Ah, salad.  So good for you (sometimes) and so tasty (sometimes), especially when someone else made it for you (yes, please).

The next best thing to someone making it for you is a well-stocked and attractive salad bar.  Easy to slap something wonderful together.  Something that is healthy and nutritious.  Instead of, say, that nasty slab of meatlike substance served in a stereotypical school lunch.

Imagine, then, if vegetables and fresh fruits were an option at school.  Imagine a gleaming, colorful salad bar, the kind only Whole Foods, that symbol of high-end healthy eating, could create, in a school.  Salad seems so much more appealing when it’s presented in an endless array of self-serve options.  That attraction must be amazing to school children.

Whole Foods is doing exactly that – helping to put salad bars into schools.  In a partnership with Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, the Whole Kids Foundation is  providing grants to schools so that kids will be able to choose delicious healthy fruits and vegetables for their lunches.

Hungry now?  Here’s where you can eat and help at the same time.

On Saturday, September 9, Whole Foods will donate $1 for every pound of food sold at their salad bars and hot food bars from every store in their Southern Pacific Region toward building salad bars in local schools.  (If you look on their interactive map, you’ll see that there are no schools near us that have salad bars.  Maybe that can change with our help!)

Our local Whole Foods Markets in Tarzana, Woodland Hills, and Thousand Oaks are all participating in this wonderful event.

I don’t suppose they meant for me to eat several pounds of their delicious macaroni and cheese, but it’s for a good cause, so it’s my civic duty to go and buy some that day.  Come to think of it, I should probably buy and eat a salad to model this for my children.  Maybe then they will mimic my behavior and choose vegetables and fruit over say…macaroni and cheese.

Perhaps I’ll see you at the salad bar.  In the meantime, enjoy this lovely infographic that shows how your tasty meal, purchased at a Whole Foods salad and hot food bar on Sunday, September 9, will help grow a salad bar at school so that the children there can choose healthy options that also look delicious.

This post is sponsored by Whole Foods Market but the opinion that salads taste best when made by someone else and that Whole Foods’ hot mac and cheese is to die for are, of course, my own.