Anybody ever had the chance to be a part of or witness a food fight? Just picture it, the stereotypical food fight: cafeteria trays, kids everywhere, fistfuls of mashed potatoes whizzing through the air. Do you see it?

I ask because I want to start a food fight. Actually, I already have thrown the first “fistful of potatoes,” although it’s a bit different than what you may be imagining.

My name is Taylor. I am a Tennessean by way of Memphis and long time future of food philosopher. To get to the point: I want to revolutionize cafeteria lunches. This is the “food fight” I had in mind and why I created World Wide Food to focus on getting healthier food alternatives into schools, and empowering local communities through education and sustainability teaching with a focus on black communities.

The National School Lunch Program, a federal program that operates in public and private schools, served 5.1 billion lunches in 2013, Bloomberg reports. Surely these school lunches must correlate to the health of our students in some way. I am more focused on getting real healthy food into our schools more so than focusing on the numbers, but if you look at the numbers, they are very telling, especially if you factor in demographics. Everyday, over 32 million students eat a cafeteria lunch, and for most of these students, they are consuming over half of their daily calories while at school.

Around the globe, other countries have us beat when it comes to school lunches. More fresh fruits and veggies, and less fried food, specifically. Let's look at a couple of pictures of lunches from around the world.

Source: Sweetgreen’s Tumblr.

Now let's compare this to 2 other countries.

It is easy to see we have some room for improvement.

Kimbal Musk during a TedxMemphis talk refers to food as “the new internet.” He speaks on the food industry now in the same way he felt about the internet in 1995. Musk talks of a shift on the way—the reemergence of real food in most households. Memphis was ranked remarkably low in terms of health this year so personally this hits close to home. As an added bonus, Musk does a good deal of his operations in Memphis, TN.

Musk goes on to say in his talk that the food industry is poised for massive disruption and change. Fast food restaurants are closing by the hundreds, soda sales continue to plateau, frozen food sales continue to decrease. In this Fortune article, former Con-Agra executive Steve Hughes goes on to say:

“I’ve been doing this for 37 years, and this is the most dynamic, disruptive, and transformational time that I’ve seen in my career.”

Change is already a foot, so what better place to start than the American schools feeding our future leaders. I’ll be documenting this food fight in more detail on the World Wide Food blog soon, but for now follow my Medium account for any updates.

school lunch

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