met with hisstaff and his staff said to me, "we can not close the achievement gap in america unlesswe fix school lunch." so for the first time, the secretary of ag and the secretary of educationare actually talking about these two things
because the secretary of education is overeducation and the secretary of ag is over school lunch so there's two very divergentthings. from google's point of view, there is so much you can do to help. i mean, oneof the things, any of you who are at lunch or we could show later, one of the thingsthat's happening right now is we are building a web portal and these little bands that say"i matter, feed me well" also have the url for the web portal that we're building andwe're trying to build a web portal that will have all the tools that every school districtin the country can use to make these changes. it has menus and recipes and technical toolsand videos and educational materials and a big community piece sort of aka facebook wherepeople can gather, so we are trying to build
this. we partnered this past summer with wholefoods and we raised a million dollars to start the process of building a portal, but oneof the things i've come to understand which is very interesting is i thought much of thisup in my head and we've been struggling to have the technology catch up to what we kindof thought of, and so we're struggling with the technology to be able to build somethingthat's actually can do all the things that i think it needs to do and can be seen bypeople in schools who can't get onto facebook, who can't get onto twitter, and who can'tuse youtube or anything like that, so all schools ban all of that material, so how doyou have someplace where people can go that's sort of outside of the social networking arenathat we all play in because schools can't
play in it. the other thing around that ithink, from a google standpoint, we need, you know, whether it's the google phone orthe iphone, we need some apps that can build in that smartphone universe that school peoplecould like pull up recipes, that they could get answers to questions right from theirphone because many of them are out in the field and they may not be able to get to theircomputers so that's another thing we're looking at, like how do we develop that and what isit that we really want to develop around that. the other thing is on february 8th, that thesecretary of agriculture, tom vilsack, is going to make a speech and the speech is goingto be taking about school lunch. right after the speech, my foundation is starting a nationalwrite-in campaign to get a million moms and
dads or parents or caregivers to write totom vilsack and kathleen merrigan at the usda and the senate and representatives from congress.we are actually putting up the website with a map and you'll be able to click on the mapand we've got a letter that you'll be able to send in or customize the letter and sendit in. getting information like that out would be really, really helpful so we are tryingto have the stuff go viral. we've made an animated video that we hope will help us.a 90 second video can be like a psa, it can be watched on smartphones or on computersand we are trying to get a bunch of stuff going viral so this is the year of the childnutrition reauthorization that only happens every four or five years. this is where thefederal government decides how much money
they are going to give school and what theguidelines are. the money thing is really important. schools are now given $2,000.68to feed a child for a day if it's a free child. of that, traditionally two thirds goes topayroll and overhead. that leaves us less then a dollar a day to feed a kid and if anyof you have been to starbucks of late and gotten a venti latte or any of the other exotic,you know, coffee shops, you'll know that you are paying four or five dollars so you knowwe now have a world where we spend four or five dollars more on our daily coffee thenwe are spending on our kid's lunch so the dollar doesn't really get you enough but theusda does decide that. also the usda guidelines around chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolatemilk, high fructose corn syrup, transfat,
popsicles, pop tarts, and corn dogs, thatis all allowed on the national school lunch program so it's not enough just to get money.we absolutely have to get the guidelines changed. olivia wu: guidelines changed. besides thegrassroots letter writing and getting to vilsack, how can google further--, with this? ann cooper: well, i think it'll be an interestingthing. i mean google is sort of the center of the, i mean from a google outsider, someonewho googles on like a million times a day regular basis, you know, if google is theholder of information in the world, if any bit of information you want or think you wantcan be gotten through googling then that's a way to collect information so i guess thequestion would be does google want to push
information and if google did want to pushinformation, then it'd be really cool to be able to, when people are googling school lunchor people that are interested in some of these things to be able to have a message or havespecific sites that will support it. you know, when you go on google and you'll see thosetop ones and that's the ones that are sponsored sites so maybe there is a way to sponser sitesthat are done by non-profits or sponsor sites that are really pushing forward this mission.something like that. olivia wu: yes, sir? >> we don't, put up the natural search results,we won't alter those because that has to be, you know, fair and the better content of yoursite has, whatever site it is, then the higher
it'll interact in the rankings, but in termsof like the ads, we do offer google grants program to do that so i don't know if youguys have been taking part in that yet. ann cooper: uh uh. we haven't. >> great, so those advertisements are freeand that grants program is significant so you should talk about that. ann cooper: cool. great. olivia wu: excellent. yeah. so once, tellme the sequence, the ideal sequence you see things happening in, from policy down. howdo you think it should happen? and then maybe from out here, we'll have ideas on how googlefits in.
