www.brianwansink.com Open in urlscan Pro
199.34.228.59 Public Scan

Back to summary

Submitted URL:
http://smarterlunchrooms.org/
Effective URL:
http://www.brianwansink.com/for-school-lunches.html
Submission: On November 02 via api (November 2nd 2024, 9:06:07 pm UTC) from US — Scanned from DE

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Solve & Share
* Home
* Professional Projects
* About
* Tips for PhDs

* For You
* For Families
* For Free >
* Free Books for Libraries
* Free Magnets
* Kitchen Scorecard

* -------------
* For School Lunches
* For Workplace Wellness
* For Grocery Shoppers
* For Restaurant Lovers

SMARTER LUNCHROOMS MAKE HEALTHIER KIDS

"It's Not Nutrition Until It's Eaten"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Schools can make small changes to help your child select better lunches and
enjoy them more. This approach is freely available to schools as the Smarter
Lunchroom movement.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HERE'S HOW TO MAKE A LUNCHROOM SMARTER
(IN AS LITTLE AS A DAY)

MTV did a hip segment on how a 60 minute transformation in middle school
cafeteria can help kids eat better. Here's a 3-minute video clip from the
show.

My favorite line from this MTV news report is when they show a girl picking out
a cookie one week and a piece of fruit the next. When asked why she picked up a
piece of fruit this time instead of a cookie. She blurts out, "I don't know."

This summarizes why this Smarter Lunchroom approach is so powerful: It works
without people having to think about it. It's why this same approach has worked
everywhere from Google cafeterias, to Army base mess halls, to high end
Norwegian hotels, to high school sports concession stands. It makes healthy
foods convenient, attractive, and normal to take.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. BE A SMARTER LUNCHROOM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. SCORE YOUR SCHOOL

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3. SPREAD THE WORD

Here's how to help your child's school become a Smarter Lunchroom.

The Smarter Lunchroom StoryFile Size: 1544 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How's your school doing?
This shows how it can improve.

Smarter Lunchroom ScorecardFile Size: 858 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scorecard (in Spanish)File Size: 1087 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Use this flier, FAQs, and letter to let your PTA and the school know where to
start

FlierFile Size: 24074 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FAQsFile Size: 871 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LetterFile Size: 91 kbFile Type: docx

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EXAMPLES OF LUNCH LINE REDESIGN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT ARE SMARTER LUNCHROOMS?*

Anyone who’s been a parent for more than ten minutes knows that controlling the
eating behavior of young kids is tough when they’re alone and impossible when
they’re with their friends. It’s like organizing a picnic for squirrels.

Welcome to school lunchtime. If every school lunchroom had a farm-size garden,
an extra million-dollar budget, and Chef Boyardee on staff, it still won’t
really be able control the way kids eat each week. When it comes to lunch, we
can educate, bribe, or restrict what we give kids, but we can’t tell them what
to eat. And as we know, it’s not nutrition until it’s eaten.

What we can do, however, is make it more convenient, appealing, or normal to
pick up an apple instead of a cookie. This is the Smarter Lunchroom, the type of
lunchroom that can get kids to choose and eat their healthier lunch and to love
it--because no one told them what to do.[1]
Whether we live and breathe school lunch or are indifferent to it, we all have
an indelible stereotype of school lunch based on when we were in ninth grade.
With that in mind, here’s a brief history of lunchtime.

