On the heels of last week's post, Fast Food Makes You Stupid, I want to celebrate a few schools who are taking the opposite approach. Last weekend's Christian Science Monitor article "The School Lunchroom Grows Green" describes several public schools, private schools, and universities around the country that are incorporating community gardens and other eco-and-local food friendly concepts into their cafeterias. Here's a short excerpt: 
At St. Philip’s Academy in Newark, students used to bring fast food and Lunchables for their midday meal. “Before, what came out of here as a result of three lunch periods to the dumpster was just incredible,” says Miguel Brito, the head of the Episcopal academy, which prepares low-income children for college prep schools.
To improve its students’ eating habits and teach the 350 K-8 children about growing seasons and farms, St. Philip’s radically redesigned its cafeteria program two years ago, when it moved into its new LEED-certified building, a converted chocolate factory. It arranged to buy local produce from two nearby farms and created a mandatory lunch program that would take advantage of the fresh fruits and vegetables. One of the building’s most eye-catching environmental features is the gym’s green roof – 4,500 square feet of teaching gardens, complete with rain barrels to recycle water.
The program costs $750 a school year, which administrators says works out to less than $4 per meal, or roughly the cost of a Happy Meal. “We thought we would hear that ‘We hate this food, we want to go back to McDonald’s,’ ” says Jennifer Kotkin, ecospaces coordinator and seventh-grade science teacher. Instead, administrators say, the kids really enjoy eating what they have grown and are piling hummus and tzatziki on their plates along with PB&J.
The cafeteria also switched from speed lines with trays to family-style dining. “If you compare a normal school cafeteria to a family-style system, the percentage of waste significantly drops,” says Ralph Walker, the architect who designed the school’s new building. “Every individual student can control [his or her] own portions. You can make closer to the exact amount of food [needed], wash less, and do less.”
The rest of the article is just as good, and just as encouraging (the pictures are great, too). Please take a look and let me know what you think - and if you know of any schools trying similar things. Thanks to Tracy from the Birchwood Cafe for the link to this article!
