Virginia Teen Revolutionizes Her School’s Lunch

Like tens of thousands of teens eating school lunch in their high school cafeterias nationwide, Nina Gonzalez found the food served at her school to be unappealing, unhealthy and unappetizing. Nina didn’t gripe or complain about it. Instead, she set out to change it.

First, she got input from the lunch ladies. Then she researched the Child Nutrition Act, learned what other schools did to incorporate more fruits and veggies into their menus, and paid a visit to the county nutrition director. Then Nina, who is an athlete and a vegetarian, invited her buddies over and ran a taste-…

Pumpkin Muffins

A Cooking Teens Original

With five minutes to go before the school bus is due, your well-meaning attempts at breakfast can quickly deteriorate from a homemade nutrition-fest to packaged-weird-sweet-pastry-thing-in-the-toaster (where it morphs into toasted-weird-sweet-pastry-thing, which you gobble down while running out the door, only to crash a couple of hours later in math class when your body is craving some real nutrients).

But with just a teeny bit of baking wizardry on the weekend, after school or in the evening, you (and your family) can enjoy a luscious, nutritious, yummy muffin in the morning in the same time it takes for the toaster to work its magic on that pouchy “pastry.” The key to success here is to m…

Carrot Growers vs. Junk Food in Snack Food Battle

When the munchies strke, many teens grab a bag of their favorite snack. Soon the orange crunchy finger-food inside many bags is as likely to be carrots as it is cheezy curly cues. In a page out of the processed snackfood playbook, carrot growers plan to package their wares in cool bags ala Doritos and sell their tasty taproots in sleek school vending machines as part of the growers’ first…

Tons of Food Get Tossed as People Go Hungry

Journalism students in California have discovered that millions of tons of edible food have been thrown out, plowed under, tossed aside or otherwise wasted by supermarkets, restaurants and growers in California alone. This, despite that fact that about five million people go hungry in the state, …