DOUBLING FRUIT CONSUMPTION OVERNIGHT

A few weeks after we started the Smarter Lunchroom Movement in February 2009,
we were asked to visit a school that had proudly hired a new food service
director (a.k.a. head lunch lady) with a dreamy combination of two skills. She
was a registered dietician who had also graduated from an elite culinary school.
That was just before we got a call from the New York Department of Public Health
with a “quick question.” They were giving $3000 pilot grants to a school
district near Lake Placid, New York—the heart of the Adirondacks Mountains--to
see if they could increase the amount of fruit kids ate by 5 percent. Their
question: “How much do these schools need to drop the price of 50¢ apples in
order to sell 5 percent more of them?”
Our guess was that price had nothing to do with it. You could double
the price or halve the price and sales wouldn’t change. Kids who want an apple
will buy one, and kids who don’t . . . won’t. But thinking there was probably
something different that could be done--other than changing the price--we loaded
up two Jeeps and took a late-night seven-hour drive to the Adirondacks to see
what was really going wrong in the fruit world. After a short night of sleep in
a log cabin inn, we divided into two teams and began doing recon in the
different lunchrooms in the school district.
First, we saw that cutting the price of fruit wouldn’t do jack--no
kid knew the price of anything on the lunch line. Kids pay for lunches with
debit cards, PIN numbers, fingerprint scans, or eyeball scans that subtract the
price of their lunch from a magical debit account that their parents charge up
with money every month or so. Nobody was counting out nickels to pay for an
apple or pear. It was paid with these magical, invisible funds.[11] Cutting the
price seemed silly since the kids weren’t focused on the price to begin with.
Then we looked at the fruit itself. Imagine all the different ways
you could display fruit to kids. Now think of the worst way you could do it. In
school after school, anemic-looking fruit had been tossed into those big steamer
pans (appetizingly called “chaffers”) and pushed under acrylic “sneeze shields.”
You pretty much had to contort and stretch your body like a Cirque du Soleil
performer to retrieve your apple from an unappetizing metal pan that looked like
a family-size hospital bedpan. Given how inconvenient and unappetizing the fruit
looked, taking 20 cents off the price would have been a joke. The cafeteria
would simply have made less money and sold no more fruit.
When we met the next day with five of these food service directors,
we said, “Don’t lower the price. Just make two changes. Put the fruit in a nice
bowl and set it out under a well-lit part of the line.” We said it didn’t matter
what the bowl looked like. It could be from Target, TJ Maxx, Goodwill, or a
lunch lady’s basement. It just couldn’t look like a family-size hospital bedpan
behind a sneeze-shield.
This seemed pretty simple. Three of the schools jumped on board, and
they pledged to make this change and track their fruit sales. Three months
later, they reported that sales hadn’t increased by only 5 percent. Instead,
they had popped up 103 percent and stayed there for the entire semester.
These were pretty simple directions: Put the fruit in a nice bowl
and put it out under a well-lit part of the line. Yet when we checked in with
the fourth school, they told us they had bought a nice bowl, but then got a
little bit mixed up. Instead of putting the bowl of fruit in a well-lit part of
the line, they had instead taken an old desk light and simply put it up on the
lunch line and shined it on the fruit – an apple spotlight dance. Sales shot up
by 186 percent. [12]
The last school never made the changes, and they had what they
thought were good excuses: It wouldn’t work, they were too busy, they weren’t
certain what type of bowl to buy, they didn’t have the spare cash or slush fund
to buy a bowl, they couldn’t bring one from home, they weren’t sure whether the
bowl met health standards, they wanted to make sure the shape of the bowl didn’t
offend anyone’s religion, and so on. They had lots of reasons why they couldn’t
“put the fruit in a nice bowl and put the bowl out under a well-lit part of the
line.” And they didn’t sell any more fruit.
Telling a food service director not to serve cookies is one way to change the
lunchroom--but it has its problems. The food service directors are the queens or
kings of their domain. They often have twenty years of expertise in designing
menus, finding the perfect suppliers, tweaking recipes, predicting sales volume,
managing leftovers, and keeping food safe. They’re often resistant to changing
the food they serve, but they’ll often change their lunchroom to help kids pick
up an apple instead of a cookie—especially if it’s a change that can be done
quickly and inexpensively.[13]
Put it in a nice bowl under a well-lit part of the line? It works.
If the food was attractively presented, it looked yummier. Furthermore, if was
in their faces, it was on their plates. Nowhere is this more vividly
illustrated than with a salad bar.

