Research

In coordination with the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center and the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute to assess New York City's food system response to COVID-19, the Tisch Food Center reports on findings specific to school foods. New report examines the challenges and progress made by OFNS in addressing childhood nutrition and food security among residents living in underserved communities in NYC during the COVID-19 pandemic. This report is the third in a series of research briefs released by NY Food 2025 - a collaboration between the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, and the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute.

To understand how urban schools with large populations of economically vulnerable students distributed school meals during COVID-19, a team of researchers, including from the Tisch Food Center, conducted a case study of four of the largest urban school districts in the United States: Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Houston Independent School District (HISD), Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE).

To inform future food service practice and policy in rural school districts, this brief outlines rural school meal programs’ responses to school closures during the 2019-2020 school year, discusses promising practices and potential pitfalls, and provides federal policy recommendations to support school meal service in the 2020-2021 school year.

The Tisch Food Center has joined forces with the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center and the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute to assess New York City's food system response to COVID-19 over the next 18 months. New York Food 20/20: Vision, Research, and Recommendations During COVID-19 and Beyond is the first independent assessment of COVID-19's impact on the New York City food system during the first six months of the crisis.

These Food Ed Fast Facts highlight the latest science on food education so your organization can reduce the time you spend reviewing the latest literature for grant applications and other materials.

The New York City Department of Education invested $20 million to 
redesign 26 middle and high school cafeterias. This research brief measures the effects of the redesign on students' consumption, participation, attitudes, perceptions, and fidelity to Healthy Eating Design Guidelines.

The Tisch Food Center surveyed research regarding the relationship between nutrition and mental health in children and adolescents. Here's what we found.

December 3, 2019 --- New York City, which serves 900,000 school meals a day, can successfully prepare and serve scratch cooked meals to students, according Tisch Food Center’s newest report. This is a major shift away from processed foods currently on the menu. The potential positive impacts of scratch cooking on students’ diets, health, academic achievement, and sense of community are enormous.

In 2015, the Tisch Food Center launched a partnership with FoodCorps to lead their evaluation. FoodCorps places service members in over 400 schools across the nation to foster the creation of holistic, healthy school food environments. We found that students in high-implementation FoodCorps schools eat triple the fruits and vegetables compared to children in low-implementation schools.

As the rates of childhood obesity and related health consequences increase, researchers have been interested in how nutrition education curricula and wellness policy implementation change students’ eating and physical activity behaviors. The study design for the Food, Health & Choices trial compares curriculum and wellness policy individually versus when both are implemented together.

The Tisch Food Center conducted a two-year evaluation of the Wellness in the Schools (WITS) programming to understand how WITS programming impacts students’ school lunch consumption, physical activity and behaviors at recess, readiness to learn after lunch/recess, and what students think about lunch and recess.

The Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy (Tisch Food Center) in the Program in Nutrition at Teachers College, Columbia University, studied 40 organizations that run 101 nutrition education programs in schools across New York City to reveal key opportunities to ensure ALL NYC students have access to great nutrition education.