Boot Camps: The Perfect Summer School for

School Food Service Staff

I’m just back from a family vacation and my nephews were very excited about their respective summer camps.  Back at work we’re beginning to schedule two weeks of training for our Sous Chefs and Production Cooks.  As I catch up on school food news, I’m reading with admiration and delight about the Boot Camps that are being put on in both Colorado by the Colorado Health Foundation and in California by the Orfalea Foundations.

These “Boot Camps” are the “brain-child” of Kate Adamick and I was fortunate to work on the 1^st one with her and a team that included Andrea Martin (who continues as a lead on the project), Beth Collins, Leesa LeClaire, Deena Chafetz, Michele Lawrence and Marguerite Lauro.

 There is so much discussion about school food these days.  We have Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution, Michele Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign, Farm to School, Slow Food USA, as well as advocates writing about and working on these issues all across the country.  But as we all know, action speaks so much more than words and that brings me back to the Boot Camps; if we truly want to change how our kids are fed in schools, then we need to start by training Food Service staff about real food and how to cook it.  And I mean truly cook and not reheat!

 We need to help them understand everything from what real food tastes like, to why it’s important for kids health to how to financially manage an operation that segues from processed food to a scratch cooked environment.  And we need to teach them that cooking can be really easy and even fun.

So as we hit the mid-point of summer and as we think about vacations and summer camp and just enjoying the summer sun, we should also be thinking about and saying thanks to all of the Food Service staff and the Foundation staff that are spending part of their summer working toward a better/healthier and more delicious future for school food.

The Precautionary Principal and the Tale of Two Disasters: the BP Spill and Cancer

I spent the weekend with a good friend who has cancer and in the next few weeks I’ll go to visit another.  Both 50-something women who eat well, get lots of exercise, take care of themselves, have work they love, spouses and families they love and who love them and live in places they love.  Yet both these wonderful women who I love very much have cancer and frankly it’s just horrible.

Over Memorial Day weekend I thought about cancer a lot, but I also heard over and over and over in the news all about the BP oil spill, which will very probably decimate the Gulf of Mexico’s wild-life, fishing industry and perhaps even the area’s economy for generations to come.  Today is day 50 of the oil spill, 50 days with accusations, lies, dying fish, dying communities, dying fishing industry, false promises, plenty of blaming and tens of thousands of gallons of oil spewing forth.  And yet, there doesn’t seem to be a clear understanding of how and why we find ourselves in this situation; however I believe it’s because we don’t often invoke the precautionary principal when money and power are in the balance. The Principle states:

“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the precautionary principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.” – Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, Jan. 1998 (more…)

May 17th, 2010

Kids have issues with vegetables

Might as well say it straight up: Kids don’t like vegetables.

At least most kids don’t like most vegetables most of the time. That’s the ultimate lesson I draw after spending weeks in school kitchens from Washington, D.C., to Berkeley, CA. And that certainly challenges the idea of produce as a magic elixir for the childhood obesity epidemic. Is the clamor for additional government standards requiring more vegetables in school meals really justified? Or even a good idea?

Truth to tell, I was relieved to see that students in Berkeley are just as indifferent to broccoli and carrots as kids everywhere else. There was a time I feared there might exist some kind of parallel universe where children actually enjoyed and willingly ate the vegetables adults put in front of them. Perhaps the vision of children embracing collards and acorn squash is merely a case of wishful adult thinking after all.

What I saw during my week in Berkeley’s central school kitchen was a pair of seasoned, professional chefs who knew what the deal was with kids and vegetables. Being chefs on a budget, they take a clear-eyed, pragmatic approach to making school meals. They weren’t just slapping peas on a tray to satisfy some standard dreamed up in Washington, D.C. With stoic determination, they were finding ways to incorporate vegatables that would actually be eaten in daily meals, often by making them much less obvious. They don’t waste time or money on broccoli side dishes. They serve lots of beans, which satisfy government vegetable requirements cheaply and efficiently–just in case that Tuscan bean salad ends up being scraped into the compost bin. (more…)

May 15th, 2010

Me, in hair net, weighing pasta

After discovering earlier this year that the “fresh cooked” meals being served in D.C. schools were actually industrially-processed convenience food, I went looking for a school district that was really making food from scratch. I turned to Ann Cooper, the “renegade lunch lady” famous for advocating healthy school food made with fresh ingredients.

Cooper this past year has been busy switching schools in Boulder, CO, to the fresh-cooked scheme. I suggested I spend a week there with her. But she demurred. Boulder was still in transition, she said. If I wanted to witness a “mature” program, I should book a flight to Berkeley. Cooper put me in touch with Marni Posey, the food services director for the Berkeley Unified School District, and eventually we settled on a date when I could spend a week in the central kitchen there.

All I needed was a place to stay. (more…)

May 14th, 2010

Preparing stir fry in the Edible Schoolyard kitchen

After spending hours sorting chicken pieces my first day on the job in the Berkeley school system’s central kitchen, I got a break. “How would you like to serve the kids at lunch?” asked Joan Gallagher, the sous chef in charge of kitchen production. “It’s the most exciting part of the day. You’ll get to interact with the kids.”

I would soon learn that interactions with middle-schoolers over lunch food can test your nerves.

My assignment was to scoop beans at one of two pizza stations in the “dining commons” at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. About 1,000 kids attend the school. They descend on the “commons” in three waves, beginning at 11:25 am. First they check in at one of two cashiers, where they punch a personalized, four-digit numbers on a small keypad that identifies them as either a free, reduced-price or pay-in-full customer. They get a ticket they are supposed to deposit in a plastic bucket when they pick up their food. And they grab a tray, a re-usable plastic dinner plate and silverware.

There are four food stations in all. In middle school, kids get a choice of two entrees; elementary school kids get only one. The other choice on Mondays is tacos with beans and rice. (more…)