GETTING TEENAGERS TO EAT A LOT MORE SALAD IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA

Vegetables are a battleground where the will of a child fights the will of a
parent. A similar battle is waged in United States lunchrooms, where thirty-two
million kids eat school lunches every day. But here it’s a battle between
pizza-loving kids and salad-serving lunch ladies. At most schools it’s a losing
battle for the salad bar. The USDA even called us and asked if we had any
insights on how to get middle and high school kids to pile it on their plate.
How could we turn this around?
We typically think that if we want kids to eat salad, we either have
to educate them or entice them. When education doesn’t work, we try to entice
them by cutting the price or adding those miniature corn-on-the-cobs that look
like something Malibu Barbie would eat. The problem with these approaches is
that “educating” students requires a plan, a time slot, and a teacher, and
“enticing” them costs money to subsidize or to buy the extra Barbie corn.
If we were to ask kids why they didn’t eat salads, their knee-jerk
answers would be predictable--too icky or boring compared to pizza. That’s what
they’d say--but they’d be wrong. Here’s the real answer: The big reason they
don’t buy salad is simply that they don’t think about it. Just like us, they
have their lunchtime habits--and they don’t include salad bars. But if something
made them think about salad--even for a second--it might lead a high schooler to
pick up the tongs.
Within a month of making our pilgrimage to Lake Placid to help
schools increase fruit sales, we stumbled across the chance we needed to follow
up on the USDA question about salad bars. We got a call from an award-winning
food service director, Chris Wallace, who called asking if she would increase
salad bar sales in a middle school if she were to cut the price. Because of the
bigger-picture USDA synergy, we hustled out to her district.
Here’s the layout of the lunchroom. The salad bar is pushed against
one wall and virtually ignored. It’s as easy to walk by and ignore as a wall
flier for last Tuesday’s blood drive. The sixty-second solution was to wheel the
salad bar ten feet out from the wall and turn it sideways. This way kids
couldn’t walk by it; they had to walk around it to get to the cash registers.
For the first couple of weeks kids would pick up their standard lunch, bump into
the salad bar, pause, walk around it, and pay for their food. After a while,
however, these pauses got a little bit longer. Eventually, some students broke
from their remote control lunch pattern to try the salad. It didn’t happen every
day, but it was frequent enough that within a couple weeks the salad bar sales
increased 200 to 300 percent.[14]
When the salad was in their face, it was on their mind. They might
say no nine days in a row, but every once in a while a yes will squeak by. No
price cuts, no expensive additions, no complaints, and no salad leftovers to
throw into the mulch pile.

SALAD BAR REDESIGN

YOU CAN ALSO USE TA SIMILAR IDEA TO GET YOUR KIDS TO EAT BETTER AT HOME.

HOW TO DO A LUNCH LINE REDESIGN

We’ve discovered more than 100 changes that lunchrooms can make to nudge
students to eat better. For instance, if you show a kid three consecutive pans
of vegetables--green beans, corn, and carrots--they’ll take 11 percent more of
whatever vegetable is in the first pan. It doesn’t matter what it is. They’re
hungry, and what’s first looks best. To help schools visualize how they could go
through their lunchrooms and make a bunch of low-cost/no cost changes, my friend
David Just and I wrote an infographic editorial for the New York Times.[16] One
teacher said she even printed this out for her students and had them color it in
class. High school math class just isn’t what it used to be.

Shortly after the op-ed was published, a television producer wanted to film
us doing a before-and-after Smarter Lunchroom Makeover of a middle school. Why a
middle school? Apparently elementary students act too random in front of TV
cameras (remember that picnic for squirrels?), and most high schoolers aren’t
photogenic enough for television--too many strange clothes, weird hair colors,
piercings, and uninterested looks. The TV people wanted us to find a middle
school that would do a total lunchroom makeover for less than $50--and film it
all MTV-style.[17]
After finding the perfect middle school and watching students eat
lunches for a week, we isolated ten changes we could easily make for less than
$50 total that would probably help them eat better without even realizing
it--things like changing the location of the fruit, giving fun names to healthy
foods, moving the cookies behind the counter, putting the vegetables first, and
so on. The food service director and producer were cool with the changes, so we
got to work.[18] Twenty-five kids were hand-picked to be secretly filmed by
three hidden cameras. We hid cameras in a ceiling tile, a hat, and even in our
fake water bottle. Everything was set--and then came the catch. We were asked,
with the cameras rolling, to predict the sales for each food item.

After lunch was over, the smoke cleared, and the dishes washed, we were able
to calculate just what had happened. The makeover was a nutritional
victory--kids took a lot more salads, fruit sales doubled, white milk sales went
up 38 percent, sugary drinks sales dropped by 17 percent, and they ran out of
the healthy bean burritos--renamed Big Bad Bean Burritos--for the first time
ever. These kids ate an average of 18 percent fewer calories, and they ate
better than they typically did.[19]
What didn’t work was putting the cookies behind the counter. We thought
this would decrease sales by 30 percent, but it did nothing. Even worse, we
predicted that moving vegetables to the front of the line would increase sales
by 11 percent, but it instead dropped by 30 percent.[20] What happened?
A little bit of sleuthing showed that cookies were the cafeteria’s
big “destination food.” They were five inches of hot, freshly baked gooey
goodness--the main reason some kids ate school lunch. Wild horses couldn’t have
pulled these kids away from the cookies without pulling them away from eating
lunch there altogether.
The vegetables were a different story. As I mentioned, our lab
studies showed that lunchgoers were 11 percent more likely to take whatever
vegetable they saw first compared to whatever they saw third. Well, that’s true
when three vegetables are in the middle of the serving line, but here we put
them in the front of the line. Nobody scoops up a plate of green beans and then
looks for the entrée that goes with it. People pick out the entrée and then the
vegetable. They didn’t want to take a veggie until they knew what they were
having for a main course.

