Celebrate National School Lunch Week!

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Today kicks off the National School Lunch Week, helping to provide awareness and support for National Farm-to-School Month throughout October and to share and support schools who are implementing healthy school food efforts all year round.

Considering that students eat more than half of their daily calories at school, nutritious school food plays a vital role in the development of healthy students and healthy eating habits. This is even more true for Latino kids who often are in schools that don’t always implement healthy foods and snacks in schools, studies show.

To learn more about how school meal programs have encouraged healthy eating decisions among students insights were gathered from a panel of school nutrition leaders commissioned by the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project, a joint initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Survey data revealed when school meals got healthier, so did students, eating more fruits, vegetables and entrees in 2014 than in 2012.

The most successful strategies to encourage students to eat healthier was to add salad bars, easy to grab sliced fruit, offering a variety of fruits and vegetables, modifying recipes to student’s tastes, and instituting school gardens.

Many Salud Hero’s have implemented these healthy school food changes, like local Nurse, Derek Dimas in Corpus Christi, Texas, (50.7% Latino) who encouraged kids to eat more fruits and made eating an art with his Fun with Fruit program.

Or there’s Sarah Syverson  from Colorado who helped implement a Farm-to-School apple orchard in a local school’s old softball field and implement a variety of heritage apples into school lunches.

There are many more heroes that are known for changing school meals for the better all around the nation! To learn more about them, click here or learn more about the need for healthier school food for Latino kids by clicking here.

To help celebrate National School Lunch Week in your community, learn more here or share #NSLW on twitter and Facebook or take the pledge to help take one small step for farm-to-school!