Better Food For Schools - BFFS

Vital Stats

Seattle, WA

people helped20
People Doing It10

The Problem

I am a senior in high school working on changing the access to healthy, local, and delicious food at school. Our school districts limitations have made the quality of school food very poor. About 81.5% of our school has free or reduced lunch and those same students rely on two out of three of their daily meals from school, therefore, in order to have successful students we need fuel that is going to make us successful. We have a large percentage of students who play sports and most play more than one. Our school food is unattractive and most students go hungry rather than eating the food because of its poor quality. The taste, the healthy quality, the attractiveness of the food, and knowledge of how to be healthy are all problems I am working towards solving.

Plan of Action

My goal is to create an alternative lunch menu item that meets all health requirements, budget, is healthy, and still tastes good for 100 students, staff, and district nutritionist. I started last year by creating a school garden in which students and staff volunteered their time to help plant and take care of. Now that I’m a senior I have decided to take it to the next level. I have spent many hours researching school food requirements and communicating with the district nutritionists on what we have access to as far as the district, what it takes for food to be approved on the menu, and how much it all costs. Now that I have done this I am planning to create a menu that follows the these same requirements but make it even more healthy and attractive, taste better, still fit within budget, while trying to incorporate school garden food to cut costs. Since starting this project I have had so much support from staff in almost every way, I’ve had students approach me in the garden wanting to help or taste things, and I’ve