When the interview got to this point, the producer asked, “You’ve
been doing eating research for twenty-five years. Sales didn’t increase by 11
percent, they dropped by 30. Why were you so far off?” I said, “Well, if we
always knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.” (He seemed amused
enough by this answer to not report these missed predictions in his story.)
Still, nailing five out of seven predictions was pretty decent. Our
prediction report card wasn’t straight As, but it was better than the report
cards I got in high school. Most important, we were able to show in real-TV-time
how only $38 and two hours of tweaking made a bigger difference than hefty
expert commission reports.

WHAT'S YOUR SMARTER LUNCHROOM SCORE?

Some people have a hard time believing that simply moving a fruit bowl or the
white milk can change what kids eat overnight. But when they do it and see that
it works, they become huge converts and want to know what to do next. It’s good
to get advice, but once we get rolling, people--just like school lunch
directors--pretty much know what will work best for them and what won’t.
To help schools figure out how smart of a lunchroom they are and what
they can do next, we’ve designed a do-it-yourself Scorecard that lunch ladies,
parents, or students can use. All it takes is the pdf Scorecard to the right, a
pencil, and a lunchroom. Each lunchroom can get as many as 100 points, because
there are 100 tasks or changes that help kids choose better and eat better. The
more changes your school makes, the higher the score. Most schools first score
around 20 to 30, but can quickly move up to 50 within a couple weeks if they
really focus.
These are all research-based changes we have found help kids make smarter
choices. A school that got a 75 last year will probably get about a 75 this year
if they haven’t made any changes or if they haven’t backslidden.
School lunch ladies -- food service managers -- like this because
many are naturally competitive and because it specifically strokes them for what
they’ve done right, and it specifically gives them a menu of the other things
they could do to become an even smarter lunchroom. These changes are the common
ones that will benefit all schools. Since 2009, we’ve worked directly or
indirectly with over 20,000 schools, and every time we go into a new school we
find unique changes that will have a huge impact in that school but won’t be
broadly applicable. The 100 most common changes can all be found in the
Scorecard, but some of the others are more unique to your school.
So how do you discover those mysterious, subtle changes that may
perfectly fit the needs of your school? After you make some of the more basic
changes and feel good about how things are going and are ready for the next
challenge, go stand with the kids in the front of the lunch line and ask
yourself, “WWMcD?”

Smarter Lunchroom ScorecardFile Size: 858 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smarter Lunchroom Scorecard (Spanish)File Size: 0 kbFile Type: pdf

Download File

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MAKE YOUR SCHOOL LUNCHROOM SMARTER
FOR UNDER $50

Make Your School Lunchroom Smarter for Under $50The Smarter Lunchroom Starter
List
When we do Smarter Lunchroom makeovers, it’s easy to find ten or more easy
changes a lunchroom can make overnight or over a weekend for less than $50. Yet
for most, even making a couple small changes can have a dramatic impact. Here
are easy changes we’ve designed to get you started:

To Increase Fruit Sales . . .
[] Display fruit in two locations, one near the register
[] Display whole fruits in a nice bowl or basket
[] Employ signs and suggestive selling to draw attention to the fruit

To Increase Vegetable Sales . . .
[] Give them creative/descriptive names[21]
[] Display the names on menu boards and at point-of-purchase

To increase White Milk Sales . . .
[] Place white milk first in the cooler
[] Place white milk in every cooler
[] Make sure fat-free (skim) white milk accounts for at least 1/3 of all
milk displayed

To Increase Healthy Entrée Sales . . .
[] Make the healthy entrée the first or most prominent in the lunch line.
[] Give the targeted entrée a creative or descriptive name
[] Feature it on a menu board outside the cafeteria

To Increase the Number of Complete Healthy Meals Sold . . .
[] Place key meal items at the snack window2
[] Move chips and cookies behind the serving counter -- offered by
request only
[] Create a healthy-items-only “grab and go” convenience line[22]

Where should a school start? Start with the Smarter Lunchroom Movement Checklist
below and choose three easy changes to get the ball rolling. When we sit down
with the food service directors and managers, we specifically tell them what
they’re doing exceptionally well. We then mention that these are some other
ideas they can consider, but we ask them to pick no more than three. Some
schools want to try everything, but while ambition may soar in the heat of the
moment, when it comes to implementation, making more than three changes can seem
so overwhelming that often nothing gets changed. Focus on three and save the
rest for later.

