Pam Koch, Mary Swartz Rose Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Sustainable Futures has been awarded a 5-year NIH grant for her study entitled Creating Resources Uplifting Nutrition, Culture, and Health at Lunch (CRUNCH Lunch). Through this project, which links STEM to school lunch, Pam and her team aim to bring positive attention to the National School Lunch Program which can spark continuous improvement and attention to high quality meals. The long term goals of the study are to bring STEM to students in a relatable and culturally relevant way, increase early interest in STEM, improve food literacy, and increase school lunch consumption.
Read below to find out more about the project!
Creating Resources Uplifting Nutrition, Culture, and Health at Lunch (CRUNCH Lunch)
Imagine if lunch was the heart of the school day. The sounds and smells of the kitchen flow through the hallways as a fresh lunch is prepared. Teachers blend learning about lunch into STEM lessons by growing carrots in their classroom or in a school garden as part of their biology lessons. Principles of chemistry are demonstrated by cooking carrots to explore how textures and colors transform. As teachers bring students to lunch, they remind students of all the exciting foods to try on the day’s menu. Afternoon lessons begin by students recording observations about what they ate for lunch. This vision allows for schools to nourish students’ bodies as well as their minds. However, the reality of school lunch in the United States is far from delicious and it is typically disconnected from classroom lessons.
Our National School Lunch Program (NSLP) operates in the majority of schools in the United States. Since the NSLP’s initiation in 1946, school lunch has not been viewed as integral to the educational part of the school day. The NSLP has the potential to not only promote equity by providing food to students who are food insecure, but to also provide practical, engaging, and deep connections to science, math, health, and other academic subjects. School lunch can inspire future generations of scientists through teaching about food production, transportation, processing, cooking, nutrition science, and the diet health connection. Healthful dietary habits help prevent metabolic-based chronic diseases and infectious diseases, as we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
By linking STEM to school lunch, Creating Resources Uplifting Nutrition, Culture, and Health at Lunch (CRUNCH Lunch) can bring positive attention to the NSLP. This positive attention can spark continuous improvement and attention to high quality meals and will highlight the clear connection between STEM education and lunch.
If schools focus on making lunch an educational part of the school day, this could help justify increased resources for school lunch to improve food quality and to prepare more fresh foods and scratch-cooked meals. Additionally, with more attention on lunch, school communities can work together to create a school lunch environment that is positive, conducive to eating, culturally inclusive, and rich with opportunities for learning. Lunch at the heart of the school day. When teachers receive professional development about why and how to connect STEM to school lunch, this can be the norm at our nation’s schools.
To this end, CRUNCH Lunch has two aims:
Aim 1: Create CRUNCH Lunch Teacher Workshops. These professional development workshops (delivered in person or via video conferencing) empower teachers to combine inquiry-based STEM education with evidence-based nutrition education, to improve their attitudes and confidence in STEM and in connecting education to school lunch.
Aim 2: Create a CRUNCH Lunch Resource Hub (web-based). This robust and comprehensive professional development Resource Hub provides teachers with ongoing support to apply what they learned in the workshops (Aim 1) to increase students’ STEM and food-related attitudes, STEM and food literacy, and students’ consumption of school lunch.
We will conduct a three-year summative evaluation of the CRUNCH Lunch Teacher Workshops and Resource Hub to understand the outcomes for teachers and students compared to controls after one, two, and three years of CRUNCH Lunch. The pilot will provide CRUNCH Lunch to 6 New York City K–5 schools and the summative evaluation will reach another 24 schools, reaching 30 of the about 800 elementary schools in NYC. Students and teachers in grades K–5 will receive CRUNCH Lunch for a total of about 720 teachers and 15,840 students. Second to fifth grade students and teachers will be enrolled in the evaluation for a total of 480 teachers and 10,560 students. We will disseminate CRUNCH Lunch widely to reach students across the United States. Our hypothesis is that since CRUNCH Lunch is connected to the familiar act of eating lunch, students who typically do not see themselves as connected to or excited about STEM will become engaged in STEM, especially girls who are often disconnected from science yet interested in food and nutrition and prone to nutritional challenges. CRUNCH Lunch will improve students STEM literacy, health literacy, dietary habits, and, hopefully health. Students will be more engaged in school, be more familiar with and connected to STEM careers, eat more healthfully, and become life-long learners about food, STEM, and health.