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When I entered the cafeteria of the K-8 Wexler-Grant Community School, a New Haven K-8 school, at 10:15, it was crunch time. Five lunch ladies, dressed in matching red-collared shirts and hairnets, were scooping canned apricot halves into small plastic containers and covering the pans of lettuce and chopped meats with foil. When the apricots ran out, they moved onto applesauce. One of the ladies stepped forward, an unofficial spokesperson for the group. “You need to do something about this,” she said, motioning toward the food. “Why would you give kids this on a cold day?

A coalition of high school students in Chicago spoke out against their school lunch menu today at a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. Schools have tended to defend their menus as giving students what they want, but students at the meeting said those foods are sickening.

"Nutrients are missing. Calories are high. Sugar is high," said Teresa Onstott, a high school sophomore. She said that if the cafeteria at her school has ever served vegetables, she has not seen them.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 24, 2010)—The Organic Trade Association (OTA) today thanked Senator Sherrod Brown (OH), chair for the Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Hunger, Nutrition and Family Farms, and Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) for gaining inclusion of an amendment for a pilot project to offer healthy organic food in school feeding programs in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee today.

A local school committee interested in bringing more fresh, unprocessed food to the menu in the Madison school district will get its first look at a report prepared by national food consultant Beth Collins on Thursday at a public meeting at 8 a.m. at the district's Doyle Building. The School Food Initiative group, organized last summer to explore tuning up the menu for school meals here, includes parents, administrators, chefs and food activists.

When school officials defend serving a daily menu of nachos, pizza, burgers and fries, they often say they're just giving students what they want.

But you wouldn't know it by listening to an angry coalition of high school students who plan to speak out on Chicago Public Schools meals Wednesday at the monthly Chicago Board of Education meeting.

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