WWMCD -- WHAT WOULD MCDONALDS DO?

You can love Big Macs or hate them . . . but it’s hard to argue that McDonald’s
isn’t great at serving lunch.[24] They make Happy Meals and happy diners. But
what do they know that a school lunch director doesn’t? Oh, sure, they’re backed
up by $750 million in advertising, lots of spare cash, a Mom-friendly
drive-thru, and laser-precision quality control. But how well would these
smarty-pants managers do if they were thrown into a school lunchroom and given
only $50 to improve it? WWMcD?
I wanted to find out, so I enlisted a handful of former fast food
managers and employees to join me for lunch at three different schools. I wanted
their impression of what they would do if I were to put them in charge of these
forlorn lunchrooms and gave them only $50--not millions--to play with. What
would they do to get more kids to eat lunch and to enjoy it more?
After less than five minutes of watching kids order and eat, they
started firing off ideas. What’s important is that nobody said a word about
changing the food. One said he would put one of those Italian-style menu boards
outside the cafeteria and write down the names of the three or four healthier
items with Day-Glo marker colors. This way kids could make pre-committed
decisions and the non-lunch goers could see what they were missing. Another said
she would close the main door to the lunchroom and funnel everyone (even those
with sack lunches) through the serving area so they would at least see what was
offered. Another said she would make the serving area more attractive by playing
low-level popular music and putting some backlighting on the wall. A fourth
person said they would move the fruit by the cashier and have her ask, “Do you
want a pear or apple with that?” The last said he would move the condiments line
to outside of the main serving area so it didn’t look so congested and
unappealing, and it scared kids away.
These were their very first comments at the very first school.
Again, nobody said they needed a $750 million-dollar advertising budget or a
bigger food budget. Nobody said it was a lost cause, threw up their hands, and
pouted.

WHAT WOULD MCDONALD’S DO?

ake a visit to a high school cafeteria and then to the nearest McDonald’s. After
taking former fast food managers into three schools, we asked them what they did
differently. Most changes could be made over the weekend for little or no cost.

Looking at a school lunchroom and asking, “What would McDonald’s do,” may seem
too crass or too contrary to how we believe our kids should eat. But who knows
better how to give people what they want?[25] We need to have a new model to
think of how things could be. Nobody makes more diners happy each day than
McDonald’s. It’s not about what they serve. It’s about how they serve it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE LUNCHTIME REPORT CARD

The only worse school day than Vaccination Day is Report Card Day. It’s the day
to face the music. While Tiger Moms are obsessed with this day, some other
parents don’t care as much., and kids mostly care in relation to their parents.
Report cards are a way of checking in and reminding both kids and parents how
the year is going—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
What if it there were lunchtime report cards?[27] What if every Friday,
parents got an email telling them what their little angels bought for lunch that
week? It would tell which of their kids bought cookies and Gatorade and which
one bought apples and white milk. As with real report cards, you can imagine
that some parents couldn’t care less, and others would lose sleep over it. Some
parents might care more about what the kids are eating, and others might care
more about how much they’re spending. But would it change what kids order?

Each Friday for a month, we sent parents the list of all the foods their
kids (K-12) bought for school lunch. What happens when families get these report
cards is kind of funny. The bottom line is that little Valerie and little Teddy
mysteriously start buying cookies one-third less often and start buying fruit 50
percent more often.
You might think kids changed what they bought because their parents had
heart-to-heart nutrition talks with them, but that’s not always the case. It
seems that simply knowing that someone is aware of what they’re doing--and maybe
cares--gradually bumps these kids back into line. After all, Big Mother is
watching.[28]
While you can ask your children’s school to start a Lunchtime Report
Card program, you don’t have to wait. All you need to do is ask, “Sooooo . . .
how was lunch today?”

