Mapping School Food
Mapping School Food is a project I worked on while at the Public Health Advocacy Institute in Boston. Mapping School Food (MSF) was based on the idea that reforming school food systems to improve the food environment was more about understanding how to do something rather than necessarily what to do. There was and remains a lot of information out there about what foods children should eat. What wasn’t understood was how to make the change.
MSF was based on that idea and was built around some of the ideas of Ralph Potter at Harvard Divinity School. The hope was to create a system of tools that would help advocates implement policies and laws to improve school food.
Much of my current work is thinking about these problems and the relationship of what we should do in policy to how we should do it. The difficulty in solving complex policy problems often turns on implementation. Understanding how law is implemented, especially in public health, is key to improving population health outcomes, and it is also tells us something interesting about how the law and legal systems behave.
If you are using MSF in your community or as a tool, please contact me. I'm interested in learning more about how MSF is being used and would be happy to talk to you or your research team and provide additional guidance. My hope is to develop tools and materials to help evaluate the use of MSF in implementing changes in school systems.
There are links here to the Mapping School Foods materials that I wrote with my colleagues Marlo Miura and Jess Alderman, or you can download them from the PHAI site directly.
Mapping School Food: A Policy Guide
Off the Map: Extracurricular School Food - School Stores, Concessions and Fundraising
Off the Map: Extracurricular School Food - Open Campus Lunch
Off the Map: Extracurricular School Food - Legal Notes for Practitioners