ann cooper: in a perfect world, and we knowwe're in such an imperfect world, the problem with the usda guidelines and the money isthe usda was founded to be the marketing arm for agribusiness and their mission in theworld, and it may be changing now, but their mission historically has been to promote bigagriculture and for the most part that big agriculture exports to other countries soliterally they are the marketing arm for monsanto and dupont and adm and all these big hugecompanies. olivia wu: chemical companies. ann cooper: chemical companies that have nowdecided that food companies and as well, you know, monsanto and dupont produce agent orangeand stain resistant carpet. they control 90%
of the commercially produced seeds in america,so this is a crazy paradigm, but as well they also support a lot of companies through thecommodity food program and our tax dollars spend about 45 billion dollars a year subsidizingcorn, soy, rice, wheat, and i think one other, cotton, so the government buys all of thestuff and the reason why sugar is so cheap is because corn is so highly subsidized andthe reason we have high fructose corn syrup in everything from hamburgers, to hamburgersto hot dogs to gum to soda is because the corn is so overproduced and so cheap thatnow they make it into high fructose corn syrup and so the usda gets to decide what's allowedin the food. they buy this food, although it's not actually food because none of thatcorn goes into high fructose syrup would ever
be eaten, so they buy the stuff and then subsidizeto make this processed stuff that we send into schools and to give you a perfect exampleof how awful the system is, a year ago january, a year ago this month, for some reason tysondecided they needed a bail out, so the usda bailed out tyson for a 143 million dollarsso they bought a 143 million dollars worth of chicken from tyson while there may noteven have been chicken but there is the virtual chicken. there is the idea that they neededmoney so the government gave them the money in exchange for chicken. so then tyson comesto schools all over the country, school districts and says, "the government just gave us allthis money and we can give you free chicken." it's like, "great, we'll take the chicken.""oh no, no. you can get it in chicken nuggets,
chicken patties, da, da, da, da, da, da, ataround forty dollars a case." so the government buys the chicken from tyson who then sellsthe chicken that they've already been given, they've already been paid for the chickenthen they sell the chicken to schools for the processing fee and oh by the way, thenthey add all that junk in there so it's a very corrupt system. it's very highly ingrained.i don't know how we change the farm bill that oversees that. i did talk with kathleen merriganand i said the commodity system has to change and she said pick your battles so i thinkthat that's going to be a tough one but if we could do, if there was a grassroots campaignin this country that would get people all over the country to say we want better foodfor kids then that would make it a priority
to the senate and the congress people andthe representatives who are actually the ones that vote on and decide on like staying onthe farm bill because the usda promotes it, the president promotes but when congress meetwith representatives and especially with any kind of partisanship decide that their stateis going to be, is not going to do so well because now we're not going to have high fructosecorn syrup in schools and what's iowa going to do if they can't produce high fructosecorn syrup, so that's why it's so important to be able touch just regular people likeus because we are the ones that the officials supposedly listen so if we could have thismass belief and get people to actually do it, i mean when the organic standards wasoriginally going to be passed it was going
to allow gma's, irradiated food, and sewagesludge as all part of the organic program, and there were two hundred and sixty thousandpeople who wrote in and said that's ridiculous and they changed and that was before emailpretty much. i mean, people actually picked up a piece of paper and pencil and wrote andmailed. you know, now if we could get a million or two million people to say we want somethingdifferent, i think it would start to force the government to look at this in a differentway, so i think that's what has to happen and it has to happen at the government becausewe are not going to get more money and we're not going to get higher guidelines unlessthe government decides and the guidelines without the money or the money without theguidelines, you have to have both.