HELPING YOUR SCHOOL BECOME SLIM BY DESIGN

There’s a story of a mother who’s trying to get a whiny, belligerent son off to
high school in the morning, but the son kicks and screams that he doesn’t want
to go because all the kids hate him and make fun of him, and all the teachers
nag him and think he’s dumb. When his mother pleads, “But you have to go to
school,” he says, “Give me one good reason.” Mom replies, “Because you’re the
principal.”
Aside from the principal, no school employee gets beat up more
than the school lunch lady. She’s gone from being the punch line of hairnet
jokes to being played by a dirty-dancing, Karaoke-singing Chris Farley
on Saturday Night Live. Now she even has her own $10.95 action figure.[37] The
Lunch Lady Action Figure wears heavy black-rimmed glasses and a blue, 1950s
Chris Farley-size dress. She has the forearms and calves of a Nebraska
linebacker and is armed with her secret weapon: a serving spoon shaped like an
ice cream scoop.

This is a terrible stereotype, and most of us realize that. But what we
don’t often appreciate is that this woman is the true Iron Chef. She may not
have perfected a signature Beef Wellington recipe for hundreds, but each week
she orchestrates five different breakfasts and five different lunches, delivers
them to 500+ impatient diners, has two to four consecutive seatings, takes
complaints with an understanding nod, and inspires twelve staffers who work four
hours every school day for minimum wage. She does all of this and feeds our kids
for less than $1.36 per meal. Let’s see Chef Morimoto do that.
Here’s what else you wouldn’t realize. After analyzing thousands of
Smarter Lunchroom schools results across the country, we’ve found the biggest
determinate of whether a student eats a school lunch is how much he likes the
lunch lady. The more he likes the lunch lady, the more often he eats
lunch.[38] Or maybe it’s because the more often he eats there, the more he likes
the lunch lady. It doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s touching: After 175 meals a
year, they can still make it personal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EVIDENCE-BASED SUPPORT AND PUBLISHED REFERENCES

[1] One of the original articles on using behavioral economics to create Smarter
Lunchrooms is David R. Just and Brian Wansink (2009), “Better School Meals on a
Budget: Using Behavioral Economics and Food Psychology to Improve Meal
Selection,” Choices, 24:3, 1-6 and the USDA version of this is David R., Just
Lisa Mancino, and Brian Wansink (2007), “Could Behavioral Economics Help Improve
Diet Quality of Nutrition Assistance Program Participants?” Economic Research
Service Number 43, ERS -- Washington DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, June.

[2] Clip-on ties were invented for wounded vets who had difficulty tying a
necktie because of hand injuries. Pajamas replaced full-length nightgowns, more
closely mirroring the GI’s need to sleep in underclothes. The full story of the
history of hot lunches can be found at
http://www.cracked.com/article_18703_5-inventions-you-wont-believe-came-from-war.html.

[3] Specifically, “46% of African Americans and almost one-third of European
Americans called for the draft were classified “4-F” – unfit for service. A
People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Volume II: Since
1865 (2011), by Mary Beth Norton, Carol Sheriff, David M Katzman, David W.
Blight, Howard Chudacoff, Cengage Learning, 2011 Edition 9, p. 754.

[5] Throughout this chapter I’ll use the word “Buy” instead of select or chose.
Some people have to pay for the things they take in the lunchroom (or their
parents do). Other people get certain foods free as part of a free or reduce
USDA reimbursable meal. Instead of continually qualitifying this in the text,
“buy” will basically mean “take.” At any rate about the only people who really
care about the distinction are reading this footnote, so at least we’ll know the
semantics.

[6] We’ve seen this Domino’s side-door delivery stunt a bunch of times. As
someone who spent his moonlighting summer jobs delivering pizza in Sioux City,
Iowa, this is neither a nutritional win for the students nor a big tipping win
for the delivery driver.

[7] We’ll be focusing on individual behaviors, but there is also excellent work
that takes a more macro-look at lunches. These include Janet Poppendieck’s “Free
for All: Fixing School Food in America” (2010), Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics,”
and Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes’ book, “Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We
Feed Our Children” (2006).

[8] A nice treatment of these new challenges are in Katherine Ralston, Constance
Newman, Annette Clauson, Joanne Guthrie, and Jean Buzby (2010), “The National
School Lunch Program: Background, Trends and Issues,” Economic Research Report,
forthcoming, and Schanzenbach, D. W. (2007) Does the Federal School Lunch
Program Contribute to Childhood Obesity?, Journal of Human Resources,

[9] From Wired magazine, April 2012, p. 054.

