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Today must be National School Lunch Discussion Day or something because there were two separate articles in two separate venues discussing two separate issues on school lunch.
Amazing.
The first article comes from WaPo. Tasty Trays
Actually the article came complete with a misleading title, “At Some Schools Tastier Trays Come at a Price” leading the reader to think that better school lunches always have to cost more. Actually, what the article pointed out was that there is one organization which is mostly serving charter and private schools but has started to become involved in public school lunch programs nationally which has proven that cooking from scratch can produce a pre-packaged meal that is better tasting, more nutritious and affordable on the public school budget. A revolutionary concept.
“Revolution Foods also saves money by making most of its meals from scratch. The company’s first prep kitchen was a retrofitted McDonald’s on a naval base in Alameda, Calif. It now has four commissaries that produce 40,000 meals a day. In Washington, the company has outgrown its Silver Spring kitchen and plans to move to a 20,000-square-foot space in Northeast Washington to service its 25 local charter and private schools. "The conventional wisdom says that if you buy packaged goods, you save money," Richmond said. "But by putting the work in and buying fresh broccoli, rather than chopped and bagged, we’re able to save a lot of money."
The second article, from the New York Times, discusses the challenges of lunch programs in New York City. Challenges in NY School Lunch
Their point, which has been discussed here at FDL many times, is the basic lack of sheer cooking skill and power in school districts now. In the race for the bottom on school lunch program costs, school districts have been convinced that cooking from scratch costs too much and with lack of capital investment money for equipment and facilities, have given up doing their own cooking for menus stuffed with pre-cooked items that can be quickly reheated.
“More than 80 percent of the nation’s districts cook fewer than half their entrees from scratch, according to a 2009 survey by the School Nutrition Association.”
However, it does not have to be that way. “Bill Telepan, the chef who runs the highly regarded restaurant Telepan on the Upper West Side, has been trying to get fresh food back into school kitchens ever since he walked into his daughter’s Manhattan elementary school a couple of years ago and found grape jelly and ketchup passing for barbecue sauce. Through a program called Wellness in the Schools, started by a group of parents, he is reworking recipes and leading a team of culinary student volunteers who will work side by side with cooks in eight schools”
On a school by school basis, things are improving, though “even with the best equipment in the world, you can’t cook without cooks. So school officials use M.S. 137’s large kitchen as a training center.
Mrs. Barlatier [the kitchen manager in MS 137] embraces the mission like a cheery drill sergeant. She pounds home the concept of kitchen organization in people for whom mise en place might as well be space shuttle repair. She empowers them to turn away produce orders filled with wilted parsley and moldy oranges and to use leftovers judiciously.“If you would not eat it yourself, don’t serve it,” she admonishes. She will not tolerate cooks who say students will eat only hamburgers or pizza or who complain that there is not enough equipment to cook the more complex recipes the district is trying to encourage.”
Even the USDA is getting into the act. Recently, after giving testimony to the House, Kathleen Merrigan, the Deputy Secretary announced greater emphasis on bringing local foods to schools through their small farms/school lunch initiative. USDA Farm-School Lunch Initiative
This is a major change for an organization which has been pushing commodities such as cheese and frozen chicken parts to schools for years.
Now, we are not exactly in the economic condition to try to push major money into the school lunch programs. That is an unfortunate truth. There is capital improvement money in the stimulus. But we are seeing major changes in philosophy at the local, state and national levels about what constitutes good nutritious lunches for children and how best to get those provided to children. Because as we all know, for a lot of kids, that lunch might be the best meal (or the only meal) they get all day. We may not have MORE money to work with, but people are showing cooperation and creativity to DO more and better with what they have.
5 Comments
Thank you for this, Toby. I’ve seen articles on a group in California helping schools to grow organic food for their lunch program. The kids help in the garden, learning how their food is grown–watching the wonder of it all, and better nutrition, to boot!
Thanks Toby!
Remember when ketchup was a vegetable in school lunches? Thanks Ronnie Reagan! Mix it with grape jelly and you get one fruit and one vegetable!/snark
We live in one of those hippy districts where kids actually participate in lunch preparation. Once a week, kids pick one veg to share with the class and bring it from home. Then the kids chop the veggies themselves with help from teachers who put it all together in a soup. They also bake their own bread. We are so lucky.
Yes you are. If nothing else, the kids are being exposed to the fact that there is an activity called “cooking” (as well as “food preparation”). In most schools, what the kids get exposed to is called ‘warming’ or perhaps ‘nuking’.