Chef Ann Cooper is changing kids lunches, one school at a time. Photo: Ann Cooper

Stroll in an Ann Cooper-stamped cafeteria and they'll dish up whole-grain, real bean and cheese nachos without the blinding yellow cheese sauce. Loads of locally-sourced produce and not a Red Dye #40 popsicle in sight. This former celebrity chef turned renegade lunch lady is stirring fast to make healthy school lunch a sought-after celebrity in schools nationwide.

Cooper is sounding the alarm at the connection between childhood obesity and school lunch. One-third of kids are overweight or obese today. Through her consulting firm, Lunch Lessons LLC, she's overhauled the school diet for thousands of students in New York and California, and she's currently changing the tastes of 29,000 chicken nugget lovers in Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. Beyond practical implementation, Cooper has established 10 guidelines to bring wholesome foods into schools, including culinary students working off student loans in K-12 cafeterias. Hmm, middle-school girls everywhere would swarm the cute, young lunch guy serving up grilled chicken salad -- a perfect wholesome-is-cool marketing move.

But changing school food policy will require more than replacing can-openers and microwaves with sharp knives and ovens. Taking her mission for school lunch reform nationwide, Cooper is launching the nonprofit F3 Foundation (Food Family Farming), offering a lunch toolbox stuffed with free menu plans, recipes, food sourcing tips and more. She's also waving around her fourth book, "Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children" as she asks Congress to raise the per meal reimbursement rate to $4 or $5 based on area cost of living, with $1.75 of that spent on food. The current rate is a paltry $2.59 per meal, with less than $1 of that edible. A frozen, canned junk budget for sure.

Even if the renegade lunch lady's book is picked up by the President's hands, tinged with dirt from the new White House vegetable garden, it'll take public outcry and a powerful lobby to overhaul the National School Lunch Program. Perhaps someday a nation of predominately-slim kids will tell their parents they love the Asian Chicken with Miso dressing at school, but it seems like a pipe dream when Chicago students are eating nachos every day. Let's keep yelling so today's kindergarteners won't die at a younger age than mom and dad.