olivia wu: umm, the farm bill is next up forwhen? next up for? ann cooper: 2012. olivia wu: 2012. ann cooper: so at least three years or actuallytwo years away from the farm bill yet they're sort of like on these alternating years. olivia wu: okay. umm, i want to zero in nowon maybe the kid level. so i visited berkeley once in the very early days when you firsttook over and there were tostadas and stuff that the lunch ladies took out from the freezerand put in the microwave and pressed a button and they heated the kid's food up and theonly fresh thing there was green grapes which
the kids then took outside in the playgroundand threw at each other so what can we do in the way of interactive stuff for kids sothat they might eat those grapes rather than throw them at each other? ann cooper: well, you might know that eatinggrapes in the middle of one if they come from chile, are the wrong thing. olivia wu: it shouldn't be there but yes,right. ann cooper: this is a tremendous educationalpiece needed, you know? i say that there are five big challenges to doing this work: food,finance, facilities, human resources, and marketing. food, where is it going to comefrom and how do we make sure it's good; finances,
how do we pay for it; facilities, how do wecook it or store it because most school kitchens don't have stoves or walk ins; human resources,how do we take all these men and women all across the country who have been using boxcutters and can crushers because everything came canned or frozen and actually now givethem raw chicken and tell them how to cook it and then after we've figured out all ofthat stuff which is overwhelmingly hard, how do we get the kids to eat it? you know, we'venow grown a generation of children that think chicken nuggets is a food group and hot cheetosand soda is breakfast. to get them to go from there to something else, you know granolaand yogurt for breakfast or roast chicken and roast potatoes and salad bar at lunchis hard. hands on experience in learning cooking
and gardening classes is really importantbut it would be really great if there was, you know i've always thought this should bepart of our website but we haven't even thought about trying to develop this yet, but if therewas some interactive things, websites, really cool, compelling, or games. how about a gamethat kids would play that would be about food or farming or agriculture and how do we getthe kids invested. i mean, how do we get kids that spend all of their time in front of ablue screen, how do we get them to understand that where a carrot comes from makes a differenceor that it may taste different if it comes from dirt or if it comes from the grocerystore where it's been for seven years, so i think interactive games, which there arenone out there, or some sort of food farming.
something like that could be really cool.some good kid-oriented websites that would connect them and there are none that i knowof out there and that doesn't replace the hands on experiencial learning. i mean, ithink we need to get kid's hands dirty. we need to get them touching food, but we alsoneed to start with from where they are and the youngest kids are not too hard but formiddle school and high school, it's really hard to turn these kids around so we haveto give them something that's cool for them, you know. we need to make this stuff cool.good food has got to be cool food and there's not a school, well there's a couple, you know?there are very, very, very, very, very, very few schools in america that has food evena tenth as good as what you guys here have
here every day. olivia wu: talk to me a little bit about,let me get the full "f's" here: food, family, farming, foundation, your foundation. ann cooper: so, we started a foundation onlyto be able to bring in money, to raise money so we could build this web portal and abouttwo years ago, i had had this idea for this web portal for a number of years and i sortof tried to shop it around and get people interested but a couple of years ago, thecarole foundation gave us a planning grant, a two year planning grant, to start buildingit and start thinking about it and start planning it and almost at the same time, i startedworking with whole foods and over the two
years between then and now, we were able toraise a significant amount of money and actually start implementation on the website so thefoundation is really a vehicle to do projects. the main, and only project right now, is thelunch box project and of the lunch box project, really what we're working on is the web portaland also some videos and this letter writing campaign so all of these campaigns are onthe child nutrition act and also around just working with schools all across the countryand this is all running through the foundation. olivia wu: are you doing anything with curriculaat school and does everybody who have, every school that has the food, gardening, and curriculacomponent know about each other? what's going on there?
ann cooper: you know, it's really difficult,you know. everybody kind of gathers around the garden piece because it feels sexy andit's fun and it's really, really, really important, but by in large the gardens don't change what'son the plate in schools and unless you can change what's on the plate in schools, thegardens are just kind of a cool fun or an add on and because they've been sort of sexy,a lot of foundations have thrown money at it. so we're reinventing the wheel a lot andone of the ideas around the web portal, the lunch box, is that we will have a whole areaon curriculum and we are trying to gather the ear of the actual curriculum or linksto curriculum in one place, so that every school and district that decides they wantto have some of these things doesn't either
a) get a foundation to pay for it again orb) not be able to get it because they just can't find it so there is plenty of curriculumout there. you know, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of curriculum, but mostly peopledon't know what each other is doing. there is not one repository for all of this andthat's what we hope the lunch box will be. olivia wu: excellent. thank you. are thereany questions from out there? ann cooper: or comments or thoughts? olivia wu: or comments or thoughts? >> they need to use the microphone. ann cooper: we need a step ladder for themicrophone.
