Inside the Soquel Cafeteria: From Homemade Turkey to Burritos in a Bag

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

Cathy Giannini has been working in the cafeteria in Soquel, California for 21 years. In the world of child nutrition, that’s not unusually long (I’ve spoken with directors who have been working for over 40 years). Still, the changes she has seen throughout her career are striking.

When Giannini started out, she arrived in the kitchen at 4 am every day to start cooking. She made her own refried beans, her own hamburger meat for tacos and sloppy joes, even her own ranch dressing. She cooked 20 turkeys at a time in an enormous kettle and served the meat with homemade mashed potatoes. A baker in the district made all the breads from scratch as well.

Giannini grew up on a farm in Georgia, where food and home cooking were celebrated. Her father was a cook in the Army, and her two grandmothers were always preparing something in her kitchen. Giannini learned to cook by watching them as they added a pinch of this and a pinch of that to the pot. When she was raising her own children, Giannini always cooked from scratch. She loved it, and she is a firm believer that homemade food is healthier. “That way you can control what’s in it — the amount of sodium and the amount of oil,” she said.

Today, Giannini’s lunch program is the antithesis of her experience growing up. On a visit a few months ago, students came out for brunch and picked up doughnuts and sausage-studded breakfast pizzas — both in a package, both recently out of the freezer. For lunch, they get packaged “el eXtremo” burritos, corndogs, mini cheeseburgers (on their buns in a plastic package) and Round Table Pizza. Giannini used to spend her days flipping through recipe books. Now she goes to food shows and seeks out the newest processed products.

More after the jump

A Sampler of School Lunch Loopholes

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

As Congress gears up for this year’s child nutrition reauthorization, there has been a lot of discussion about the loopholes in the National School Lunch Program. For the most part, though, those discussions have focused on the laughably outdated list of “foods of minimal nutritional value” and the junk food that cafeterias sell outside of complete, reimbursable meals. Few people been paying attention to the loopholes that affect the nutritional quality of the meals themselves. Over the past few months, I’ve been accumulating a list of loopholes that allow school cafeterias to dish out less-than-healthy lunches. Here are a few of my favorites:

Percent Calories from Fat — School meals must contain no more than 30 percent of calories from fat and no more than 10 percent of calories from saturated fat. However, regulations set only a minimum for calories, not a maximum (in fact, I’ve spoken to school foodservice directors who say they were written up for serving low-calorie meals and had to put desserts back on the menu to meet the regulations). That means meeting the percent-from-fat requirements is largely a game. An entree that is high in fat or saturated fat is totally OK to serve, as long as you put it on the menu with side dishes that are high in calories but low in fat. Recently, I talked to a director who said she had been encouraged to put small bags of Skittles on the menu to meet the benchmarks. The candy boosts the calories in a meal without adding fat, so it often puts the percent of calories from fat within the acceptable threshold (it’s also fortified with vitamin C, so it helps meet that requirement as well). So while a meal with French fries or stuffed-crust pizza may be too high in fat to meet the nutrition guidelines, adding some candy (or another source of extra calories) to the tray makes the lunch into a USDA-compliant meal.

More after the jump

When It Comes to Kids, Change Can’t Wait

Gordon Jenkins is the Time for Lunch Campaign Coordinator at Slow Food USA

Last week, Michelle Obama made these remarks to a group of fifth-graders who had just harvested 73 pounds of lettuce and 12 pounds of snap peas from the First Lady’s Garden on the White House Lawn:

“To make sure that we give all our kids a good start to their day and to their future, we need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served in schools. We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids.”

It wasn’t Michael Pollan who said those words. It was the First Lady. Coming from her, the phrase “big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda” is a call to action we cannot ignore.

When children are given the chance to plant and pick and cook food that’s both delicious and good for them, they’re far more curious to give it a try—and more often than not, they like it. When those children are offered real food in the school cafeteria and at the family dinner table, they eat it. They begin to ask for it.

Michelle has said that when Sasha and Malia learned to enjoy real food, they started “lecturing” her about what she should be eating and “what a carrot does, what broccoli does” to our bodies. Her kids taught her to enjoy real food. Kids can lead the way.

