The Sad State of School Lunch -- Now We're in The Thick of It...

groovy lunchbox by Goodbyn

Yesterday my oldest started public Kindergarten, and it was a rousing success. Despite our excitement about every aspect of her new school, we're officially in the thick of the school lunch juggernaut.

Prior to this year, Audrey attended a private pre-school where hot lunch was served every day. Packing a lunch wasn't really an option, and while there were a few items on the menu I wasn't so jazzed about (I'm never happy about hot dog day), overall the menus were nutritious, and the cook made as many things as possible from scratch. But we're entering new territory here, so I had planned to pack Audrey's lunch most days to ensure she's eating the healthiest meal possible.

Then I read this over on the stellar School Lunch Talk...

"Many parents pack lunch for their children because they don’t consider chicken nuggets a healthy meal. I don’t either. But before you resolve to pack lunch for your child every day this year, think about this: one of the best ways to get better food into public school cafeterias is to put away the lunch box and become a loyal lunchroom customer...

Yes, it’s easy enough to pack a lunch for your child if you don’t approve of what’s offered at school. But every packed lunch means less revenue for school lunch programs, and less revenue means less healthy food for the students who do eat lunch in the cafeteria. What’s more, the parents who pack lunch for their children out of health concerns are precisely the parents who care about good food. Without their voices, there is nobody to speak up for school lunch change.

School cafeterias operate by giving customers what they want. Right now, we’re allowing kids to be those customers. If parents can take back that buying power, we’ll take one huge step to improving school food in America."

full story here.

So despite the fact that I'm not loving the lunch offerings at Audrey's school (think pizza, pizza sticks, corn dogs, hamburgers, etc... although they do serve nice sides -- steamed broccoli, apple slices, corn), we're going to buy lunch in the cafeteria at least three days a week, and in the meantime I'm going to try my hand at organizing something with the parents to see what we can do to improve things.

We'll see how it goes...

Jamie Oliver is My Hero

image via penguin

Ok, admittedly Jamie is rather easy to love, what with his sort of mellow, punk rock approach to cooking and farming and well food in general… But it’s the school lunch thing that’s moved him (along with Pollen and Waters and Bittman) to my hero status -- You gotta idolize anyone who uses their celebrity to push forward the cause of improving school lunch.

Jamie first tackled school lunch in the UK through his show Jamie’s School Dinners to pretty great results:

“So Jamie took over school meals in Greenwich and tried to persuade the Government to improve standards. With dinner lady Nora Sands he showed that kids could be fed fresh, nutritious meals. And after a huge campaign, newspaper headlines and delivering a 300,000-signature petition, Tony Blair agreed to set new standards for school meals, and committed £280 million for proper ingredients, equipment and training.”

Now he’s headed to our neck of the woods (West Virginia specifically) to try and reform school lunch in the U.S. -- A challenge to say the least.

While I’m mildly encouraged by all the current information and activity around school lunch reform, we still have so far to go. Right now our children’s school cafeterias are essentially another fast food venue filled with HFCS laden, processed foods and their school hallways are yet another spot for soda and candy vending machines.

It's a bad scene friends.

There are all sorts of reasons school lunch has gotten so bad (school lunch talk, does a good job of summarizing here), and the root of the problem seems to be that cafeterias are incented based on the amount of food they sell, and as well all know kids love to buy junk food...

So while there’s an activist portion -- a piece of this school lunch juggernaut that requires us to take action, to be informed, to lobby and to make sure our leaders know that we want the current system to change, there’s also the piece that requires us as parents (or aunts and uncles, godparents…heck even friends) to introduce our kids to great food.

Maybe instead of taking the kiddos to McD’s for a “treat” you could make meal from scratch together… I’m a huge believer that the only way to get kids to shun such “delicacies” as frozen French fries and “French” toast sticks is to make sure they understand (and pardon my French here) what shit that kind of food is, no?

How Much Are You Willing to Pay for Food?

This passage from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for me:

“Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion of our income of food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history. In our daily fare, even in school lunches, we broadly justify consumption of tallow-fried animal pulp on the grounds that it’s cheaper than whole grains, fresh vegetables, hormone-free dairy, and such. Whether on school boards or in families budget keepers may be aware of the health tradeoff but still feel compelled to economize on food – in a manner that would be utterly unacceptable if the health risk involved an unsafe family vehicle or a plume of benzene running through a school basement.”

So I (like almost everyone else who has read this insightful, compelling book) am officially starting our family’s mini food “revolution”. In fact, you can read all about it here.

I’m starting slow, as I want to get this right. I’m trying to balance organic and local, making sure nobody feels "deprived" and re-working our household budget to accommodate any food cost increases (although I believe they’ll be minimal when we move away from frequent eating out and processed foods…albeit organic ones, but still) and move to making more items from scratch. I think the additional “cost” will come more in the currency of time than money, but responsible eating is time well spent -- I firmly believe that.

I’m curious about what others are doing. (I love this account from our green nest on how their family of three affords to eat 100% organic on $100 a week!) What percentage of your food budget is spent on organic food, local food? Do you have a garden? How often do you go to the farmer’s market? What do you always buy conventional?