>> that's true i guess. so, how do you naviagatebetween tackling everything and also staying focused enough to actually have an impact? ann cooper: i don't sleep. [laughs] olivia wu: she does not. ann cooper: so says my former roommate. idon't know. i mean, i guess because it's all the same work whether i'm in boulder, youknow going into schools yesterday to see. i mean, yesterday i was sitting in one ofthe schools at lunch talking to kids who had gone to the salad bar and didn't have anyprotein and we're giving them out these things because you know you got to them so that isjust as instructive for the bigger work as
the bigger work instructs how we deal in boulder,so because it's all so entwined, i guess i can like do it all or try as well as i cando it all and it all inner relates. so there's nothing too different so i'm able to kindof tackle as much as i can and i work with some real, real great people you know, i havea ton of support. olivia wu: is there a piece of this movementthat is about mobilizing chefs or people in the organic movement to do a piece of this? ann cooper: sort of but there's a challengeamong mobilizing chefs for this, because most chefs have no concept of what it means tocook a meal for a dollar. they have no idea how to deal with the commodity food system,many of them don't use recipes, never mind
having the usda guidelines to deal with andtrying to, and then having kids as the ones who you know, are your customers. so i thinkit's really important to be able to have the chefs involved but we have to find the rightplace. you know, now that we have like "top chef" and i just saw an advertisement forlike "the warrior kitchen". i mean, i don't know. it's all crazy but now that chefs arecelebrities. i think that there is a way to touch kids, especially high school kids andmiddle schools kids. we chefs coming in and saying you need to eat better and here's someways, but i don't think the answer is getting chefs in those kitchens cooking with the lunchladies. i think you get a lot and lot of this because it's just, you know, you got to dealwith these commodities and you got to figure
all that part out but if we could get chefsand rock stars and football stars and musicians, i mean if we could get people the kids lookup to to help with this food piece and help say it's really important to eat well, i thinkthat would be great. >> hi, i was wondering how your group is sortof addressing what i see is two sort of root causes of why food is so bad in schools. onewould be the amount of money they're getting, like a dollar. i think it's pretty much impossible.i mean, we have good food here at google but i've heard numbers about how much it costs;it's expensive but it's very good food. and then two, the actual convincing of peoplethat the food is harmful because what i think the biggest problem is that kids can be toldsomething and they will sort of believe it
but you know if parents aren't telling themthat it's harmful or they don't believe it's harmful, like you have to convince somebodythat chicken nuggets isn't healthy. how are you addressing that part? i guess that's mymain question. ann cooper: okay, so first thing on the dialor with our animated video that we hope to show sometime, maybe at lunch, we just didthis animated video and we're actually at the end of the video, it says and it's allanimated with a young child's voice, "please give us an extra dollar for lunch" so my campaign,or our campaign, is going to start on february 9th and it is directed toward the usda andcongressmen and representatives is we need an extra dollar for lunch dedicated to freshfoods, fresh vegetables, whole grains with
a priority on regional procurement so thatis what we're pushing for. i can tell you i don't believe we'll get it. there's nota lot of people only asking for 35 cents but what the president has proposed is a billiondollars for all child nutrition services which would end up with about fifteen to twentycents added to the national school lunch program which is just such a, i mean i can't buy apiece of fruit, you know? for us to get good food to put on a kid's plate is 25 cents sothe idea that we're only going to raise the national school lunch program by half of thatis just overwhelming so that's our campaign. it's going to start in a few weeks and youknow, that's what we're really pushing for. in the campaign, in the little video thatwe're going to try to get up and 'virally',
it actually in a really cute way says youknow thirty percent of kids are overweight, one in three kids are going to have diabetesin their lifetime, so we're trying to get this out without really scaring people andgetting them to understand. i think our website will also have more information but there'sa way to touch people in a school and in a district but from nationwide, it's reallygoing to take, i mean i wish the government would do a national marketing campaign aroundgood food. i mean, the government took on drinking and driving, they took on seatbelts,they took on smoking, they really should take on the food issue. i'm not sure they wouldbecause there is so much big business that you know stands to lose money if we eat healthier.i mean, if kids ate healthier, who wins? well,
not agribusiness, not the medical industrialcomplex, and not the pharmaceutical industrial complex so who wins? the kids? they don'tvote so we really do have to try and educate their kids and their parents through softmarketing and pr that does just this educational component and you know it's hard but you showits strength when it said that there's one point one million who wake up hungry everyday in america and when you're hungry, you know you don't necessarily care about thequality of the food, you just don't want your kids to be hungry so we have an access issue,we have a demographic issue between rich and poor, you know. this is totally a social equityissue. you know, the cdc has said that of the children born in the year 2001, one outof every three caucasians and one out of every
two african americans and hispanics are goingto have diabetes in their lifetime, many before they graduate high school so we're lookingat within ten years, 30 or 35 percent of kids insulin dependant. i mean, it's crazy andit really runs along social lines, social equity lines and we've also seen that theachievement and the life expectancy gap between rich and poor has grown twenty percent overthe last two decades so if you're poor in america, you're going, you're not going todo as well in school and you're going to die younger. i mean, it's a crazy thing for ourcountry, so we really have to get the education out there. olivia wu: has anybody done the matrix onthe cost of healthcare for all of these young
diabetics? ann cooper: as a matter of fact, michael pollanreported about three months ago in the new york times that just two illnesses, diabetesand obesity, is now costing the country 260 billion dollars, that's a quarter trillionand if the healthcare initiative, that may probably not pass now which is awful, wasonly going to cost 900 billion. i mean, in one year spending 25 percent of the entirecost of the healthcare bill on these two diseases that are by in large preventable. >> you should put that on the campaign forthe extra dollar. i mean, that's one more dollar, right?
