Following in the footsteps of her famous father, talk show host Montel Williams, 14-year-old Wyntergrace Williams has taken to the airwaves to solve other people's problems. But instead of counseling couples or advising addicts like Montel has done, the younger Williams is advocating for vegetarian meal options in public schools.
Williams' promo spot debuted last night during ABC Family's show "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." The 30-second PSA is part of a campaign to urge Congress to amend the Child Nutrition Act to include more vegetarian and vegan options in public school lunches. The CNA is up for reauthorization this year.
According to healthyschoollunches.org (the site that Williams is working with), though some schools are able to offer innovative school lunches that include numerous vegan and vegetarian options, some of which are even environmentally sustainable, many schools only meet the bare minimum nutrition requirements set forth by the CNA.
How to pack nutrition and flavor into kids' school lunches and home meals.
Cookie jars might be cute but they don't keep cookies fresh, so slip a zipper-lock bag inside.
Corn fiends who hate the cob can pick up a "Corn Zipper," which works just like a veggie peeler.
Wine deets: Messina Hoff's 2006 Gewürztraminer is a top 10 BBQ wine, Texan wines get play at the DrinkLocalWine.com event, and wine courses and tastings will be held at the Texas Sommelier Conference.
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For many of us, the dread words conjure one glimmer of hope -- that a delicious carton of chocolate milk could be sipped illicitly, far from Mom's watchful, sugar-phobic eyes.
White, gluey pizza stuck to the plate by "cheese"; burger patties so flat they looked like they'd been stomped on by the gym teacher; the terror of sitting on one of those red shared seats with a classmate of the opposite gender (red means love, orange means friends) -- school lunch, in the best of times, can be traumatic.
When we stumbled upon this Web site of school lunches around the world we felt not terror, but rage.
Look at the French lunch: mussels, a steamed artichoke, baguette, cheesecake, half a pink grapefruit and French fries. Seriously? Was this staged purely to infuriate American diners raised on beaten-down chicken nuggets and gummy peach slices from a can? And French fries? Does a beret come with it, too?
At my huge public middle school, overcrowding was addressed by serving school lunch in 25-minute rotating shifts. The earliest group, A Lunch, had to shovel down their chicken fingers and green beans at 10:30 a.m. By 3 p.m. everyone was starving again, just in time for the school to turn on the vending machines full of Coke and Butterfingers. Not exactly your model of healthy, mindful eating.
Now, some people are advocating higher-quality, less-rushed school lunches as a key to lifelong good health habits. In the New York Time's Well column, health writer Tara Parker-Pope talks with Dr. Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist and creator of the South Beach Diet, about promoting better childhood eating habits through better school lunches. "I think having the kids sit at a family table and get used to it at schools - and then bring the parents in to encourage that at home - that would be huge," he says.
What were your school lunch experiences like? How do you think they affected your current eating habits?
I wish I had thought of this in high school. What I a great way to protest. About 29 kids at Readington Middle School, New Jersey decided to protest the short lunch period by paying for their lunch in pennies. Yep, entirely in pennies. That would be 200 pennies per person that cafeteria workers had to count. Brilliant!
The downside is that the group apparently caused some students to go without lunch that day, which is just a confirmation of how short the lunch time must be.
The prank also got its participants two days' detention. I'm a little torn on that. The students didn't break any rules. They offered legal tender. They only inconvenienced some school employees. At the same time, they inconvenienced some other students who didn't get lunch. Everyone needs to get a healthy lunch (such as it is in public schools). So I think maybe they could use the detention time to think of ways to express their concerns that won't hurt fellow students.
I still thing the protest was brilliant. I was friends with some of the creative, rebellious types, but being the oldest child in my family I was just a little too, um, "follow the rules"to think of something like this. I'm not saying I wouldn't go along with this stunt, I just wouldn't have thought of it.
Last year I picked the 8 best school lunch items I remember from my school days (admittedly, a long time ago). But what about the lunches that a lot of kids hate? Here are my choices:
1. Mystery meat: What exactly was this? I'm trying to go through my mental Rolodex and I can't remember. Was it meatloaf? Salisbury steak? I'm not sure, but it just seemed to be this mass-produced glob of grayness topped with lame gravy. The days I saw that this was the lunch were the days I just had something to drink and maybe a bag of chips.
The machines, Horizon OneSource Healthy Vending, offer healthy foods to students, and allow parents to track what their children buy from the machines. The machines are refrigerated (since many "healthy" foods are fresh and need refrigeration) and are equipped with software that allows students to key ID and PIN numbers for pre-paid accounts to buy food and drinks. This is how parents are able to track what their kids are eating.
The machines will be installed in about a dozen schools this fall. It seems awfully expensive to have this sort of fancy machinery to "watch" what kids eat.
I'm not sure if LunchBox software will help solve child obesity, but it can't possibly make things worse.
Some school districts in South Carolina will start using LunchBox this school year. Parents will be able to track their kids eating habits and restrict what their children eat. The system works by issuing students PIN numbers that are entered each time a purchase is made. Mom and Dad can then monitor junior's purchases from home.
From looking at the company's website LunchBox seems to be a POS/inventory/ordering/sales tracking solution that's trying to get parents in the loop.That's all well and good, but parents can't possibly track everything their kids eat at school. My folks never knew about the pints of Ben & Jerry's I scarfed during my free period in high school.
Ah, the lunch lady. That classic American worker who stands behind the counter in the school cafeteria and spoons out the sloppy joes and the mystery soups. Actually, I liked school lunches when I was a kid. Not everything, but the pizza was always good, I liked the hamburgers (even if they were a little gray), and I absolutely loved the fluffy, pink dessert they used to serve. What the hell was that stuff anyway?
Archie McPhee is selling a Lunch Lady Action Figure! Comes complete with not only a counter, but removable food stick-ons so you can change what type of food she's serving. She looks exactly like a woman who used to serve food in my school cafeteria. Though I don't remember that woman's arms being so muscular and mechanical.
Yes, it's full of high fructose corn syrup, and added in huge quantities to your burger, ketchup might contribute to childohood (and adult!) obesity. However, the condiment hasn't been banned from an Arizona high school because of fears of nutrition. The cafeteria actually allows students to take three packets of ketchup per hamburger.
However, extra ketchup can be purchased for 25 cents each. Students can bring ketchup packets from home, but bringing bottled ketchup to school is not allowed because it violates health codes. A student has been disciplined because he brought it to school two days in a row.
The limits were placed after students were caught stomping on ketchup packets, leaving messes in hallways and on sidewalks.
I wish I had thought of this in high school. What I a great way to protest. About 29 kids at Readington Middle School, New Jersey decided to 
Last year I picked the 8
I'm not sure if 
Ah, the lunch lady. That classic American worker who stands behind the counter in the school cafeteria and spoons out the sloppy joes and the mystery soups. Actually, I liked school lunches when I was a kid. Not everything, but the pizza was always good, I liked the hamburgers (even if they were a little gray), and I absolutely loved the fluffy, pink dessert they used to serve. What the hell was that stuff anyway?
Yes, it's full of high fructose corn syrup, and added in huge quantities to your burger, ketchup might contribute to childohood (and adult!) obesity. However, the condiment hasn't been banned from an Arizona high school because of fears of nutrition. The cafeteria actually allows students to take three packets of ketchup per hamburger. 
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