Kate Adamick
School Food Consultant
KATE ADAMICK, Principal of Food Systems Solutions LLC, is a New York City-based consultant specializing in integrating operational changes, site-based programming, and public-private partnerships to implement, reinforce and support the healthful transformation of institutional meals programs and aid in developing local and sustainable agriculture systems. She has worked for school districts, hospitals and retirement communities across the United States. As co-creator of the Cook for America® Lunch Teacher™ culinary boot camps, featured on PBS NewsHour, she provides concentrated and comprehensive culinary training that transforms America’s school food service personnel into skilled and passionate professional culinarians.
Adamick is a frequent speaker on institutional food systems, sustainable agriculture, childhood obesity issues and the economics of school food reform, and has appeared on stage with such notables as Dr. David Kessler, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Dr. Marion Nestle, Morgan Spurlock and Chef Ann Cooper. Adamick is a regular guest lecturer at New York University and University of California at Santa Barbara, has presented at The Aspen Institute’s Health Forum and Montefiore Medical Center’s Social Medicine Grand Rounds, and has co-taught a course called “Blueprint for a Green School” at Antioch University NE. She has also been an invited participant at Alice Waters’ “School Lunch Initiative Roundtable” at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. and the TEDxManhattan conference “Changing the Way We Eat”, and has been a featured speaker at conferences held by Yale University, the Community Food Security Coalition, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, FoodService Directors Magazine, Field to Plate, Colorado Association of School Executives, Philadelphia’s Food Trust, Chicago’s Healthy Schools Campaign, Better School Food, and The Orfalea Foundations.
Adamick is a featured blogger for The Atlantic (www.TheAtlantic.com/food) and has appeared in numerous articles in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Denver Post, The Daily News and USA Today, about school lunch programs, industrial organics and farm-to-school initiatives. She is also featured in Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes (HarperCollins, 2006) and Free for All: Fixing School Food in America by Janet Poppendieck (California Studies in Food & Culture, 2010), has been a guest on PBS’s To The Contrary, and appears in the documentary film Two Angry Moms. Her frequent essays relating to food systems can be found on www.sCoolFood.org.
Adamick currently serves as the principal consultant for the Colorado Health Foundation’s Healthy School Meals Project, for the Orfalea Foundation’s s’Cool Food Initiative in California, and for the Children’s Health Foundation’s Lunch for Life project. She also acted as the Project Director during the inaugural year of the SchoolFood Plus Initiative in New York City. Adamick’s eclectic past includes her careers as a corporate attorney, a professional chef in both white tablecloth restaurants and senior living communities, and a small business owner.
In addition to being a member of Slow Food, Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, and Chef’s Collaborative, Adamick sat on the National Farm-to-School Executive Advisory Committee and currently sits on the Advisory Boards of Better School Food, the New York Coalition for Healthy School Foods, Aubin Pictures’ “What’s On Your Plate,” and Parent Earth.