ann cooper: yeah, well it's just so crazyand the national school lunch program right now spends $8.5 billion to feed 5.4 billionlunches a year and so if we added a dollar, it would go from 8.5 billion to 14 billionand people, you know i say this in washington and you know people like lose their mind andi'm going, "yeah, but okay so it's costing three billion dollars a week for the war thatwe try and pretend we're not in and it's going to cost 260 billion a year for healthcare"so what is it going to take for us as a nation to understand that we have to see what weeat as part of our health and part of preventative medicine. you know, health and human servicesrecently came out and said if we don't change how we're eating, every single person in ourcountry is going to be overweight or obese
by 2040, you know? in 30 years. it's crazy,it's crazy. olivia wu: what other matrix should we belooking at? ann cooper: well, the thing, the unfortunatething that everybody wants to know is if we feed kids better food, will it raise theiracademic performance. this is a very, very, very hard - olivia wu: well, duh. ann cooper: well, instead of like "duh". okay,so when any of us like eat crap all day or don't eat, how do we feel? we feel reallyawful and when is it that we want sugar or caffeine? 3 in the afternoon when we skiplunch. i mean, we as adults know what happens
to our body, you know. we don't? >> we don't pay attention to our bodies asadults. what are you talking about? [laughs] ann cooper: okay. maybe as adults we actuallyhave the knowledge to pay attention to our bodies if we wanted to and with all that beingsaid, we do know that kids that eat a diet high in sugar, refined sugar and refined flour,are really often diagnosed with add, adhd, and dyslexia. we know that these same kidsare almost always in the office, that they have real poor performance and real poor behaviorbut everybody wants the study that's going to link better food to academic performancebecause of no child left behind. well, no child left behind pretty much leaves everychild behind. it is a crazy system, it's really
bad from the food service point of view. therewas just a study done in england by jamie oliver's group, a group run by jamie oliverjust did a study and did actually show over there that the food reduction in refined sugarsand refined flours in more whole foods does indeed increase academic performance. whati actually think it does is not increase academic performance, it increases our ability to focusand think. you know, when you give kids a lot of sugar they just get really high andthey crash and i was working with some kids in harlem one time and we were making a pbsshow and they're just hanging around and the kids are a little nervous and there're cameraseverywhere and i said, "what did you guys have for breakfast?" and i came from a littletown in the middle of nowhere and they said,
"snack crack". i'm in harlem now and i said,"oh. they said snack crack. it's an english topping." and they said, "you know, our parentsgo out in the street and get crack to get high all we need is 20 ounce soda and candyon the way to school and we get just as high, you know." i mean, this is what the kids,13 year olds were saying, so they know what we are doing to them and i say 'we' becauseyou know, the adults have to make choices. i mean, schools are drug free zones, schoolsare alcohol free zones, they should be junk food free zones. >> actually just quickly, would you talk aboutopen campuses versus closed campuses? i don't know the status of berkeley and i don't knowthe status of boulder and is that going to
be required for a big change like this. ann cooper: yeah. both berkeley and boulderhave open campuses. it's a really crazy system. i do not know why we would want to send ourchildren - >> tell people what that means. ann cooper: okay. so what open campus meansis that in many high schools across the country, the students are allowed to leave campus forup to an hour in the middle of the day to go somewhere and do something. the idea isthat you are letting them go off campus for lunch. these are, you know, sometimes as youngas 14, 15 year old, 16 year old kids who you send to school because you think that they'rebeing educated and you know given some supervision
that you then allow them to go where theywant. one of the things that happens when you let them go where they want is they don'teat the food on campus and they go eat junk food wherever they can because they don'twant to spend a lot of money and they can get a lot of calories and a lot of sugar anda lot of fat for 99 cents at some fast food place. schools are starting to turn that around,it makes no sense to me. why would you, why would we want to send our kids to school andthen assume that they're going to spend some amount of time without any supervision doingwhatever they're going to be doing and eating and drinking and smoking whatever they aregoing to be doing and yeah, i mean that happens to us all at some point when we are probablya little older then teenagers, but i do think
we should close campuses. the big challengeon closing campuses now is they didn't make schools big enough, you know? because theystarted letting kids out so now, like in berkeley, there's one high school, 32 hundred students,they built a beautiful new cafeteria and it seats 400. duh! there's no way i can feedthem and boulder's done the same thing so schools have saved money by building buildingsthat don't have cafeteria seating for the kids because they figure the kids are goingto go away so it's, "oh good, we don't have to watch them for an hour." well, you knowthat's not -- if we are educating the whole child for the whole day that we have themwith us, we have to understand that the lunch period is part of the educational experience.it's part of the whole child.
