Whetting the appetite for school lunch reform

By SUSAN TROLLER | The Capital Times | stroller@madison.com | Posted: Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:45 am

Those looking to overhaul Madison’s school lunch program will get a taste of what could be when Beth Collins pays a visit in January.

Collins is coming to Madison to take a preliminary look at the Madison School District’s school food program and start identifying what would be required to replace such items as hot dogs and tater tots with healthier alternatives.

Collins and Ann Cooper are partners in a business called Lunch Lessons. Cooper and Collins have helped transform school meals in several cities across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Boulder, Colo., by incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and non-processed meat, poultry and fish. Both women are well-known chefs consulting for the Boulder area school district.

Collins’ visit to Madison is the result of the efforts of a group of parents, school district administrators and food service workers, local chefs and other community members who have been meeting since June to discuss potential changes to the meal program offered in Madison schools. Known as the Madison School Food Initiative, the group also includes representation from the REAP (Research Education Action and Policy) Food Group, which has been helping several other Dane County school districts, including Monona Grove, Mount Horeb and Middleton, bring more healthy local produce into their school meals programs.

In a phone interview from her home in Michigan, Collins says she is eager to take a look at the Madison school district’s program and to explore how school meals here could be improved to enhance nutrition.

“I think Madison is going about this in the right way by being very deliberate,” says Collins. “We’ll take a look at the facilities, make some recommendations about what it would take to get something up and running, and then go from there.”

The quality of school food programs is a hot topic not just in Madison but in communities across the country, including St. Paul, Minn.; Baltimore; and New Haven, Conn.; as well as Boulder and Berkeley.

Michelle Obama’s interest in fresh food and child nutrition, including her sponsorship of the new White House garden, and the pending reauthorization of the National School Lunch Act, enacted in 1948, have also raised the profile of the issue nationally.

“There are a lot of people who are beginning to understand that these issues about food and what we eat are important,” says Cooper in a phone interview from Boulder. “There’s been great leadership from people like Michelle Obama and (Education Secretary) Arne Duncan who care about good food and its impact on children and their health. But at the end of the day, the debate will still likely come down to politics and money. We’ll see what happens.”

It’s clear that neither Collins nor Cooper believes that the standard school lunches, with their emphasis on products and fast food style packaging, pass muster for health, nutrition or taste.

Cooper, who is often sought out by reporters and television talk show hosts, is fond of saying, “We’re killing our kids with food.”

She uses figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to back up the assertion, describing how half of all African American and Hispanic children born in 2000, and one third of all Caucasian children born the same year, are expected to develop diabetes in their lifetime, many of them before they reach adulthood.

“The sad thing is, it’s all preventable through a better diet,” says Cooper. “That’s why we need to change what kids are eating, including at school.”

Cooper also stresses the links between poor diet and a range of behavioral problems among children, including the inability to concentrate in class. In a place like Madison, where nearly half of the students are low income and eligible for free and reduced lunch, Cooper says improving the food children eat at school is not just about nutrition, it’s about social justice as well.

“Middle class kids have more options when it comes to a better diet,” Cooper says.

Collins and Cooper are particularly concerned about conventional school lunch programs that emphasize highly processed convenience foods that are heavy on high fructose corn syrup and an alphabet soup of chemical ingredients.

Collins will head to Madison for two or three days during the last week of January. She plans to take a broad look at how the Madison school district food program works by talking with food service personnel and getting a firsthand look at the district’s current facilities and practices for producing and serving about 15,000 meals a day. She also plans to learn about the availability of fresh, healthy food from producers and others involved with local food issues.

Following her visit to Madison, Collins will prepare a preliminary report describing whether the kind of changes she and Cooper have spearheaded elsewhere are feasible in Madison. It will provide an overview regarding what facilities and current infrastructure exist here now and how they would fit in a different kind of food system.

The next step would require approval by the Madison School Board to pursue a full-fledged implementation plan, which would likely take four to six months, and would provide specific instructions on how Madison could re-engineer its school meals program to bring fresher, healthier food choices to students, including more local production and preparation.

When Lunch Lessons developed a large-scale implementation plan for transforming the Boulder area district’s food program, the plan cost about $100,000, Cooper says.

If the Madison board chooses to pursue a full-fledged plan here, the school food study group may look for grants or organize fundraising to offset the cost, given the district’s predicted budget shortfalls for 2010/2011, according to Kristen Joiner. Joiner, a member of the local study group, is a parent and executive director of Sustain Dane.

“We’re taking it one step at a time, but it’s exciting news for everyone who’s been working on healthy food initiatives for children,” Joiner notes.

According to Cooper, Boulder and Madison have some significant similarities, as well as striking differences. They are similar in size — Boulder has a student population of around 28,000, compared with about 25,000 students here – and both communities have strong “foodie” interests, Cooper says.

Cooper says she knows Madison pretty well and has worked with Odessa Piper, founder and former owner of L’Etoile Restaurant. “So I’m familiar with the Dane County Farmers’ Market and some of the farmers there,” she says. “When it comes to food, you have a vibrant, vibrant area.”

Differences between the two school districts include student demographics, with 47 percent of Madison’s students eligible for free and reduced lunch compared to 20 percent eligible in Boulder. Boulder schools also are scattered across a much larger geographic area, with its boundaries stretched over 65 miles end to end.

Lisa Jacobson, program manager for REAP’s Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch project, has worked with a number of schools around Wisconsin to introduce more fresh local food into school meals. According to Jacobson it’s not hard to get kids to eat vegetables, and to like them.

In Madison, several local schools have created school gardens where kids first enjoy working in the garden, and then enjoy its bounty. “They like seeing where their food comes from,” she says.

Jacobson and REAP also are involved with a popular Madison program that brings fresh snacks to 10 Madison elementary schools.

“We’re actually having lots of success getting kids to eat everything from raw kohlrabi to sweet potato sticks,” Jacobson says.

“We show up with the boxes and there’s a celebratory feel so the kids are yelling, ‘Yeah, snack day!’ They’re hungry when we arrive, and their plates aren’t filled with graham crackers or something sweet. That makes a difference.”

Posted in Local_schools on Thursday, December 10, 2009 6:45 am Updated: 11:46 am. Madison School District, School Lunch, Beth Collins, Ann Cooper, Madison School Food Initiative, Reap Food Group, National School Lunch Act, Michelle Obama, Arne Duncan, Centers For Disease Control, Kristen Joiner, Sustain Dane, Lisa