Food Revolution hero Ann Cooper recently re-launched her new and improved website for The Lunch Box — a collection of scalable recipes, resources and general information to turn any school lunch system into a healthy, balanced diet for kids. One of the most exciting initiatives of this revamp is the Great American Salad Project (GASP) which, in partnership with Whole Foods, will create salad bars in over 300 schools across America. The new salad bars will give young students daily access to the fresh fruits and vegetables they need, and will be funded by donations from Whole Foods shoppers and visitors to the website. To donate, click here.

Schools can begin grant applications on September 1. If you’d like to see a fresh salad bar in your cafeteria, click here to review the process and get your app ready.

To learn more about Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish and get on board with the Food Revolution, watch his talk from TED2010 or visit the official website here.

Written by Shanna Carpenter from the TED Blog

“How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices?”

As the TED Prize team continues to develop our project plans to realize Jamie Oliver’s wish, the above question keeps ringing in our ears. If we are going to inspire families to cook and schools to change their lunch menus, it is critical that kids (and adults) know what is wrong with processed food and why fresh is best.

Today OpenIDEO – a community that brings together human-centered design methods with a web-based platform to incorporate a broader range of inspiration, concepts, and evaluation – launched a challenge to social innovators to find an answer to this question.

You, the TED community, are invited to participate in this challenge. Contributions can range from inspirational observations and photos, sketches of ideas, to business models and snippets of code. Sometimes this can be in the form of a comment, other times it’s building off a previous person’s work.

The challenge is broken into three phases: Inspiration (August 2-17), Concepting (August 23-September 12) and Evaluation (September 16-30).

INSPIRATION: Participants post inspiring content: stories, videos, photos, articles, sketches and anything else that could help the community think differently. People can build off of others’ inspirations or simply applaud others’ work.

CONCEPTING: Building off of themes generated in the inspiration phase, participants offer up ideas to address the challenge. These ideas can be fresh concepts or build on other people’s work. All ideas are open for commented and adulation.

EVALUATION: The community evaluates the most popular concepts against the challenge criteria provided, and a top concept surfaces. On October 8, the top concept will be announced. OpenIDEO will track the progress of the winning concept to show how it is having impact in the world.

Participants can get involved at any time during the challenge.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution lit a fire under many people to create change in America and beyond. Over 600,000 people have already signed the petition. Almost 30,000 people are engaging with one another and developing a Food Revolution Community on Facebook.

Now toolkits are available to help you start your own revolution. With information to get you cooking at home or starting to change school food in your local community, these tools are an important first step towards change. We encourage you to download and then share any other revolutionary ideas you have on Facebook.

Many thanks to the great team at Zemoga for designing and developing the toolkits and Facebook page.

Last night ABC aired a sneak preview of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution”. You can watch the full episode online now. Next week the program will begin airing at its regular time – FRIDAYS @ 9pm EST.

Take 30 seconds to sign Jamie Oliver’s petition to build support for better food at school and better health prospects for America’s children.

Jamie plans to take his petition to the White House after the TV series airs, to show The President and First Lady how many people across the country really care about this and ask for their support.

The prevalence of obesity, especially in children, keeps Jamie Oliver up at night. He questions how it can be that people aren’t more outraged that people are dying from a preventable condition. He works with individuals and government alike to create workable solutions to remove fatty and sugary foods from people’s diets.  And now he wants you to work with him.

Tonight Jamie Oliver receive the 2010 TED Prize and unveiled his “one wish to change the world.”

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

A plan (detailed below) has been created to help Jamie’s wish become a reality. Everyone is invited to share your offer of support and we look forward to working collaboratively to combat obesity.

THE PLAN:

Set up an organization to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat. The movement will do this by establishing a network of community kitchens; launching a travelling food theater that will teach kids practical food and cooking skills in an entertaining way and provide basic training for parents and professionals; and bringing millions of people together through an online community to drive the fight against obesity. The grassroots movement must also challenge corporate America to support meaningful programs that will change the culture of junk food.

THE NEEDS:

• Help to establish the organization, with funding, office space and facilities.
• Find partners to equip and run the community kitchens, and food suppliers to provide the fresh ingredients.
• A partner to build and maintain a fleet of food theatre trucks.
• Education experts, graphic designers, artists and writers to develop and produce creative, fun teaching materials.
• Communications experts to create messaging for the movement.
• Web designers and developers to create and build the website.
• Establishment of a food line that generates a sustainable income for the movement.
• Corporate partners to invest in cooking and food education for their customers and champion honest food labelling.
• Your names added to the petition to challenge our leaders to make change now: www.jamiesfoodrevolution.com/petition

Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson