Read at :

CEL – Center for Ecoliteracy

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/programs/rsl.html

Program

Rethinking School Lunch

The Rethinking School Lunch (RSL) program uses a systems approach to address the crisis in childhood obesity, provide nutrition education, and teach ecological knowledge. CEL spent five years researching the 10 interrelated dimensions below, which are vital to achieving this vision:

(organigram of the 10 dimensions)

The RSL program:

- Includes an online Rethinking School Lunch guide, an essay series, “Thinking outside the Lunchbox,” technical assistance, grants, and presentations

- Creates a framework for a comprehensive curriculum that integrates campus gardens, kitchen classrooms, school lunch, and a wide range of academic subjects

- Treats childhood obesity, nutrition-related illness, the quality of school lunches, and children’s ability to learn as related issues

- Recognizes that lunchroom experiences (including poor-quality meals, shortened lunch periods, commercial messages, and excessive packaging and waste) can be a “hidden curriculum” that undermines classroom lessons about nutrition and health

- Links schools’ food purchasing decisions, the viability of family farms, solid waste generated by the lunchroom, and the environmental cost of shipping food over thousands of miles

- Offers, through Thinking outside the Lunchbox essays, challenging views by leading thinkers on food and food systems, education, economics, and personal and community health

- Provides a downloadable Model Wellness Policy Guide that provides language and instructions for drafting a Wellness Policy that places health at the center of the academic curriculum

The planning framework of Rethinking School Lunch is being applied across a public school system through the School Lunch Initiative at Berkeley.
Learn more about the School Lunch Initiative at Berkeley

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