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Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children By Ann CooperLisa Holmes ( Collins )
Release Date: 2006-09-01
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $22.95
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Product Description
Remember how simple school lunches used to be? You'd have something from every major food group, run around the playground for a while, and you looked and felt fine. But today it's not so simple. Schools are actually feeding the American crisis of childhood obesity and malnutrition. Most cafeterias serve a veritable buffet of processed, fried, and sugary foods, and although many schools have attempted to improve, they are still not measuring up: 78 percent of the school lunch programs in America do not meet the USDA's nutritional guidelines. Chef Ann Cooper has emerged as one of the nation's most influential and most respected advocates for changing how our kids eat. In fact, she is something of a renegade lunch lady, minus the hairnet and scooper of mashed potatoes. Ann has worked to transform cafeterias into culinary classrooms. In Lunch Lessons, she and Lisa Holmes spell out how parents and school employees can help instill healthy habits in children. They explain the basics of good childhood nutrition and suggest dozens of tasty, home-tested recipes for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. The pages are also packed with recommendations on how to eliminate potential hazards from the home, bring gardening and composting into daily life, and how to support businesses that provide local, organic food. Yet learning about nutrition and changing the way you run your home will not cure the plague of obesity and poor health for this generation of children. Only parental activism can spark widespread change. With inspirational examples and analysis, Lunch Lessons is more than just a recipe book—it gives readers the tools to transform the way children everywhere interact with food.
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 Not so great ( dasajam )
I thought it would be more recipes and it actually had very few. It is mostly nutritional talk and statistics. The few recipes they do have are NOT lunch box friendly and are not things kids will eat.
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 Lunch Lessons- Not A Cookbook
I guess I was thinking the was more of a cookbook, but instead it IS a Lesson, or more like a lecture on lunch programs.
Good if you are interested in the subject, but only offers very minimum recipes and NO Pictures. Could have been better... (not worth the $$.) Check it out at the library first before you purchase.
Wish it had 1/2 on the suject and 1/2 on recipes with good pictures to get you motivated.
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A wake-up call on eating and living green for kids and their parents ( veggiechiliqueen )
Lunch Lessons is an in-depth expose of how our unhealthy American diet is literally killing us, particularly its impact on our kids who participate in the USDA school lunch program. Nearly 80% of American schools don't meet the USDA's nutritional requirements. This doesn't come as a surprise seeing as schools are expected to provide a full meal for $1.50 per child. Many schools have done away with kitchens entirely, and rely on reheating processed foods. Financially-strapped districts raise money for extracurricular activities by contracts with soft drink and fast food companies, fueling the current childhood obesity crisis.
Lunch Lessons looks at the impact of revolutionary school lunch programs that aim to reconnect students with their food by raising their own vegetables from seeds, performing investigations, and preparing the fruits of their labor. Other featured schools buy locally grown organic produce for slightly more than commercial brands, and prepare meals that are proportioned appropriately and contain whole grains, fruits and vegetables without additives, extra sugars, or fat. There are also suggestions on how to "green" your home by buying eco-friendly cleaners, composting and recycling, and green dining and shopping alternatives. The book is scattered with statistics on American obesity, diet-related disease, and sidebars, but the placement was disruptive to the text and I frequently lost my place as I skipped around reading the various doom-and-gloom factoids.
The rest of the book consists of recipes taken from the various schools and programs mentioned earlier in the book, and include selections for breakfast, snacks, and lunch. Full nutritional info is included, as well as a conversion guide to figure out the daily values for various ages (the standard nutritional info is based on a 2,000 calorie diet, which is about two times too high for very young children, and not enough for an active teen). Many of the recipes are vegetarian and are low-fat, and are simple enough that older children could prepare these on their own. Some of the more interesting choices included frittata with spinach, mushrooms, and cheese, peanut butter and jelly power muffins, fruit smoothie, orzo salad, pumpkin curry, carrot-ginger soup, and red lentil burgers, although many sounded adventurous for picky eaters.
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Great Lunch Box Ideas
Great ideas for the picky eater and this helps add ideas to the mundane lunch box routine
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Good Ideas Are in this Book
This book has great ideas for lunch meals. We tend to get into a routine of turkey and yogurt for lunch, but this book breathes new ideas into a hum drum meal. I love that the nutritional contents are included. It gives great advice for portion control, too.
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