Burger Trials

A student taste test in the Portland Public Schools

By Lola Milholland

Published in MeatPaper – http://www.meatpaper.com/ – Issue 9, Fall 2009

Nikole Williams is sweating puddles into the armpits of her blouse. We’re standing in the cafeteria of Benson High School in northeast Portland, Oregon several hours before lunch service. The air smells like Parker House Rolls, the ovens keep beeping, and all around us are bowls of uncooked sliced potatoes and trays of pink, raw hamburger patties. Williams, a program manager for the Portland Public Schools’ Nutrition Services, is a beautiful brunette, classically American-looking—as though a cheerleader grew into a dream mom—but today she looks frazzled.

“It’s scary to have the raw meat,” she tells me, holding a smile. “There’s the potential for cross-contamination, and you cannot get a kid sick. The fear of that is so big we have had to take lots of extra precautions.”

On this January morning, for the first time in thirty years, all Portland Public Schools will be cooking raw beef on their premises. For the last several decades, the lunchrooms have received precooked patties through the USDA commodity entitlement program. But starting in fall 2008, the school district—the largest in Oregon, serving more than 20,000 lunches every day in eighty-seven schools—implemented something they call “Local Lunches,” wherein for one day every month, they swap regular ingredients for local versions. Today, regular commodity hamburgers will be replaced by Cascade Natural Beef burgers from Northwest-raised grass-fed cattle.

I work for a non-profit, Ecotrust, which garnered financing to cover the increased cost and helped seek out regional farmers to supply ingredients. The guiding theory is that sourcing from local farmers will benefit communities by both boosting the economy and integrating less processed foods into students’ diets. It sounds simple enough, but in reality, for the district, making the switch means navigating an obstacle course with 20,000 kids on its shoulders. Cafeterias lack the equipment, experienced staff, time, and budget to prepare meals from scratch. Moreover, many kids are hesitant to try new, unfamiliar menu items when they do appear. (When roasted beets were served, one confused little girl declined, explaining, “I’m a vegetarian.”)

The cheeseburgers and potato wedges seemed like an easy win, but this morning the patties were frozen stiff to each other, and the workers hadn’t factored into their schedule the time to defrost them. Scariest of all, perhaps—besides the raw beef hurdle—hung the question: Will the kids like them? Parents and their worries aside, it’s the kids who approach the line and select their lunch items each day. They are the primary customers.

In order to gauge the student’s receptivity, this past December the district solicited the help of Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, which specializes in consumer-testing new food products. In the weeks before, they held two taste tests in southeast Portland schools. The first test was to determine if kids could tell the difference between the commodity grainfed and local grass-fed burgers. Both patties were cooked in an oven and served sliced into quarters on identical whole-wheat buns. Besides the distinction in cattle-rearing practices, the USDA patty also differed from the local one in that it was precooked, and thus actually cooked twice before the kids ate it. The commodity meat also had added hydrolyzed corn protein, dextrose, salt, flavorings, sodium phosphates and caramel color (much like their fast-food cousins), while the Northwest-raised beef was plain, save for a sprinkling of salt. To no one’s great surprise, the students could easily tell the difference.

The second test was to determine their preference. At Abernethy Elementary, ninety-one fourth and fifth graders were offered two samples, each on its own paper plate numbered either “372” or  “681” (“372” denoted the USDA beef and “681” the Cascade Natural). Ann Colonna, who runs the Food Innovation Center’s Sensory Science Program, introduced them to the test with the precursor, “You think you like some food because you like the ads for that food. But what if you get the chance to compare that food with other food just like it—and you don’t know which is which? You might be surprised by which one you really like best.” Without a second’s delay, the students began eyeing, sniffing, licking, and then eating the samples. Then they filled out paper ballots, circling the number of the burger they preferred and answering the question, “Why did you prefer the sample you liked best?”

Here are some representative responses:

Those responding to flavor:

• 372 cuz it tasted kind of like bacon
• 372 cause it tastes most like a Garden Burger
• 681 because it tasted like a hamburger I normally eat and the other one tastes a little like steak
• 681 because it was really juicy and spice tastey
• 372 because when I finished it the flavor stayed in my mouth. It tasted so good even without any condaments… I usaly have hamburgers with a refreshment, but I relized that soda… takes the flavor away from the food

Those responding to texture:

• 681 because the other one was more hard (no ofence)
• 681 because the other one was too squishy
• 372 because of the sweet tenderness of it

In the end, 45 students preferred the hamburger from Northwest-raised herds while 46 liked the USDA—which is to say, untraced—beef best. In essence, a tie!

And so a few weeks later we are in the Benson High School cafeteria for the cheeseburger “Local Lunch.” Williams and her co-workers have already developed and administered online training and testing on how to handle raw meat to the school cafeteria staff. But she’s sweating as the burgers are emerging from the oven, tray by tray, their brown surfaces mottled in what one cafeteria worker called simply “the brownish yuck that comes from burgers.” Now it’s just a matter of waiting.

An hour before lunchtime, everyone has to pitch in for burger assembly: one person splits buns, another places patties onto bottom buns, a third lays down slices of orange Tillamook cheese, and a fourth applies the top buns. The finished trays go into warming ovens, and after the lunch bell rings at 11:17, the grass-fed burgers are served to some 400 students. I watch the high schoolers pile their burgers with shredded lettuce, pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise, and then eat them up. I order a burger too, and it tastes fine – just sort of like a burger to me, but one that’s skinnier and more cooked than I like. “681,” I think, “because I’m hungry.”

All told, the day goes off without a hitch. No students get sick. Without any flavor-enhanced comparison, the grass-fed burgers were a hit. From Marysville School, cafeteria worker Carole Harms reported, “All grades took and ate every speck of the cheeseburger—even the small children.”

Though picky, kids are also impressionable. Today’s “Local Lunch” demonstrated that the switch to better food—both for personal and environmental health—is possible: kids won’t revolt and cafeteria staff can be trusted with raw meat. Both hurdles were successfully cleared. This matters enormously because what students are served shapes their future food expectations, habits, and preferences, not to mention their health. For many kids, school lunch is their primary source of nutrients all day: some 30.5 million American children receive low-cost or free lunches through the National School Lunch program each year; in Portland, that corresponds to 45.1% of public school students. The health of these students’ bodies and psyches is largely out of their control.

The biggest obstacle to improving school meals is simple: there is not enough money. What had appeared to be a tie between the natural and commodity burgers was in fact a huge loss for Cascade Natural because while the USDA commodity burger cost 12.2 cents per patty, the grass-fed burger cost a whopping 59.8 cents per patty—a big difference for a district whose food budget per student per meal is a piddling $1. There is significant movement around child nutrition at the national level, and better school food is a priority of the Obama Administration, but until a lot more money is skillfully injected into school meal programs, districts will struggle to make improvements, no matter their best intentions. For now, Portland Public cannot afford 681, even though it was “really juicy and spice tastey.” They are stuck with 372, in all its “sweet tenderness.”