Yuck — A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch

This all started when young Zachary Maxwell wanted to start packing and taking his lunch to school. His parents, however, thought that the school lunches as described and pictured on line looked like they would be just fine. So young Zachary smuggled in a camera to school in order to show his parents the reality of those school meals. He kept filming (even got busted once) and made a short documentary called Yuck — A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch. Love this kid. Anyway, this doc has won some awards and has been playing the festival circuit. I’m posting the trailer and another piece with clips below. It sounds as if this entire film will be online shortly, but I don’t know when:

Trailer: Yuck – A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch from Maxwell Project on Vimeo.

Introduction for Zachary Maxwell (World IP Day Event 4/24/2013) from Maxwell Project on Vimeo.

One of the things I’d like to see (especially from the NYT — linked above) is some questions for Mayor Bloomberg. He is famously on a health kick that he wants to enforce on the rest of the city, yet the one place where he has direct control of the nutritional choices, isn’t looking all that nutritional. I don’t doubt that plenty of schools aren’t exactly serving food choices that would make parents happy, either. But I hope that this little bit of filmmaking moxy gets repeated in school cafeterias all over the country.