School Lunch Toolkit

Overview of Conducting a Healthy School Lunch Initiative

This Action Sheet offers an overview and some guidance on how to get started, provides resources to help achieve a wide range of goals, and includes a listing (at the end of the document) of organizations that we’ve identified doing work to advance healthy school lunches – with information from their websites.

Initiating Meatless Monday in a Local School

This Info Sheet was created to assist Pods that want to implement a Meatless Monday campaign, or similar initiative, to improve the nutritional quality of the lunch offerings at one or more local schools. There exists a significant amount of information about Meatless Mondays on the web, including particularly useful resources created by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).

Successes Around the Country

Creating healthier school lunches, whether that be by implementing Meatless Monday, Tasty Tuesday or by adding one whole food, plant-based meal to the menu, is an accomplishment. This Info Sheet is a place where we share these success stories to provide examples for Pod members of what is possible and to help develop ideas for future goals.

Building School Lunches from Kim Campbell

Building school lunches is an important task when getting kids off to school. Here are a variety of simple ideas that are quick and easy to put together. Eventually the kids may take over and use the ‘formula’ to build their own lunches. Lunches are typically comprised of 4 components with some fun ideas for every style eater.

WFPB Diet Explained for Food Service Director/Administrators

This Info Sheet, designed to share with a food service director/administrator at a school, outlines what a whole food, plant-based diet is and provides resources for more information in order to support efforts to add more plant-based options to the school lunch menu.

Please fill out the brief School Lunch Initiative Reporting Form to let us know what you’d like to do in your community. And if you have a success story you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear about it! Please use the “Submit your Pod’s News” form to send it in. 

Please share your questions with us so that we can include them in this section! Email info@plantpurecommunities.org.

Please see Action Sheet: Overview of Conducting a Healthy School Lunch Initiative for more information on organizations that are doing work to advance healthy school lunches.

Lean and Green Kids – A nonprofit working to help kids reach their full, beautiful and powerful potential, while creating a healthier, happier and greener world. For more information, visit their website. 

For a list of plant-based recipes that comply with the federal school lunch program, see PCRM’s Vegan Recipe Guide for School Lunch Programs, as well as additional resources for parents. For more information about the work PCRM does in schools, please visit their website: http://www.pcrm.org/health/healthy-school-lunches.

“Advocating for Healthy School Food,” an article by Amie Hamlin published by the Center for Nutrition Studies.

“Cooking at Every Age, Why Kids Should Learn to Cook,” an article by Chef Del Sroufe published by the Center for Nutrition Studies.