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.

Kid-friendly panda bento box. Photo: luckysundae, Flickr

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School lunch.

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.

[Via wcbstv.com]

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.

Well, good morning, our favorite Slashfood friends! Did you finish that final chapter of the last book on your reading list? Did you put all your supplies safely into your backpacks? Most importantly...did you pack a healthy lunch?!?!

In case you didn't know, we here at Slashfood are headed back to school today!

We'll be taking the whole day to post about speedy breakfasts, well-rounded lunches, healthy after-school snacks, and dinners for kids and family that are easy to prepare during the hectic pace of the school year. But it won't just be about the little kids. For some of us, "Back to School" means heading back to the college dorms, so we'll have some tips on how to avoid the Freshman 15 (or 20, in my case), tips for late night study/cram session snacks, and how to cook in a dorm room.

As always, we love sharing, so if you've got suggestions, posts on your own blog, or just want to get a little something off your chest about anything related to going Back to School, leave us a comment, or send us a tip!

I'm not sure how well this will go over with kids, since anything too highly unusual tends to embarrass them (or is that just me writing as the result of my own personal elementary school cafeteria trauma?). However, there has to be some way that you can work the Apple Jacket into their lunchboxes because it's just too cute to not use.

The Apple Jacket protects apples (and I suspect any other fruit that will fit) from bruises and knicks. The hand-knit sleeve is 100% cotton has a darling knit leaf detail and button closure. This is probably especially useful if you carry apples around in your purse or totebag along with other things like keys and notebooks that could damage the apple.

The Apple Jacket is $14.50 and comes in three colors, pink, white, and blue.

It seems like 2007 is the year of kids food. There has been a lot of talk and action around the world looking at the problem of poor diet and health, especially among children. Schools and municipalities are examining what children are eating and trying to educate them and change the school lunch diets.

The school lunch business is a multi-billion dollar industry. In the US the National School Lunch Program, which provides meals lacking in solid nutrition to approximately half the 54 million public school kids, costs around $7 billion-a-year.

Now a whole slew of food companies are producing healthier prepared lunches aimed specifically at kids in school. No more of those cheap but fat and chemical laden snack type lunches you buy in the deli section of the supermarket. These are real meals that parents can afford and are healthy too. Some of these companies are available at or deliver to schools, some sell from store fronts, and some sell through the Internet. Many of these programs are getting a larger response from parents of private school children but most service public school kids as well. I expect to see many more of these companies in the next year or two and offerings to public schools growing rapidly.

A few of the companies trying to feed healthy school lunches to our kids are:

Brown Bag Naturals (brownbagnaturals.com). In Manhattan Beach, CA, provides online ordering and delivers to several local schools.

Kid Chow (kidchow.com). In San Francisco, CA, they provide reasonably priced meals ordered online and delivered to 12 schools.

Health e-Lunch Kids (healthelunchkids.com) In Fairfax, Va., they take orders online and deliver to private schools. they are in discussion with Washington, D.C., public schools as well.

Kidfresh (kidfresh.com). A store in New York City delivers to private schools. Kidfresh plans 50 stores in six cities over the next five years.

What would you do if your child were punished because you did not pack a lunch that met the schools' guidelines?

In Kent, England, a 10-year old boy was made to leave the lunchroom and eat outside under supervision because his lunch contained "one more snack than allowed". At Lunsford Primary School, a lunch is only permitted to contain two snacks (the type and quantity of other food items was not specified) and young Ryan Stupples's lunch had cheese biscuits, a cake and a fromage frais yogurt. We can assume that the school felt that the contents of Ryan's lunch would have a negative impact on the eating habits of the other children, or else they would not have sent him outside to eat. "Ryan said he...felt upset and frightened and feared he was 'going to be suspended'."

The school defended the decision to remove the child from the lunchroom, stating that they had given the father a warning about packing appropriate lunches.

With all the hype about making sure kids' lunches are healthy, perhaps the best hing to do is send your kid to school with something healthy you've made at home.

But a sandwich in a brown paper bag is boring! These photo lunch boxes from Ogg Studio will make "taking lunch" a lot more fun. You choose any digital photo, send it in to Ogg Studio, and within a week, Ogg will send you a classic metal lunchbox that features your photo on it. Imagine your kid carrying a Superhero lunchbox, where the Superhero is...himself! Each lunchbox costs $35, and for an additional $10, you can add a second photo to the other side.

It is probably not surprising to hear that kids often use money they are given to purchase school lunches to buy junk food, either on campus or after school. What is surprising is the number of students who do it. Researchers in the UK found that more than 2 million students, about 25% of all students from 4 to 16, skip lunch and buy junk foods with the money, and roughly 1 million students in the same age range "fib" about the amount of fruits and vegetables that they eat.

If there was ever a good reason to take the time to pack a lunch at home for kids to take to school, and to make sure kids are eating healthy at least while they are at home, this is it. Kids can still have cookies, chips and candy sometimes, but the report indicated that "some [students] even cheat by throwing away oranges and bananas in their lunchboxes but bringing home the peel." Kids should also to learn to eat - and appreciate - the foods that are good for them to develop healthy eating habits.

As the old adage goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The same sentiment holds true for kids, who can be quite stubborn where food is concerned. At home, parents can monitor what their child is - and is not - eating to make sure they learn to make healthy choices. Now that the school year has started, however, ensuring that the kids get a healthy lunch can be harder.

One thing you can do is, as we have mentioned before, get your child involved in preparing the lunch. S/he can pick out the fruits and snacks that look the tastiest from the healthy foods you have available (aiming for fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean protein most of the time, of course). If it is hard to get your child going in the morning, however, you might not have time for this bonding activity. So, other tips include:

Lunch is often overlooked by busy, working adults, but school-age kids have time in their day set aside to make sure they eat. Sometimes they might buy lunch, but the best lunch is always going to be a homemade one. Making lunches day in and day out can be challenging, especially if you don't want to make the exact same thing over and over again. Most cookbooks are not set up to offer recipes that would be appropriate for school lunches, though they have plenty of lunch recipes. These books are, on the other hand, geared only towards brown bag lunches are a great way to get some ideas - for your own lunches, as well as for kids.

Brown Bag Lunch Cookbook is packed with healthy recipes that can be prepared in advance with easy to find ingredients and minimal fuss. It's as good for kids as it is for working adults.

Brown Bag Success has lots of menus to help you plan and creative ideas to put twists onto old favorites to make them more appealing and add some variety to lunch.