Eat Well Guide

My friend Sharon turned me on to this BRILLIANT site. Just type in your zip code and find all the sustainable food options within a particular radius.

I discovered a new organic restaurant that we're going to try out with the girlies this week and a farmer's market that's open through December, so it'll be easier to procure local food well into fall. + It would be especially helpful in avoiding the fast food wasteland on your next road trip.

I'm addicted. Check it out!

Want To Cook Together?

Recently Kristine of the excellent blog Waiting for Kids asked if I wanted to start an online cooking group for moms. I was immediately intrigued by the idea, and after a few e-mails back and forth sharing ideas, we came up with the following approach.

We’d form a group of like-minded folks that want to cook new, interesting things and test them out on their kids (or if they don’t yet have kids, someone’s kids…i.e. nieces, nephews, godchildren, the neighbor's kids -- really any willing tot will do), honestly sharing the results with the rest of the group. It's key that we’re totally candid about how the dish went off with the kiddos…I know it’s tempting (trust me) to only blog out our culinary “hits”, but understanding the misses and why they didn’t work is key.

The group would cook around a specific, pre-determined ingredient or type of dish each week and can use a new recipe, something of our own creation, something from a magazine…no restrictions there, except that it has to be something you haven't made before.

Each member of the group would post their recipe and results on Monday, (that way folks can work the good ones into their weekly meal planning) and (this one is especially important to me) try to use as many local, organic ingredients as possible in the recipe. Also I’d like to try and focus half of the recipes on vegetarian options since there are so many good reasons, especially environmental, to keep our meat consumption limited.

Now granted every kid has different tastes, so there are no "one size fits all" recipes, but my hope is that a few recipes will surface each week that feel like sure fire winners, and at the end of the experiment, we can create a compilation of the “kid-approved” ones. My dream is to cobble together a little cookbook that we could sell online and donate any profits to the groups trying to fix the abysmal school lunch program in America!

I’d like to start on Monday, August 3rd and go for 10 weeks. I’ll link to everyone’s blog who is participating.

Right now, I’m thinking the weekly “plan” could go something like this:

Week one – Vegetarian
Week two – Poultry
Week three – Pork
Week four – Vegetarian
Week five – Dessert
Week six – Seafood
Week seven – Vegetarian
Week eight – Red Meat
Week nine -- Casserole (no ingredient requirement)
Week ten – Vegetarian

So what do you think? Who’s in?

The Sad, Sad State of School Lunch Part II – Glimmers of Hope

Photo by the lovely and talented (and incredibly kind) Chelsea Fuss

First up, the Lake Highlands Community Garden -- A first of its kind partnership between the City of Dallas and local residents to find a productive and beneficial use for unused property owned by the city… We’re on the waiting list for a plot and really, really excited about this.

How does this relate to the state of school lunch you ask? I recently finished Alice Water’s biography and was incredibly inspired by her Edible Schoolyard project and how it ultimately influenced a complete re-engineering of the school lunch program at Berkley public schools. I think this garden is a huge step for our city and one that will hopefully trickle through our school district.

We’ll see.

Next there were Michelle Obama’s recent remarks regarding school lunch and the responsibility of the USDA to ensure the children eat nutritious meals in school. (via school lunch talk)

“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,” she said. “In doing so, we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids.”

There’s still time to sign the petition urging congress to update the USDA’s School Nutrition Standards.

Small steps…but steps nonetheless!

The Sad, Sad State of School Lunch

image via limonada's flickr set

I had planned to post a few recipes today, but I keep stumbling on little blurbs, articles, etc… about the dismal state of our nation's school lunch program, so I thought surely that was some sort of sign that I needed to talk about it here, no?

First up, let’s take a quick peek at the school lunch calendar from a school in France, courtesy of the lovely Stephanie.

image via stephmodo

With nary a slice of pizza, hamburger, fruit cup or French fry anywhere to be found, these kids are feasting on fillets of salmon, organic steak, green beans, apricots, crème brulee, zucchini flan, organic omelets… The daily costs of these amazingly perfect lunches? Three U.S dollars.

Now let’s take a quick quiz courtesy of Mom’s Rising.

"Which of the following is considered a junk food according to national school nutrition standards?"

A. Hi-C Blast - vitamin fortified sugar water
B. Poland Springs seltzer water - water with bubbles
C. French fries
D. Candy Bars

"If you guessed A, C or D you'd be wrong. Seltzer water is the only item on this list banned as a junk food because it doesn't contain any vitamins or minerals. "

"The USDA's school nutrition standards were developed in the 1970's and are no longer consistent with nutrition science or current concerns regarding childhood health. For example, USDA does not consider candy bars, snack cakes or French fries to be junk foods in schools. USDA standards don't even address calories, saturated and trans fats or sodium."

I can’t decide if this makes me sad or furious…or both. So I signed this petition, and you should too!

Seriously friends, it’s time to motivate…and until things change, pack your kiddo’s lunch...

Other great school lunch related links of late:

• Hungry for Change
• Lunch Lessons
• Angry Moms
• School Food Policy
• Brain Fog Blog