[10] A number of these peer-reviewed milk studies are popping up at various
economics, nutrition, and psychology conferences. Two of these include Drew
Hanks, David Just and Brian Wansink (2012), "A Source of Contention or
Nutrition: An Assessment of Removing Flavored Milk from School
Lunchrooms," Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 44:4 (July-August),
S21 and Laura E. Smith, David R. Just, Brian Wansink and Christine H. Wallace
(2011) “Disrupting the Default Choice: The Contentious Case of Chocolate
Milk,” FASEB Journal, 25:781.24.

[11] Some kids receive free or reduced price lunches based on the income-level
of their parents. If their income is 130 percent below the poverty level, the
meals free. If it’s below 180 percent, its discounted.

[12] While putting a colorful fruit bowl out in the open consistently increases
fruit sales by about 100% in most of our studies, even simply using a colorful
bowl boosts sales. This is useful for schools that think they can’t bring the
fruit out from behind the sneeze guard: Laura Smith, Brian Wansink, and David
Just (2010), “Smarter Lunchroom.org’s Fancy Fruit Bowls Increase Fruit Sales by
23-54%,” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Volume 42:4S1, S116-117.
There are also other approaches, such as those used by Simone A. French and
Gloria Stables, (2003), “Environmental Interventions to Promote Vegetable and
Fruit Consumption among Youth in School Settings,” Preventative Medicine, 37,
593-610.

[13] Most of these fruit bowl-like changes can be made overnight for free. A few
others might take a week and $50 from the lunchroom slush fund. One way or the
other, how the cafeteria is designed is going to influence how kids eat. It’s
either for the better or the worse.

[14] After this 60-second move, we scoured lunchroom sales receipts and
production records – how much lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and little Barbie-size
corn-on-the-cobs did they sell? Within two weeks of moving the salad bar, sales
went up 200-300 percent, depending on the day: Laura E. Smith, David R. Just,
and Brian Wansink (2010), “Convenience Drives Choice in School Lunch Rooms: A
Salad Bar Success Story,” FASEB Journal, 24: 732.11.

[15] This even works great in both schools and homes and with both kids and
adults, Brian Wansink, David R. Just, Andrew S. Hanks, and Laura E. Smith
(2013), “Pre-Sliced Fruit in Schools Increases Selection and Intake,” American
Journal of Preventive Medicine, 44:5 (May), 477-480.

[16] A nice visual of lunch line redesign is titled just that: Brian Wansink,
David R. Just and Joe McKendry (2010), “Lunch Line Redesign,” New York Times,
October 22, p. A10 .

[17] The specific show is the MTV-owned show called Channel One. It’s a hip,
almost too-cool-for-school program that actually is for school. It shows a
10-minute news feature every morning during homeroom to 5 million kids in
America – typically those in the big cities.

[18] The video of this can be found at SmarterLunchrooms.org. Thanks to the
Ithaca Food Service Director, Denise Agati for making this happen and sticking
with the changes.

[19] This is a great two-part (before/after) video with a lot of energy, good
lessons, and some modest laughs. You can find it at YouTube
at healthymeals.nal.usda.gov/healthierus-school.../lunchd-part-one and the
“after” version at
healthymeals.nal.usda.gov/healthierus-school.../lunchd-part-two

[20] This works great in the lab, but that’s when you have three vegetables in a
row: Brian Wansink and David Just (2011), “Healthy Foods First: Students Take
the First Lunchroom Food 11% More Often Than the Third,” Journal of Nutrition
Education and Behavior, Volume 43:4S1, S8.

[21] These changes can be so easy even a high school kid could do them. We
showed that by having a high schooler we never met implement a vegetable naming
program 200 miles away from us. More at Brian Wansink, David R. Just, Collin R.
Payne, and Matthew Z. Klinger (2013), “Attractive Names Sustain Increased
Vegetable Intake in Schools,” Preventive Medicine, forthcoming.

[22] Nothing makes it easier to choose the right food than when it’s convenient.
Here’s some great tips here: Andrew S. Hanks, David R. Just, Laura E. Smith, and
Brian Wansink (2012), “Healthy Convenience: Nudging Students Toward Healthier
Choices in the Lunchroom,” Journal of Public Health, forthcoming.

[23] Find more at SmarterSoupKitchenens.org.

[24] I’m pretty McBiased toward McDonalds. Each week I eat two breakfasts there.
Each month my three girls eaat two Happy Meals. Each year meet twice with their
Global Nutrition Council to work with them on making healthy win-win changes to
their menu, their resturants, and their promotions.