olivia wu: do we know the policy people andthe congress people who are most friendly to childhood nutrition and such issues? ann cooper: yes. there will be up on the newwebsite, there's some other websites that do have them all listed. we don't have themlisted on our website but we will have all the information up there. >> i have a question that relates to that.it seemed to me for a long time that the real way to victory on this is to make this a bipartisanissue which of course it inherently is. it's about children and it's very hard to meetany elected official who doesn't understand that that's fundamentally really the constituency.of course, it very quickly can become a political
and bipartisan issue when i think grownupsget involved. ann cooper: [laughs] >> and so i actually really would love tosee, you know, a way to get children speaking more actively and i challenge the people ofgoogle to help make this happen. to let children more speak to their experience directly toshare their experiences with people and to be the advocates for this change,because what we're seeing more and more is that these polarizing issues including healthcarehas become very, very difficult for people to understand, for the electorates to understand,for democrats who originally thought it was a great idea to understand, for republicanswho felt that they were going to have to support
it to support it. most people now feel, asyou said a moment ago, it's kind of dead in the water. you know, the children are incrediblypowerful here. they can cut through a lot of this but we have to find a way to givethem a voice. ann cooper: there's a couple of interestingthings happening. there is a couple of different groups. one is the healthy schools campaignthat are actually having kids do a set of "iron chef" competitions and the winners ofthe one in chicago actually got to meet sam kass, who is the chef at the white house,or michelle's chef and working on these issues. they actually just two days ago served thewinning recipe from this year at all the chicago schools so there is this group that's doingthat. the other thing that's happening is
a video competition which is, what's the nameof it? >> the national farm to school network. ann cooper: the national farm to school networkis hosting a video competition and we are part of the sponsors of this and they aregetting kids all across the country to make little videos and upload them about what theirschool food is and what it should be so there's two projects that are going on right now,and we are working with both of them. >> and that's on youtube by the way. ann cooper: that's on youtube? yeah, okay.that again is farmtoschool.org. olivia wu: okay. a lot of data has alreadybeen gathered. what we don't want to do at
google is repeat any of that and a lot ofstudies have been done, short of the one you're talking that connects academic performancefor that, but is there any area in data collection that has not been done out there? ann cooper: well, there has not been a reallyunbiased national study done about what's really happening in schools. on our website,we are going to have areas where there's feasibility studies that have been done so you can seethem and a lot of this information will be on the lunch box site but what i don't thinkhas happened is a real comprehensive look at what we are feeding our kids all acrossthe country. the school nutrition association has done it, but not all school districtsare involved and they really have it bent
to make it look good, so i don't know thatwe've ever collected really what kids are eating. like new york city, i think on thenew york times today, new york city just changed the fat content of the milk and saved, i don'tknow, how many billions of calories, but we shouldn't serve chocolate milk in schoolsand we haven't been able to get chocolate milk out of schools. so really understandwhat we are feeding our kids and the health ramifications. i just don't think we've donea good enough job figuring that piece out. >> you mentioned a list of people in congresswho are friendly toward healthy food in the schools. have you identified people who areless then friendly who are more on the agribusiness side and more to understand their argumentand their problems to be solved as well so
that hopefully it could be a bipartisan issue? ann cooper: well, i don't have that list butit'd be pretty easy to make. >> about half, right? ann cooper: yes. nicole? nicole >> children tips and la vida locavorehas a list of the unfriendlies on her website. ann cooper: okay, so there's a website. lavidalocavore.organd she has both the- for and against people. the people are not against healthy food forkids but they are by in large from these states where all of their money comes from corn orsoy, and there is basically not much good you can do with gma corn or soy except makeit into this stuff that goes into school food
or healthcare or things like that. >> related question. have we learned muchfrom the fight against tobacco and how to work with those states that are dependantupon tobacco because there's been, as a child of the 70's, tremendous progress in the lastthirty years. ann cooper: you know, michael pollan talksabout this issue a lot and you know, there's a lot of people who talk about this big adand how it points into the cigarette smoking issue. the thing that comes up, and you hearis the pushback all the time, is there is nothing positive about smoking and you didn'tneed to smoke. everyone needs to eat and there's this social component of that. there's a historicalcomponent of that. there is the familiar component