The National School Lunch Program provides a meal to 30 million children every school day. By giving schools the resources to serve real food, we can teach 30 million children healthy eating habits that will last throughout their lives. That’s a major down payment on health care reform. By providing 30 million children with locally grown fruits and vegetables, we can dramatically reshape the way this country grows and gets its food. By raising a generation of children on real food, we can build a strong foundation for their health, for our economy’s health and for America’s future prosperity.

This year, the Child Nutrition Act, which is the bill that governs the National School Lunch Program, is up for reauthorization. Unless citizens everywhere speak up this summer, “business as usual” in Congress will pass a Child Nutrition Act that continues to fail our children. We can do better.

Our leaders in Congress have to hear that everyday people in their districts refuse to accept the status quo. We have to tell them that when it comes to our children and the legacy we’re leaving them, change can’t wait.

That’s why a group of us are organizing a National Eat-In for Labor Day, Sept. 7, 2009. On that day, people in communities across America will gather with their neighbors for public potlucks that send a clear message to our nation’s leaders: It’s time to provide America’s children with real food at school.

To get the whole country to sit down to share a meal together, we’re going to need the help of all kinds of people: parents, teachers, community leaders, kids and people who’ve never done anything like this before. We’re going to need everyone to pitch in, starting today—because with the President calling for health care reform and the First Lady planting a garden on the White House Lawn, we’ve got an opening to pass legislation that grants 30 million children the freedom to grow up healthy.

We can do it this year, but only if we act now. It’s time to get real food into schools.

Universal Lunch Poised to Move Beyond Philly

by Slow Food USA Interns Alex Tung and Leah Gorham

This week, the front line for getting better food into schools is Philadelphia.

After narrowly escaping the closure of its school breakfast and lunch program, which provides free meals to 120,000 low-income students without requiring their families to fill out unduly paperwork, Philadelphia has turned the tables: five Pennsylvania Congressmen are introducing bills in the House and Senate that would expand the city’s paperless program to the rest of the nation. Together, the Paperless Enrollment Act for School Meals of 2009 and Rep. Joe Sestak’s School Meal Enhancement Act of 2009 would give schools an alternative to the current application processing system and would make it easier for poor families to apply for free and reduced-price meals.

In a press release, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, a co-sponsor of the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009, said, “Modernization of the school lunch program is one of my top priorities when the Senate reauthorizes the Child Nutrition Act later this fall…. The current system is inefficient and outdated.”

More after the jump

Philadelphia and its Universal Feeding Program

A few weeks ago it was reported that the feds planned to discontinue Philadelphia’s universal lunch program.  For some of us, this was news—all kids in public school in Philadelphia qualify for a free lunch?  With no paperwork needing to be filed?  Amazing!  In many areas the families of children who should qualify never fill out the paper work, and hungry kids miss out.  Apparently it started as a pilot program there 20 years ago, and never left.

Well, the good news reported on all of the school food blogs this morning is that the program is thankfully safe, for the time being.  The USDA has wisely decided to wait until the Child Nutrition Act is reauthorized this fall before making a final decision.  In the meantime, many are calling for “Universal Feeding” to be expanded, if anything, into a national program.

Some are doubting: a commenter on La Vida Locavore warned us “not to get too excited,” since “the motivation has less to do with feeding children healthy meals than it does their ability get more federal funds.”  And a commenter on School Lunch Talk rightfully wondered “How does making the same drek universally free improve nutrition?”

Turns out, kids love pizza

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

They say you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Cafeteria directors say you can lead a child to healthy food, but you can’t make him eat it. Well, at least when he has the option of eating pizza and fries instead.

I’m on the road this week visiting cafeterias in Ohio and Massachusetts, and I’ve been continually struck by the difference between what’s offered to students and what actually ends up on their trays. All the high school cafeterias I’ve seen on this trip have offered dozens of choices, including healthy items like fresh sandwiches and salads. Yet probably 75 percent of students buy the same two or three items: pizza, chicken patty sandwiches and fries. ”It’s great that they have all that healthy stuff,” one high school student told me. “But nobody eats it. It’s a shelf-filler.”

At a high school in Massachusetts today, students could choose from sandwiches, salads, home-made shepherd’s pie, a hot sausage and pepper sub, turkey a la king with brown rice or pizza and tater tots. The adults buy the shepherd’s pie and the turkey, the director told me. About 80 percent of the students would opt for pizza and tater tots, she said.

At the high school I visited in Ohio, the cafeteria dishes out about 1,100 servings of french fries each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It sells about 60 salads.

Cafeteria directors always show me all the healthy options available to students, telling me how hard they work to give students the opportunity to eat a healthy meal. But that’s just what it is: an opportunity. The healthy choices are there, but they’re sitting right next to those oh-so-tempting junk foods. And when you lead a student to pizza and fries, he’s almost certain to choose that over a salad or turkey a la king with brown rice.

If we’re serious about student wellness, we’re going to have to stop approaching nutrition as an opportunity. Schools have a responsibility to make healthy eating the norm, not just an option for a few students who are already health-conscious.

photo courtesy of Adam Kuban, via flickr creative commons.

Cooking for Dummies

Interesting NY Times Op-Ed from Amanda Hesser last Sunday about Michelle Obama missing an opportunity to talk up cooking. 

Our first lady has been an outstanding champion of fresh fruits and vegetables, of teaching our kids healthy eating habits that last through life by connecting them to food and where it comes from.  Surpassing any and all hopes and expectations, she has planted an organic garden on the White House lawn.  She has knelt in the dirt with her kids, and others’ and helped to grow her own food.  She has visited soup kitchens, and elementary schools.  Last week, she visited her young friends at Bancroft Elementary School. 

As reported on School Lunch Talk Michelle O. said that: “‘kids can lead the way for us.’ And school lunch can help them do that. We need to make sure that “the food that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be, so that we’re bringing some of these lessons home and we’re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools.”

What more could we ask for?!  Well, Hesser points out that Obama still hasn’t stood up and supported home cooking, thereby supporting common public perception that cooking is too time consuming, too complicated, and—that old chestnut—too expensive to be worth anyone’s time.  As Hesser says, “Because terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth.”

[For more about how cooking from scratch is right for your pocketbook, read Chef Kurt Friese’s article “How I beat KFC’s Family Meal Challenge” on Grist, that also appears in this month’s Snail magazine].

Inside the Jonesboro Cafeteria: Bringing in the Money with Familiar Foods

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

A few months ago, Hester Dye received boxes of beautiful, plump blackberries from the USDA. She was delighted — the berries were as big as her thumb — and she hoped her students would enjoy eating them for lunch.

But the kids in Jonesboro Public Schools, where Dye directs the school lunch program, didn’t touch the berries. Determined not to let the fruit go to waste, Dye and her staff made a blackberry cobbler. Still, half of it ended up in the trash. “They didn’t know what it was,” Dye said. “They weren’t familiar with it.”

Students’ familiarity with certain foods has always driven Dye’s menu. When she started working in the Jonesboro cafeteria 37 years ago, students ate home-cooked meals with their families, and that’s what they expected for lunch at school. Dye served soup, lasagna and meatloaf, because that’s what students were used to. Today, Dye serves students who have grown up with heat-and-serve entrees and fast food, and her lunch offerings have changed to accommodate their tastes.

“We’ve taken all the lasagna and meatloaf off the menu because the kids don’t know what that stuff is anymore,” Dye said. “They won’t eat it.”

Instead, Dye offers the items they will eat. Her menu runs heavy on mini corndogs, chicken nuggets and stuffed-crust pizza — the foods students are familiar with from restaurants and TV commercials.

More after the jump

High School Students Carve out a Future through the Culinary Arts

The first time I saw “Pressure Cooker” was at Slow Food Nation last Labor Day. It left me—and as far as I could tell every single other viewer in the theatre—in tears.  It follows three seniors at a Philadelphia public high school, charting their journey through a culinary arts curriculum under the wing of the hilariously blunt, tough-loving Mrs. Stephenson. The film has been making the film festival circuit for the past 9 months and will now be enjoying a theatrical release in several cities (scroll all the way down for schedule).  Here we sit down for an interview with Co-Directors Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman:

SFUSA: What do kids get from culinary education that they can’t find elsewhere in their schools/lives?

