Chef Ann Cooper
Founder of the Chef Ann Foundation
and Director of Food Services,
Boulder Valley School District
Making School
Food Good FoodIn high school, no one would have voted
Ann Cooper most likely to succeed. In fact,
she didn’t even graduate. She did drugs, was
thrown out of several schools, then hitchhiked
out to Telluride to be a ski bum. It was only
when she got a job slinging breakfast and fell
in love with cooking that she, unwittingly, took
her first step toward making lunchroom food
healthier for America’s children.
From line cook, Cooper went to the Culinary
Institute of America and on to trailblazing victo-
ries: she was one of the first women to cook on
a cruise line; and one of the early voices champi-
oning sustainability and the dangers of America’s
food supply (which she chronicled in her book,
Bitter Harvest). Back then, in the 1990s, it wasn’t
obvious what it all added up to, until her circu-
itous career path landed her in a school cafeteria.
You need an odd combination of skills to
succeed in the byzantine world of school food:
a mastery of budgets, a passion for cooking at
scale, and a deep outrage that it should be so
hard to feed students well. Cooper had them all.
After a stint cooking at a private school in New
York, she was lured by chef Alice Waters—Amer-
ica’s doyenne of sustainability and founder of the
Edible Schoolyard Project—to Berkeley, Califor-
nia, in 2005 to shake up the school food program
there. Cooper didn’t disappoint. She eliminated all
unhealthy trans fats, preservatives, refined flour,
high-fructose corn syrup and salt-heavy foods
and replaced them with made-from-scratch
meals like Buffalo chicken sliders, pasta with fresh
tomato sauce and Southwest quinoa salad. She
added plenty of produce and nixed juice and sug-
ary beverages in favor of low-fat milk. Her radical
approach, unheard of at a time when virtually all
school food was highly processed and heat-and-
eat (as it often is even today), proved that tasty,
nutritious food was possible on a shoestring. It
wasn’t long before she was nationally known as
the Renegade Lunch Lady.
But it’s what Cooper has done since she made
her name that makes her a standout. She could
have moved from district to district, fixing one
cafeteria at a time. Instead, she settled in Boulder
and launched the Chef Ann Foundation—which
celebrates its 10th anniversary this year—to de-
mocratize change. Its first project was The Lunch-
box, an online resource to help cafeteria staff
transition to scratch cooking. Next came Salad
Bars to Schools, which has raised more than $14
million to implement (what else?) salad bars. In
2019 alone, 250 schools will get theirs, bringing
the total to nearly 6,000 salad bars across the
country. “For decades it was canned beans and
corn and now we have thousands of salad bars
that make such a difference to the kids,” she says.
“When you give kids a choice about what is on
their plates, they try new things and eat better.”
But what Cooper is most proud of: “That I’m not
the only renegade lunch lady anymore.”