of that and big business just keeps pushingit as choices, choices, exercise, yet they spend twenty billion dollars a year marketingnon nutrient foods to kids so i think a lot of people have thought how to connect theseand i do think, we've seen some people like trying to sue mcdonalds and then now we havethese anti veggie laws where you can't sue. i don't know if you guys remember when oprahsaid that she wouldn't eat a hamburger again from the national cattlemen's associationsued her for billions of dollars. she won but it cost her a billion to win, you knowso there's these anti defamation for vegetable laws so you can't say a food isn't good, youknow. it's crazy so people have sort of put their toe in. i think the way to go afterthis and it's really hard to say you have
to sue the government, but i'd love to seeus think about a way to do a class action suit against some of these big companies andagainst the government that's feeding our kids that allows this food into schools, butit's really hard to sue a government [laughs] i want to do it! we can do it.[laughs] >> well, you and i have been talking for along time about suing the government and i'm in. i'm ready [laughs] i'm just going to say maybe you want to mentionkelly brownell who recently had that pretty interesting report that he issued. this isa guy at yale who is very interested in the parallels between anti smoking sentiment andthe movement that grew up to really kind of
take that over. ann cooper: but which report exactly? >> it's about nine months old and actuallyi can just send it but it's pretty interesting because it actually doesn't deal so much withthe litigious aspects as the cultural aspects of marketing and it's really about the mistakesthat people in the food movement have made and the mistakes that people in the tobaccomovement are making and how we can kind of try to capitalize on it but i appreciatedhis study because it was more nuanced and it did deal of course with this huge problem,which is that we all have to eat, but it really tried to talk a lot about the kind of marketingshifts.
ann cooper: well, one of things at one ofthe studies that has just really recently come out too is really finally proving thisthing about marketing to kids and that these big companies are so focused on marketingthis non nutrient foods to kids and you know, kids are basically brainwashed over this stuff,but kelly brownell from the rudd center at yale has been studying obesity in kids andadults for a long time and looking at all of these issues. olivia wu: i want to bring the conversationback around to just what you do on the ground every day and what the kids are like. so describefor me what a kid's lunch was starting with chicken nuggets and then describe to us forthe dollar and the commodities that you got,
what kind of meals they got by the end ofyour four year tenure at berkeley. ann cooper: in berkeley, we started with thefood i told you. the real crappy commodity food. olivia wu: so it was chicken nuggets, chocolatemilk. ann cooper: it was chicken nuggets, corn dogs,extremo burritos, grilled cheese sandwiches, and pizza pockets and they are all pre frozenand pre made things and they had chocolate milk and they had all kinds of sugary 'desserty'things and stuff like that. olivia wu: so how many calories was a meallike? ann cooper>> a typical meal like that tendsto be about a thousand calories and it tends
to be 2,000 milligrams of sodium which isreally more than a daily dose so that's what it tends to be. olivia wu: and calories from fat? ann cooper: almost all. like 60 percent caloriesfor that and usually a meal like that has 15 or 20 percent 'sat' fat even though thelaw says ten. olivia wu: and then what was the change? >> that's within guidelines, right? ann cooper: well, it's going outside the guidelines.there's no guidelines on sugar or sodium. you are supposed to stay under 35 percentfat and under 10 percent 'sat' fat but because
the way a lot of it works, some people don'tbut you can balance it over the course of a week, so then you feed them something elsethat doesn't have so much fat one day and you can balance out, so there's no law onhow much you can feed kids. there is also no maximum calorie count which is really,really old and silly. they tell you that you can feed kids two to three thousand calories.it's like, "huh? do you not know there's an obesity crisis?" but again, their job is topromote agriculture and the easiest way to promote agriculture is corn and soy, becausethat's what we grow in this country. so now in berkeley, although i haven't been therethis year but when i left last year, instead of chicken nuggets there'd be roast chickenand instead of tater tots, there'd be roast
