Cases of diet-related illnesses are some of the most common illnesses we witness today. From heart disease to type 2 diabetes, from obesity to hypertension, many of these diseases are easily prevented by lifestyle changes. However, it is much easier to instill healthy habits in a population from the start rather than trying to change habits later, even if one's health depends on it. A pastime as simple as cooking allows us to take responsibility for our own health by (quite literally) taking it into our own hands. This is why I chose to write a cookbook for my honor's thesis. More importantly, this is why I chose to write a cookbook geared towards young children. My target audience is 8-11 years old because that's when I first started to cook, and it's a habit that has kept me well to this day. Within this cookbook, readers will find over 30 (mostly) healthy recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and desserts, complete with written instructions and photographs to aid with meal preparation. My hope is that, during my career, I will be able to publish this book and distribute it to children who might not have an interest in cooking, but can learn basic cooking skills from my book. If kids get working in the kitchen, they might keep cooking as they grow older, which will help them keep control of their health for the better.

This project looks into elementary school lunches around the world, with a focus on nutrition and government involvement. The project uses recent obesity research to determine the extent of childhood obesity and draws connections between obesity rates and each country's school food policies and resulting school lunch meals. The countries researched are Greece, the United States, Japan, and France. An effort is made to find accurate representations by using real unstaged pictures of the school lunches as well as using real, recent school lunch menus. Analysis of the nutritive balance of each country's overall school lunch meals includes explanation of possible reasoning for lower quality or lesser-balanced school lunch meals. In Greece, the steadily rising child obesity rates are possibly due to Greece's struggling economy and the loss of traditional Greek foods in school lunches. In the U.S., the culprit of uncontrolled obesity rates may be a combination of budget and an unhealthful food culture that can't easily adopt wholesome meals and meal preparation methods. However, there have been recent efforts at improving school lunches through reimbursement to schools who comply with the new USDA NSLP meal pattern, and in combination with a general increased interest in making school lunches better, school lunches in the U.S. have been improving. In Japan, where obesity rates are fairly low, the retaining of traditional cuisine and wholesome foods and cooking methods in combination with a higher meal budget are probable reasons why child obesity rates are under control. In France, the combination of a higher budget with school lunches carefully calculated for balance along with traditional foods cooked by skilled chefs results in possibly the most healthful and palatable school lunches of the countries analyzed. Overall it is concluded that major predictors of more healthy and less obese children are higher food budgets, greater use of traditional foods, and more wholesome foods and cooking methods over packaged foods.