Since 2008, 39-year-old Gefen has acted as corporate chef at Unilever in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Unilever is one of the world’s leading consumer product companies, encompassing more than 400 brands including such pantry, refrigerator and freezer mainstays as Ben & Jerry’s, Bertolli, Lipton, Breyers, Skippy Peanut Butter, Ragú, Hellmann’s, Knorr and Wish-Bone.

Having spaghetti and dumped on a jar of Ragú pasta sauce? Thank Gefen. Cooled down in the summer with a Popsicle®? That’s her team’s doing too. Worldwide, the corporation has close to a 50 percent share of the global grocery market and invests nearly $1 billion every year in research and development – including in the edible category with Gefen as top chef.

If you’ve never really given much thought about who exactly is designing your food outside dining establishments, you’re in good company: Gefen herself didn’t really either.

A highly-skilled chef in her own right, Gefen started out working at fine dining restaurants throughout Israel before coming to New York City to join the kitchens of Danal and the three Michelin starred Daniel.

She later transitioned into a chef-instructor role at the Institute of Culinary Education, where a student approached her about an opening in corporate chefdom and promised to e-mail Gefen the details.

“So I read the job description which was two pages long with lots of great information, yet I couldn’t understand for the hell of me what this person did from nine to five,” Gefen said. “But it intrigued me enough to send in my résumé.”

After a series of interviews and an “Iron Chef” type exercise where she created and presented three dishes from whatever was in the refrigerator, she was offered the gig.

On a day-to-day basis, the corporate chef methodology soon became clear: start like a chef, end like a consumer. For Gefen, it was an easy transition as a trained cook and also as a busy, working mother.

Read more at CNN

So to satisfy palates that lean more gourmet than grub, Latto and several friends organized a co-op in which fancy cheeses from a nearby Connecticut farm are delivered each week to the Middletown campus and distributed to students, many of whom line up with baguettes — and meal cards — in hand.

While universities nationwide have updated their dining hall menus to meet the increasingly epicurean expectations of students like Latto, many students are also taking things a step further and bringing fancy fare to campus on their own.

For some, it means launching co-ops to get everything from fair-trade coffee to fancy herbs or hand-rolled butter from nearby farms. For others, it means collaborating with the vendors who stock their dorm cafeterias to get quinoa, kohlrabi or other non-traditional items on their menus.

In California, a student-run collective near the University of California, Berkeley, gained scores of members as soon as it opened last winter, the legacy of students’ fight against fast casual chain Panda Express’ now-dashed 2009 plans to open a site there.

Now, the Berkeley Student Food Cooperative is the flagship example in a national effort to train collegians to start their own food co-ops emphasizing healthy, local food in student-run storefronts, campus cafes and other spots.

Read more at The Washington Post

The state Department of Education recently donated thousands of cases of out-of-date food from the school lunch program to state prisons and a county jail, documents show.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.

A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.

“While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments,” Monique Bond wrote in an email. “In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom.”

Read more at The Chicago Tribune