BOULDER, CO – When Boulder Valley School District high school students return to classes this fall, they may find themselves looking forward to that lunch bell even more than usual.

In their continuing efforts to up the ante on re-envisioning school lunch, the district has recently acquired a new mobile food truck that will be making the circuit across all of the district’s high schools to provide even more options for the noontime meal.

On the menu: pulled pork sliders with slaw, all natural beef burgers, spicy chicken quesadillas. All locally-sourced, nutritionally balanced and tasty as hell.

The idea came to Brandy Dreibelbis, district manager for the School Food Project at BVSD, after seeing the popularity of food trucks grow in recent years. Due to “open lunch” programs, which allow students to leave campus to buy meals out in the community during their scheduled lunchtime, only about 15 percent of BVSD high school students eat lunch on campus, but Dreibelbis thought that if a food truck could go to a different high school each day, offering students healthy, locally-sourced lunch menu options in addition to those offered inside the Agriculture nutritional guidelines.

Additionally, many students (and therefore parents) end up spending more on lunch purchased off campus than the $3.50 charged for lunch in the cafeteria. The price of a meal from the new food truck, however, would remain consistent with BVSD lunch prices. Students can punch in their number for items available at the food truck, making this option available to all BVSD students with meal plans, including those receiving free and reduced lunch.

Dreibelbis, who has been with the School Food Program for the last five years, put the idea to Ann Cooper, BVSD’s Food Services Director and nationally-known “renegade lunch lady.” Together, they came up a list of local supporters that share some of the same core values around healthy eating. They began with Whole Foods, who enthusiastically supported the project in full to the lunchroom, perhaps more students would opt to Connect stay tune with of $75,000 us to buy and outfit the truck, which on campus for lunch. became fully-operational this spring. The wheels hit “It’s a little more fun than just going in and getting lunch from the cafeteria,” says Dreibelbis.

It’s drives the road the last week of school for the first few test important because the variety of food options surrounding local high schools (primarily fast food) are Keeping with their practice of cooking food not often in line with U.S. Department of from scratch using real chefs with food purchased as locally as possible, the menus began to take shape. Unlike other commercial food trucks, the new BVSD food truck had to meet the USDA’s guidelines for a “reimbursable meal.”

Find the entire article at boulderweekly.com <here>