Worth the Risk

Recipe for Success Foundation Gracie Cavnar
    Ever tried to feed a child quinoa with grilled chicken, roasted root vegetable soup, whole wheat muffins and a green salad? Gracie Cavnar has, and not only did the kids try it, many cleaned their plates.
    Gracie is the energetic and passionate founder of the Recipe for Success Foundation, a Houston-based charitable organization with the singular goal of combating childhood obesity by changing the way children eat and think about the food on their fork. More than 3,000 children spend several hours each month planting gardens at school, tending to their plants and cooking up a batch of healthy, delicious food they eat together come harvest time.
    This Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™ program Cavnar designed has transformed the lives of more than 12,000 of Houston’s most needy kids one carrot at a time.
    In an era when nearly 32% of American children are overweight or obese, Gracie is certain she couldn’t have chosen a better time to take action.
    “I’m all about food. Love, love, love it,” she says. “But we’re getting away from food—real food. Instead, we’re left with Frankenstein food.”
    This highly processed food, filled with additives, chemicals and little nutritional value, is the first thing she wants to see kicked out of children’s diets. And she’s convinced—through her personal experience and by watching students change their eating habits since launching the Recipe for Success Foundation in 2005—that all children have the capacity to eat well. Eating patterns and lifestyle habits can be changed, especially if children are reached before the sixth grade.
    “I’ve lived my whole life this way so I know you can get kids to eat good food,” she says. “They don’t just automatically turn it down. It’s all about presentation and making it fun.”
    Vending machines out, good food in
    Gracie’s life before Recipe for Success can be described as a mixture of high fashion, entrepreneurship and “California hippy mom.” Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, she has worked as a fashion model, been a residential and commercial architect and owned a hospitality marketing and public relations company. She is also a mom to three kids who ate baby food she made herself and never knew a can of soda until they turned eight and started visiting friends’ houses.
    But Gracie doesn’t come across as a health-food zealot; instead, she acts more like a cheerleader of good living and even better eating. She has recruited many dozens of high-profile chefs to create the centerpiece of her program—Chefs in Schools™. And she is delighted to count the president and First Lady as fellow advocates who share her sensibilities about nutrition. In fact, Cavnar now serves on the First Lady’s national task force focused on childhood obesity.
    It was when she started toying with retirement and deciding what to do next that she stumbled across a newspaper article that would change not only her life, but thousands of Texans’ lives, too.
    The article described the many elementary schools that had installed soft-drink vending machines. Granted, they used the proceeds to pay for programs such as soccer and the arts, but still, Gracie was shocked.
    “It wouldn’t matter how you raised your kids,” she says now. “If little Johnny is in kindergarten and has seventy-five cents in his pocket, all of a sudden he’s drinking a sugar-filled soda.”
    When Gracie started to make the connection between unhealthy food choices and depressing studies claiming that an epidemic of overweight and obese children was on the way, she finally decided to take action. It was the mid-nineties and people were only beginning to see what a problem childhood obesity might become.
    “The more I found out, the more I became incensed. By then the fire was lit and I couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
    For ten years Gracie talked to experts and met with officials, teachers, principals and chefs. She envisioned her role would be as a yenta, a matchmaker who would connect volunteers and health and nutrition organizations to turn the epidemic around. Eventually, it became apparent she needed to do more.
    “I realized that if I really wanted to make something happen, we had to be the ones spearheading and managing it,” she admits. “So here we are.”
    Good food for all
    Today the foundation has eighteen employees and several hundred volunteers, including more than