Private Project

Eat Up

20 million kids across the United States rely on the lunches they receive free at school as their main source of nutrition. Often, the food is so unappetising it ends up in the trash. In EAT UP an entrepreneur sets out to reinvent school food; to challenge the way Boston's public school students eat lunch. Over a year long journey, she wrangles with bureaucracy, unwieldy regulations and a team of stalwart lunch ladies, to navigate a path to replace plastic wrapped vended meals with fresh, healthy food cooked from scratch that changes the way kids both eat and learn.

  • Fiona Turner
    Director
    5 x Emmy award winner, Producer, ABC News Documentary: ‘ The Bosnia Tragedy’ and ‘How the UN failed in Bosnia’ 3 x Emmy award winner, Producer, ABC News Foreign news coverage
  • Fiona Turner
    Producer
    as above
  • Rachel Clark,
    Editors
    The Amish:Shunned (American Experience), East of Salinas (Independent Lens), Family Affair, independent documentary
  • Lucia Small
    Editors
    The Axe in the Attic, My Father the Genius, One Cut One Life, (feature length documentaries)
  • Fiona Turner and Rachel Clark
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Television
  • Genres:
    social issue, youth, food
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 21 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 8, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    500,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • IFFB
    Boston
    United States
    April 27, 2019
    World Premiere
    Karen Schmeer Edit Award
  • Museum Of Fine Arts Boston
    Boston
    United States
    June 5, 2019
  • Newburyport Film Festival, Work in Progress
    Newburyport
    United States
    September 22, 2018
    Work in Progress
Director Biography - Fiona Turner

Fiona spent 20 years producing and directing in broadcast news and documentary with ABC News and NBC News, during which time she earned 2 Emmy awards for her documentary work, and 3 Emmys for foreign news coverage. She’s a Brit who settled in Boston and has been working independently for the past 7 years. Much of her work is focused on issues of social justice and human rights. She works extensively with the VII Foundation, a charitable media and education non-profit. Eat Up is her first full length documentary feature film. She is now working on a series of films exploring peace building within war torn nations.

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Director Statement

Across the nation, as income disparity grows, many children increasingly rely on school lunch for their principal source of calories and nutrition. In Boston, nearly 80% of public school students are food insecure and every student is eligible for a free school lunch, yet participation in the government-funded program is low. The majority of schools in the district don’t have kitchens and are dependent on for-profit vended food providers with much of the plastic wrapped frozen meals ending up in the trash. Recognizing the problem, entrepreneur and philanthropist Jill Shah commits to reinventing school lunch and get Boston cooking for Boston; a prototype she believes can be replicated across the nation.

EAT UP is the story of that endeavor, a year long pilot project to test out a model that aims to provide fresh nutritious lunches, under the federal reimbursement rate and within government regulations, that kids will actually eat. Through the creation of a public/private initiative we see how hard it is for big bureaucracies to make change, how big ideas depend for their success on the labors of the individuals on the ground, in this case the lunch ladies, and that although everyone may have the same good intentions; feeding better food to kids, different perspectives ultimately lead to conflict along the way.

The film crew had open access to the kitchens, cafeterias and internal meetings within the Boston Public School district throughout the year of the pilot project. The initiative was driven by women: a headstrong entrepreneur, a well-meaning bureaucrat, an impassioned principal, and an indomitable cafeteria manager who leads her team of lunch ladies as the order unravels around them. We follow their journey as they laugh and cry, as they deconstruct and then reconstruct a system that is so deeply entrenched and has so many depending on its success. This is a story of power, food, and the future of children, and how hard it can be in America to do the right thing in the face of unwieldy regulations and corporate interests. EAT UP ripples from Boston to cafeterias across the nation, offering a model for healthy eating and how to navigate the politics of our most difficult terrain: public schools.