Lunch Love Community
People:
Helen De Michiel and Sophie Constantinou (Series Co-Producers and Webisode Directors)
Sophie Constantinou (Director of Photography)
Jean Donohue (Executive Producer)
Grants:
$10,000 in Spring 2010 for webisode production, outreach and audience engagement
About the Project
In 1999, The Berkeley Unified School District created it’s ground-breaking and influential Food Policy mandating a goal to “provide nutritious, fresh, tasty, locally grown food that reflects Berkeley's cultural diversity… and ensure that the food served [in the schools] be organic to the maximum extent possible.”After more than a decade of hard work and great creative energy, the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative is manifesting this vision to offer all students a daily breakfast and lunch that includes locally grown and organic products while integrating a gardening and cooking curriculum into the student’s schedule.
Lunch Love Community is a mosaic of web-based short films exploring how this determined community of cooks, educators, parents, health advocates, politicians and food purveyors in Berkeley are pioneering the movement to change the way our children eat.
To build awareness of the importance of supporting and developing healthy and nutritious school lunch programs for all American children, these stories will be offered freely online for users, networks, organizations and other outlets to share and repurpose.
Each 3 – 5 minute bite-size documentary essay will look at a different aspect of how, in Berkeley – a highly diverse community, both economically and ethnically -- has persisted since the mid-1990s to reinvent school lunch, and successfully integrate it into an innovative cooking and gardening curriculum throughout the K-12 system.
In a moment when education budgets are being cut, obesity is a major problem, and food insecurity is growing across the country, these documentary glimpses into the Berkeley School Lunch program can ignite inspiration and dialogue for communities to take their own next steps in changing their school food systems.
The Lunch Love Community web series is also an unusual social media strategy: it precedes --as a plate of appetizers – producer/director De Michiel’s long form documentary, Open Minds Open Mouths, which is slated for completion in 2011.