The Time for Lunch Campaign is a project of Slow Food USA, an educational non-profit with the goal of creating a world in which everyone can enjoy food that is good, clean and fair.
This year, they are asking parents, teachers and every responsible citizen to speak up and tell our nation’s leaders that change can’t wait: It’s time to provide our children with REAL FOOD at school.
School lunch is governed by The Child Nutrition Act, a federal law that comes up for reauthorization in Congress every four to five years. It establishes the requirements for the National School Lunch Program, which sets the standard for what more than 30 million children eat every school day.
With budget cuts and politics, our nation’s schools have struggled to serve children the real food they need (remember the “ketchup is a vegetable” rationale?).
The deadline for reauthorizing the current Child Nutrition Act is September 2009. Unless we speak up this summer, “business as usual” on Capitol Hill will let Congress pass a Child Nutrition Act that continues to fail our children.
Slow Food is asking that Congress and President Obama give school children access to Real Food:
1. Provide $1 more to each child per day for real food
2. Establish stricter standards on keeping foods that put children at risk for obesity out of schools (e.g. processed high-sugar foods).
3. Teach kids about food
4. Give schools incentives to buy local foods.
5. Create green jobs by creating a School Lunch Corps that prepares fresh food into lunches for school kids.
Sign the petition at: www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/campaign/time_for_lunch
Find out more information about the campaign’s platform at: www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/campaign/time_for_lunch/the_platform/
