 What's It All About?
The combination of food and entertainment is a fun way to bring people together, introduce the school's foodservice staff to the students, teachers and parents, and market the breakfast/lunch program and healthy eating to the students and parents. Your school can piggyback a Team Nutrition activity onto an already established school-wide event, such as a PTA-sponsored family evening event. This can be a perfect opportunity to pool resources, make learning about food fun, and achieve the larger agenda of getting children to think about the foods they eat.
How do we start?
You can work closely with the school principal, planning committee, and local public health coordinators to promote the activity, prepare appropriate nutrition education materials and create interactive games so that students, parents and staff will have a night to remember!
 Booths and exhibits can be organized by students, teachers, partners and foodservice staff to reflect a variety of nutrition-related topics. Examples of activities can include displays of fat in test tubes and sugar cubes, school lunch versus brown bag lunch comparisons, and Nutrition Facts label comparisons. The students can contribute artwork that reflects their ideas of what good health means. For instance, they can draw or paint a picture of someone cooking a healthy meal, purchasing fresh fruit in a farmers' market, or biking. Posters and displays can also reflect the theme "All Foods Can Fit When Eaten in Moderation."
What else?
The school foodservice staff will be able to play a major role in teaching about nutrition. For instance, they can create a display that shows the complete nutrient analysis of two popular school lunches as compared with a typical packed lunch. You may be surprised with the results, since school lunch generally is lower in fat and higher in important nutrients compared to typical bag lunches from home. The visual display will show the students and parents that the school lunches are healthy, not as high in fat as they are led to believe and that they are affordable.
Nutrition education materials such as brochures on the Food Guide Pyramid, healthy eating at home and raising healthy kids, along with recipes, can be made available for parents to take home. To end the evening on a fun note, organize a raffle. Prizes may include donated food and grocery vouchers, seed packets, gym bags, sports tickets and stuffed animals.
And more...
Build on the enthusiasm generated from the evening and start to think of fun and exciting activities for next year. Have survey or feedback forms available for parents, teachers and partners to fill out at the end of the activity. A future theme may be the link between physical fitness and nutrition.
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