[25] We have been working with a number soup kitchens to develop low-cost/no
cost changes that make themselves more inviting and attractive. There’s more at
our website: SmarterSoupKitchens.org.

[26] Find more at SmarterSoupKitchens.org.

[27] A few years ago, a visionary governor from Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, sent
BMI Report Cards home to parents. These reports told parents a child’s height
and weight compared to the other kids in the class. No lecturing, no A+ or F.
Simply a number and the average BMI of other kids. People went crazy. This was a
violation of privacy, it was embarrassing, and it would scar the self-esteem of
these kids. But it worked for many. In the early reports, Arkansas BMIs started
dropping almost immediately.

[28] These Nutritional Report Cards (NRC) hold tremendous promise for changing
the way kids eat and how their parents talk with them about lunch. The proof and
the programming code can be found in the article Brian Wansink, David R. Just,
Richard W. Patterson, and Laura E. Smith, (2013), “Nutrition Report Cards
Improve School Lunch Choice,” under review at American Journal of Public
Health,” and the initial stats on their effectiveness can be found at Brian
Wansink, David Just and Richard Patterson (2012), "Nudging Healthier Choices
through Nutritional Report Cards," Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior,
44:4 (July-August), S78.

[29] If your school is interested in the computer program that does this
automatically, we've designed one and it can be downloaded and used at no charge
from SlimByDesign.org.

[30] Much of our earlier work on this is summarized in my book Mindless Eating –
Why We Eat More Than We Think, New York: Bantam-Dell (2006), and in the paper
Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, “The Perils of Plate Size: Waste, Waist,
and Wallet,” forthcoming.

[31] High color contrast between food and the plate lead people to serve less
and eat less. It you want more detail on this than a person should have to
endure, check out Koert Van Ittersum and Brian Wansink (2012), “Plate Size and
Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating
Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (August), 215-228.

[32] Branding works better for healthy foods than the indulgent ones – basically
because indulgent ones sell well anyway. Check out Brian Wansink, David R. Just,
and Collin R. Payne (2012), “Can Branding Improve School Lunches?” Archives of
Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 166:10, 967-968.

[33] Usng real trays is not a reality for every school. Some schools have gone
to disposable trays and others don’t have the facilities to wash trays.

[34] More details are available from Brian Wansink and David R. Just (2014) The
Smarter Lunchroom Tray: Designing the Sustainable, Scientific Solution to Lunch,
under review.

[35] See Marla Reicks; Joseph P. Redden; Traci Mann; Elton Mykerezi; Zata
Vickers, JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association 2012;307(8):784-785.

[36] One exception is Van Ittersum, Koert and Brian Wansink (2012), “Plate Size
and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating
Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (August), forthcoming.

[37] These are cool and a favorite present of mine. The price is $10.95 and you
can buy them here: mcphee.com/shop/lunch-lady-action-figure.html

[38] The power of personal connection is unbelievable. Thanks why the big chefs
“work the room,” and ask how you like everything. It’s the same with tator tots:
Brian Wansink, Andrew S. Hanks, and David R. Just (2014) “Server Affect and
Patronage,” under review.

[39] Other great tools to help school cafeterias include Sarah Wu, “Fed Up with
Lunch” (2011) and Amy Kalafa’s “Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food
Revolution” (2011).

[40] A number of great ideas and printouts can be found at
SmarterLunchrooms.org.

[41] The best one-stop source for how to do start a SNAC or to help change your
lunchroom cat be found at SmarterLunchrooms.org. There’s also dozens of YouTube
videos about how to do makeovers.

* Adapted from the book Slim by Design (Brian Wansink 2014)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOME FAQS ABOUT SMARTER SCHOOL LUNCHROOMS

How can schools get kids to eat more fruit and vegetables?

How can I make my child's school lunchroom healthier?

What's an example of a Smarter Lunchroom makeover?

How can schools get kids to waste less food?

Is there a solution to banning chocolate milk?

How do lunchroom staff get Smarter Lunchroom training?

Can healthier concession stands make money?

Can Smarter Lunchrooms work in company cafeterias?

HOME

FOR YOU

FOR FAMILIES

FOR SCHOOL LUNCHES

* -------------
* For School Lunches
* For Workplace Wellness
* For Grocery Shoppers
* For Restaurant Lovers

* About
* Tips for PhDs

www.brianwansink.com Open in urlscan Pro 199.34.228.59 Public Scan

Form analysis 0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

www.brianwansink.com Open in urlscan Pro
199.34.228.59 Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM