eat up

A film by Fiona Turner
Produced by The VII Foundation
© 2019 The VII Foundation
Available on Peacock, Apple TV, and Amazon.

20 million kids across the United States rely on the lunches they receive free in school as their main source of nutrition. Yet, often the food they are served is so unappetizing it ends up in the trash. EAT UP follows a Boston entrepreneur as she sets out to reinvent school lunch. Over a year long journey she wrangles with bureaucracy, unwieldy regulations and a team of stalwart lunch ladies to navigate a path to replace plastic wrapped vended meals with fresh, healthy food cooked from scratch that changes the way kids both eat and learn.

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The initiative is driven by women: a headstrong entrepreneur, a well-intentioned bureaucrat, an impassioned principal, and a fast talking, no nonsense cafeteria manager who leads her team of lunch ladies as the order unravels around them. We follow their journey as they laugh and cry, as they deconstruct and then reconstruct a system that is so deeply entrenched and has so many depending on its success.
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Filmed over 12 months inside Boston Public Schools Cafeterias and kitchens, EAT UP ripples from Boston to cafeterias across the nation, offering a model for healthy eating and how to navigate the politics of our most difficult terrain: Public Schools.
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“It’s a $25 billion industry to feed kids within schools. That’s a huge market opportunity. This is America . . . but . . . it doesn’t feel right that it’s a US government subsidy that’s supporting the food that goes into these kids mouths and it’s also paying for plastic wrap and transportation and logistics and operational inefficiencies  . . . and profit. Some segment of every dollar is paying for those things instead of broccoli and chicken and food.”