Jennifer: Culinary education provides hands on training that can engage all of the senses – smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound. It combines creativity with practicality, and is a skill students can use in their lives now and in the future.  Culinary Arts also encompasses many other disciplines: reading, math, science, but presents them in a practical rather than theoretical way that appeals to many students.  In addition, the discipline of the kitchen adds structure to lives that may not have much structure, and teaches teamwork.

Mark: As for the students from Frankford, in Culinary Arts with Mrs. Stephenson, they are gaining access to a classroom unlike any other at their public school. They know that if they can perfect their crepes and tourne potatoes for Mrs. Stephenson, they can get scholarships and get out of Frankford. Mrs. Stephenson, through her irreverent and uncompromising manner, teaches the value of practice and discipline. There are seven sides on a correctly crafted tourne potato: Wilma helps the kids see that there is a serious upside to perfecting that shape. The patience, repetition, and focus necessary to tourne a potato are skills predictive of success inside and outside the kitchen. Wilma makes that abundantly clear.

SFUSA: What do kids gain by developing a relationship with food?

Jennifer: Some students develop a passion for food and cooking, some gain respect and understanding for the products used in the kitchen, and many learn about nutrition as they broaden their palate and modify their eating habits.

Mark: I felt like I witnessed a developing respect for process. The students at Frankford were learning to put time and care into an endeavor. In preparing even something as seemingly straightforward as an omelet there were several variables that could lead to success or disaster. They developed a rigor in their mentality about how to achieve results.

SFUSA: In the movie we see the kids eat home cooked meals and the food they cook in school—do they, like most teenagers, eat fast food?  Or has their culinary training made them less susceptible to the big draw of fast food? Did you learn anything about kids and their relationship to fast food?

Jennifer and Mark: Although Mrs. Stephenson’s students cook gourmet meals at school and often cook at home, they also consume a lot of fast food because of its low price and easy availability.  Also, several students work in fast food chains and often eat there for free.  Money and time are big factors when students are at school, doing sports, taking care of siblings, and working part and full-time jobs.  Mrs. Stephenson does try to broaden her students’ palates. In one of the scenes in the film, Erica (a 17-year-old) even chastises her family for not having a discerning palate: “You haven’t acquired the taste for anything but Fritos and Chitos.” And Erica believes in what she is saying, even though the food economy and culture around her can prove an overwhelming foe.

More after the jump

Agribusiness vs. University Dining Services

by Slow Food USA Intern Melissa Rosenberg

In 2007, Virginia Tech Dining Services (VTDS) was ranked #1 for Best Campus Foods by the Princeton Review, getting high marks for student satisfaction. Recognized for its outstanding work by food industry peers, VTDS received the prestigious 2009 Ivy Award, bestowed each year upon exceptional food service operations.

Hired as the VTDS Sustainability Coordinator in October of 2008, Andy Sarjahani jumpstarted an effort to support sustainable food systems by monitoring every aspect of its food services. In a short time, Andy and his team have implemented a vast array of initiatives: removing trays to decrease food waste, composting, and working with distributors, non-profits and local farmers in a variety of Farm-to-College programs.

In addition, VTDS began growing its own herbs in a garden operated by the Horticulture Department and switched from Pennsylvania-raised factory farm eggs to Virginia-raised organic cage-free eggs. While somewhat more expensive, the food does more than taste delicious: VTDS’ $8 million budget enables the university to significantly impact the state food and agriculture economy as it feeds 34,000 hungry stomachs each day.

In March, statewide attention was drawn to the changes in VTDS buying practices after the Humane Society of the United States issued a press release celebrating the changes. Since then, staff members have come under pressure from such agribusiness groups as the Virginia Farm Bureau and the Virginia Poultry Federation, among several others. The lobbyists are asking the university to scale back or cease its work on promoting awareness and access to sustainable food.

More after the jump