The Senate’s Passed the Healthy Hunger Free Kid’s Act

But What’s For School Lunch? High Fat – High Sugar – High Salt!

 On the heels of the Senate’s unanimous vote to pass Child Nutrition Reauthorization, this time around named the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, I find myself think about the next big bill to pass; the Farm Bill.  I applaud the Senate for passing the bill and truly hope that both houses can come together to get a bill to the President’s desk by September 30^th when the current bill expires.  However I am concerned with what real change we’ll see on our kid’s plates and I believe that some of the most significant change can come from the Farm Bill and the commodity food that “pushes” unhealthy offering onto school lunch menus.

 But before I get to the relationship between the two, I’d like to share Kim O’Donnel’s great piece on Culinate, School Food Cheat Sheet.  In her article she gives a great overview of the issues, so give it a read.

 I, like many advocates across the country have taken on many of the issues that surround school food.

• ü  Flavored Milk
• ü  Too little/non-existent training for food service staff
• ü  Too little money dedicated to healthy food
• ü  The need to teach children (and adults) how to cook and where their food comes from
• ü  Marketing and advertising to children and how that negatively impacts their food choices

 But there’s one issue that is not often eluded to, the USDA commodity food program.  This program was designed to support agriculture by helping to keep prices high by buying up surplus agricultural product.  Former Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz’s now famous proclamation to agriculture to “get big or get out,” began a system where farmers are often paid to produce crops that aren’t needed and in fact would lose them money if not for the price supports.  Watch the movies King Corn and Food Inc for good in-depth explanations of this bad system.

 In school food, this program gives school districts approximately 19 cents credit per each reimbursable lunch served in the prior year as their commodity foods allocation, which in many school districts accounts for approximately 15 – 20% of their food budget.  The most often received commodity foods are often unhealthy, especially when not eaten in moderation.  Items like cheese, ground beef (high in fat), canned vegetables (high in sodium) and canned fruit (high in added sugar) frequent the USDA offering.  Even though this is a federal program the items available may vary from state to state and in some cases from district to district, a full list is available on the USDA website.

 However, if unprocessed cheese, chicken, turkey or ground beef are acquired through the commodity program and utilized in a “scratch cook” environment the resulting food can be delicious and nutritious and can help food services departments balance their budgets.  Sadly, that is rarely the case in school districts across the country; in fact the system tends to be wasteful, expensive and produces food that is making our children sick!

 The lion’s share of all “free” commodity food get “processed” into yes… highly processed mostly unhealthy food and unfortunately this “free” food is what’s on most kid’s plates.  What this looks like on the plate is chicken nuggets as opposed to roast chicken, burgers with all manner of additives, pizza pockets, corn dogs, beef ribletts, “grilled” cheese sandwiches and uncrustables and as well they may contain added trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup.  All of these items come pre-packaged and frozen, are often heated from frozen in their individual plastic wrappers and even served in the same wrappers so they’re never touched by human hands.

 Manufacturing this “free” food, results in costs to the districts in fees, which in many districts may amount to tens if not hundreds of thousands and in the case of large districts, millions of dollars for this free, unhealthy food.  But there’s a tremendous amount of profit for manufacturers and distributors in all this free food.  For example, in Tyson’s case the relationship between the USDA commodity program, the states and the school commodity purchasing co-ops creates a freeway between manufacturers and school districts for processing “surplus” chicken into chicken nuggets.  Tyson is poised knowing the government will buy chicken (that by the way doesn’t even have to exist, it can be “virtual” chicken) and knowing that most school districts in America will elect to move their commodity allocations into nuggets and pay that $30-$40 fee per case for the service of providing a ready to heat and eat product.  The real cost?  Our childrens’ lifelong health.

 This egregious and I think honestly unconscionable system is not only promoted by the USDA but “sold” to school food service staff and administrators as a cost effective way to get “healthy” food on our kids plates and under the USDA guidelines it’s all healthy.

 So if we truly want to fix school food, if we truly want to stem the obesity crises, if we truly want the next generation of children to be healthier than the current one, then we need to fix the commodity food program and replace it with a system that values fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, whole grains and clean protein.  And further, we need to find our kitchens again, both at home and in schools, and start cooking and then teach our children how to cook as well!

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…)