Anne Cooper
By Corinne Platt Rikkers
Ann Cooper, a.k.a. the Renegade Lunch Lady, is on a crusade to persuade schools across the country to transform lunches into healthy, appetizing meals. Furthermore, she is teaching students about nutrition through hands-on work in gardens and a curriculum that covers the fundamentals of food. To the many people here who knew her in the 1970s and ‘80s, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Lunch Lady began her career as a breakfast cook in Telluride after being thrown out of high school and hitchhiking across the country to become a ski bum.
Cooper is currently the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District in California. She works with 16 public schools and over 9,600 students to revamp school lunches under a program funded by renowned chef Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation. In school terms, her job adds up to 4,000 lunches, 2,000 breakfasts and 2,000 snacks each school day. She cooks from scratch and uses as many whole foods as she can, which is hard to do on a budget of pennies per day per meal. “You’re left with, at best, about 60 cents to serve a nutritious, delicious meal with about 600 calories,” she says. “That’s why we have such bad food in most schools. There’s so little money. We need to change the policy.” When she arrived at Berkeley, she found that 100 percent of the food arrived in plastic, was reheated in plastic and served to the kids on plastic.
Children in America are eating poorly, and they’re getting sick, decrees Cooper. “Kids are getting type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure early in life now. In fact,” she says, “diet-related health illness has overtaken cigarette smoking as the number one cause of death in America. And the Center for Disease Control says that kids in America born after the year 2000 will be the first to die younger than their parents because of what we feed them.” Processed foods dominate menus in school cafeterias because they’re cheap and convenient.
The road from ski bumming in Telluride to becoming a protégé of Alice Waters—who is the author of four books and subject of many national profiles—was a long and winding one for Cooper. After talking her way into a position at the Airport Bar and Grill—having never cooked before—she opened a baking company called Rising High Dough Rollers that kept Telluride in bread through the late ’70s. “We’d bake all night, ski all day, go home, take a nap, take a shower, go out ’til the bars closed and then bake all night. It was definitely a wild time.” During her years in Telluride, Cooper was one of the first managers at Baked In Telluride and a cook at the Sheridan Restaurant. “But,” she says, “eventually you realize that there’s a life beyond drugs, sex and rock and roll…for all of us.”
Ambition led her to New York in 1977, where she attended the Culinary Institute of America. After school, she worked as a chef on Holland cruise ships and with the Rattison Hotel chain before she got a call from Brian Rapp, who at the time was president of the Telluride Ski Resort. She moved back to Telluride and ran food services for the ski resort. Mountain Village didn’t yet exist. She opened the Plunge—now Giuseppi’s—and fondly recalls more wild years in Telluride. During summers, she catered for Telluride Film Festival, bluegrass, jazz, Mountainfilm and backstage for the Grateful Dead. After another four years, she opened Pandora’s, a restaurant under the old post office (currently American National Bank) on main street.
In the late ’90s, she was asked to become the executive chef of the Ross School in East Hampton, New York. “I literally thought to myself, ‘Me, a lunch lady, no way!’” When she wrote Bitter Harvest: A Chef’s Perspective on the Hidden Danger in the Foods We Eat and What You Can Do About It, she grew interested in organic and sustainable foods. “I really started thinking hard about what we are doing to our kids,” she says. “Courtney Ross inspired me. She wanted to change education in America and decided to build a school in which one of the core values was wellness. I became totally invested. I thought, ‘Wow, I could really make a difference.’” At this point, one in five public schools in America was selling fast food, less than half had working kitchens and the country was seeing more childhood obesity than ever.
What also weighed on her was the fact that corporations had taken over the food industry. “Big companies are profiting on our children’s health,” she says, adding, “The world doesn’t need more soda. They’re killing kids, and it just makes me insane. And the idea that we would allow profit to overshadow everything else is awful.
“All it takes to make change is passion and priority,” she says, adding that every school system in America could do what they’ve done in Berkeley. “But somebody has to have the heart and the drive to make it happen. It has to be a priority because, financially, it’s very difficult.”
Does she miss Telluride? “Yes, I miss it a lot.” She likes to reminisce about the wild, free and fun days back then. “Everybody was a hippie. Almost all of us who were there in the early ’70s lived in the New Sheridan or in these hovels in town with lots of people crammed together. And we went skiing.”
Today her life is a different story. She is currently working on a fifth book and doing a lot of public speaking. She aspires to take her work to the national level. She hopes people will realize that there’s nothing more important than our children’s future because, she says, “What are we going to do when they’re all dead or all have diabetes? We don’t even know what is going to happen with diabetes in 30 or 40 years. It’s always been an old people disease, so we have huge issues we have to tackle.” She would like to see school lunches universally cooked from scratch with fresh and, when possible, local ingredients. “My hope is that, as we go into the 2008 election, we ask our candidates what they are doing about our kids’ health. Every child in America should have a healthy breakfast and lunch every day. It should be their right, and the schools need to assure that kids are well fed. If we want children to learn, they have to be well nourished.”
