Nutrition Policy Institute researchers served as guest editors for a special issue in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focusing on 21st-century global innovations in school nutrition to improve the diet, food security, and ultimately the health and well-being of school-aged children. The special issue, titled “Improving School Nutrition: Innovations for the 21st Century” includes over a dozen articles from school nutrition researchers across the globe. Domestic topics included maintaining school food operations and summer meal distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic, schools' responses to student wellness needs during COVID, optimizing school nutrition programs post-COVID, the impact of a universal school breakfast program, efficacy and cost-effective of transitioning from whole apples to sliced apples in the national school lunch program, parental perceptions of school meal nutritional quality, evaluating the prevalence of using evidence-based practices to increase student meal participation and decrease food waste across a national sample of elementary schools, and evaluating food packaging waste in schools. International topics included evaluation of school food policies in New Zealand, an evaluation of school curriculum to support improved food literacy across 11 countries, diet quality of children participating in the United Kingdom's holiday food program and evaluating an educational intervention to improve the dietary habit of school-aged children in vulnerable socioeconomic conditions in Peru. Guest editors of the special issue include NPI's Wendi Gosliner and Lorrene Ritchie in collaboration with Gurpinder Singh Lalli at from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. All 14 articles included in the special issue are available open-access online.
Editor - Director of the Nutrition Policy Institute and Cooperative Extension Nutrition Specialist