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About Bhavani Jaroff

Bhavani Jaroff – Natural Foods Chef, Educator, Radio Host, and Food Activist

Bhavani Jaroff is a Natural Foods Chef, Educator, Farm to School Coordinator, Radio Host, and Food Activist. She has over thirty years of experience cooking healthy, fresh, organic food. Her career began while a student at the N.Y.S. College of Ceramics at Alfred University. As a vegetarian living on campus, she was dependent on SYSCO, the food service company, for all of her meals. At the time, there was not a vegetarian meal plan on campus. Bhavani designed and implemented a Vegetarian Meal Plan for the University. As part of her work-study program, she cooked for 75 vegetarians every day. Within the first semester, the program expanded to over 125 students daily.

After college, Bhavani worked in many natural food restaurants both in New York City and Boston. Recognizing the need for an alternative to standard catered foods, Bhavani founded Morningstar Catering, a full-service natural foods catering company. She ran Morningstar Catering for 12 years, before choosing to be a stay at home mom, and raising her three children as vegetarians. As a homemaker/businesswoman, Bhavani put her catering experience to work and organized other mothers to form a food coop, which she ran out of her home for the next 8 years.

As her youngest child entered kindergarten at The Waldorf School in Garden City, NY, Bhavani decided to return to school to become a Waldorf teacher and to get her Masters in Education. After graduating from Antioch New England Graduate School, Bhavani returned to The Waldorf School in Garden City as a teacher and transformed the traditional cafeteria lunch program into a holistic, educational food service program. Serving mostly organic foods and using non-toxic cleaning products, Bhavani incorporated gardening, composting, and recycling into the schools’ program. Bhavani used the cafeteria as a springboard for educational opportunities throughout the curriculum and developed a community service program in the high school, where all the students had the opportunity to cook and feed the homeless on the streets of New York City.

Bhavani continued to teach cooking classes in her own school, Cooking From the Heart. She became an active member of the local school cafeteria committee and taught cooking classes at Wheatley High School in Old Westbury. Her community service programs expanded to include students, teachers, and parents from other local schools, as well as Team Building opportunities for businesses.

iEat Green is the culmination of years of experience, working together with other professionals, to help facilitate change in our communities, in our homes, in our schools, and at our workplaces. Bhavani’s newest endeavor is becoming the Farm to School Coordinator for Glen Cove Public Schools, where she has the opportunity to introduce fresh vegetables into the school lunch program using local farms.