potatoes. there'd be a fresh vegetable andthere were full salad bars in every school every day, local organic milk. no dessertsand no high fructose corn syrup, no transfats, all whole grains and that's the same way weare walking towards in boulder. we are certainly not in boulder where berkeley ended up becausewe are just beginning in it but there's a lot of pushback from kids.i mean, i just got an email today saying, "why is it that we have to feed kids chickenwith bones?" and my comeback is, "do you know any chickens that are growing without bones?"[laughs] and it's this crazy thing. now that we've convinced kids that chicken nuggetsare actually chicken, who decided that chicken should be stars or giraffes or dinosaurs oryou know, fish? chicken is chicken so why
shouldn't chicken come on the bone? but youknow, the idea that kids don't even know the chicken has bones anymore and we are not supposedto feed it to them. so in boulder, our slowest day of the week now and we are working onthis in all kinds of ways, is chicken day because kids don't know how to actually eatchicken anymore and because they think chicken nuggets is chicken, so it's a struggle tomake these changes and you know you would think roast potatoes for tater tots but there'slot of kids who haven't eaten a fresh roasted potato, but they think that tater tots areactually potatoes or that you know that instant potato stuff is what mashed potatoes are supposedto taste like so when we serve kids real mashed potatoes, they go "uggh!" and we make realmac and cheese and the kids hate it, you know?
one of our biggest complaints so far thisyear is the mac and cheese and it's like, "okay, so we're cooking pasta and we've gotreal cheddar cheese and we are making the cheese." but you know, they are used to kraftand that yellow amato powder that you mix with water and put some little pasta stuffin it, so it's a huge change for kids and the other comment i got from kids is it'snot salty enough and this comes from the amount of salt they get in processed food versusthe amount of salt you'd actually salt something with. so it's not salty enough, it's not spicyenough because they are so used to this highly processed, really high sodium food. on theother hand, what we are seeing now is kids 10 years old who have kidney stones, becauseof all the sodium in food. i mean, this is
crazy. ten year old kids now with kidney stonesand you know pre teen kids with high blood pressure and heart disease and you know, it'sreally awful. olivia wu: but on the other hand, the daysyou would tell me about where a big bowl of pink lady organic apples disappeared. thekids liked them? ann cooper: well, absolutely. i mean, in berkeleyyou had that model, you had cooking and gardening classes in every single school. that handson experiencial learning is invaluable. you got to have a way to touch the kids but bythe end of the berkeley project, or by the time i left, because it's ongoing and sustainable,i mean kids were really eating the food and the participation went up over three times.when i started, we were doing about 500 thousand
meals a year and i think they are going hitalmost two million this year so we really grew participation. the kids are eating. theyeat food, they eat vegetables, they eat off the salad bar. you know, not every kids eatsgreat every day but when you work with the kids, it's a process. i often say it takesten years. you got to get the kids when they are young and get them through high schoolbecause if you just start in the middle, it's really hard. >> okay, actually that's a great opportunityfor me to stand up. why start in school? what about first fives? what about earlier? whatabout preschool? you know, you are starting with children who've already had years ofexposure to chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs
and apples that were pre cut in a bag. whydidn't you start in preschools and get them eating healthy there? ann cooper: we actually, in berkeley and inboulder where preschools are involved with the public school system, we do but as anentry point the public school system is where we feed the most kids and because that systemis where we're actually paid, there is money available to do that so i'm not at all sayingwe shouldn't start with younger kids. it's just the entry point that i think is one wecan use but most schools are actually starting with pre kindergarten and stuff like thatso you do have an option. the thing about a lot of the preschools is that they end beforelunch, a lot of preschools are half day so
we are trying to get into the schools withbreakfast so i absolutely agree. i mean, not only you can touch the kids, the more youcan touch the parents. i mean, we go to every pta meeting, these calendars are an unbelievablemarketing tool. i mean the marketing, marketing, marketing talking to parents. i mean, it'shard. i met with a bunch of the leaders of the hispanic community in boulder a coupleof days ago and getting them to understand why it's so important and why we really haveto do this is a process. it takes time and it's not easy. olivia wu: so an interesting point for discussionlater on in a sense. if you want to fight the fight, we need to maybe start with thepreschool and consider that this generation
of high school kids is lost and focus there.so, thank you for coming and thank you so much, ann, and i know most of us will be continuingwith this discussion for the next two hours. thank you so much. ann cooper: thank you.
