While the weather is still hot and humid in most of the country, families are gearing up to head back to school and back to work after summer vacations. Even though schedules become more hectic during the school year, it’s important for families to continue to dine together.
Studies have proven that children who sit down to dinner with their families have better grades and stronger language skills than those from families that don’t have regular meals together. Opt for a hearty meal inspired by some of our favorite summer ingredients next time you decide to set the table for a family meal.
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By Jennifer Gregory
It’s a scene that plays out in many houses each afternoon: The kids come home from school and they are starving. Not just merely hungry, but absolutely famished and they want something to eat this very instant.
While it is tempting to reach for cookies, chips or ice cream to satisfy their munchies, with just five minutes of preparation you can give your kids a snack that you can feel good about serving.
Here are five quick and healthy ideas that you, and more importantly, your hungry kids, will love:
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With healthier school lunch guidelines on the way, some parents might prefer to let their child buy lunch, especially with the recent findings that “sack” lunches can pose serious health threats for children.
According to ScienceNews.org, a recent study from the University of Texas, Austin found that bag lunches are likely to harbor bacteria that causes food borne illness. Researchers tested the temperature of 235 packed bag lunches with an electronic temperature gun to determine the safety of the food inside.
According to Science News, roughly 40 percent of lunches containing perishable foods arrived without ice packs and more than 90 percent of meals were packaged in thermally insulated plastic containers. Of the 618 perishable foods packed in lunch bags with a single ice pack, only 14 food items were deemed to be at an acceptable temperature, according to the report.
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The father-son team of Frank and Craig Kohler at SchoolMenu.com is taking a stance against childhood obesity, making themselves an active player in doing something for children throughout the U.S. and giving parents the tools to in turn empower themselves. 
The Kohlers created SchoolMenu.com almost by accident. Frank led the charge on turning the side of milk cartons in to an ad medium in schools 20 years ago, working with Warner Brothers to share kid-friendly messages like saving the environment. That led to learning about the multi-million dollar business that is school food service, and thus begun their school menu service 15 years ago. They had an audience of four million elementary school children who received their “Tooned-In” school menu each month, which in addition to the menu included nutritional games, puzzles, and advertisements from the entertainment industry (for instance Shrek or Harry Potter). Then to complement the printed menu, Craig Kohler tells us that they created the dot-com part of the business as an “ancillary site that was kid-focused with games and puzzles.”
It’s only recently that they stopped printing the menus and started publishing them exclusively online at SchoolMenu.com, a move Craig says was due to “a combination of the decline in print advertising and the increased cost of printing and shipping.” He also adds that the site moved away from being kid-centric and instead more focused on meeting the needs of moms.
Simply put, SchoolMenu.com is a free online resource for schools and parents to share and have as much information about the cafeteria menu as possible. Schools can publish their menus on SchoolMenu.com, and parents can view the menus and their related nutritional information, all at no cost.
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The fall of 2011 will begin the first school year since MyPlate was introduced as the official replacement for MyPyramid. Much of the success of the new icon is in the hands of the educators who will use it in their classrooms. Many schools are preparing to incorporate MyPlate into their curricula for all age groups, and it is also already being used in nutrition education for adults and families.
“MyPyramid has gone through changes over its lifetime,” said Sharre Littrell. “I would say that this is the first one that I feel is really consumer-friendly, because we don’t eat in a pyramid. We eat on a plate.”
Littrell is a nutrition educator for UC Davis Cooperative Extension (UCCE), an organization that helps educate communities in California about healthy eating. Although the school year hasn’t started yet, Littrell has been using the MyPlate icon in family and adult educational sessions. In the fall, UCCE educators will visit about 55 low-income schools to teach both students and teachers about healthy foods and to distribute curricula for future use.
For Littrell and her colleague Josie Rucklose, incorporating MyPlate into an existing curricula wasn’t difficult because MyPyramid is based on the many of the same underlying principles. “We’re already talking about fruit and vegetable consumption, we’re already talking about whole grain consumption, but what we get to do now is incorporate that by showing them a plate,” said Littrell.
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