RD, LDN, MS, Ph.D

I am noticing that a good number of school food service directors, especially the younger ones, are registered dietitians, licensed dieticians and nutritionist, or have a Masters degree or Ph.D in nutrition.  I’m not surprised.  If I were a parent with a child in a school, I’d want my food service director to have a degree in childhood nutrition.

Yet, it peeves me that we need someone with a special degree to tell us what we should and shouldn’t eat.  Up until recently, that person with all those degrees didn’t exist, and our mothers were the experts in the food department.  A lot has changed! 

I’m thinking of going back to school to get a Masters in Nutrition – I feel the pressure to know more about nutrition so that I can legitimately answer questions about the food served at my school.  I really wish I could just focus on serving good home cooked food.   

Searching For Better Products

Last Friday, I invited a sales rep of a line of tomato products to do a tasting of his sauces in my school kitchen.  I met him at a food show while looking at the ingredients listed on a can of tomato puree at his booth.

  

I invited everyone in the kitchen to participate in the tasting and listen to the sales pitch.  A few people were skeptical.  Why change what we currently have?                     

Their pasta sauce tasted great straight from the can, slightly chunky, perfumed with onion and garlic, and made with carrot puree for a touch of natural sweetness.  One person who wanted to hold her nose while sampling the sauce (due to the mention of the carrot puree) said she liked it.

Not only am I happy with the quality, taste, and ingredients, this line is priced about the same as the current sauces we use made with corn syrup and a host of other undesirable ingredients!   

I have a long list of things I would like to replace in the school kitchen.  I know many of of these items won’t be as easy as substituting one canned good for another.  But there are surely some decent products out there (like this line of tomato sauces) in the giant warehouses of the national food supplier my school uses.  Finding those items is the challenge.  It occurs to me that maybe I should make the salesperson representing this supplier work a little harder for his commission.   

  

Update

I’ve slowed down on blogging over the last few weeks.  I was trying to put an entry in every weekday, but I’m afraid that was just a little too ambitious.  Brave New Lunch is just over a month old, but I’m starting to think I need to come up with a plan for content if I want this blog to be informative and interesting for readers and fun for me to write.  

I started this blog after reading Fed Up with Lunch: The School Lunch Project. I wanted to respond to Mrs. Q’s op-edit posts since I have an insider’s view of things.  I’ve written a couple of guest blogs for Mrs. Q (Pizza Perspectives, Ingredients, and Thaw-and-Serve) and will continue to write them every once in a while.     

My plan for my blog, at least for the next month, is to try to add new types posts to the blog – short interviews with people involved with school lunch and simple, wholesome recipes.    

This Tuesday I will attend a Massachusetts Farm to School “Shoptalk” conference, which will be my starting point for potential interviewees.  A few public school food service directors will give presentations about how they successfully implemented local farm produce programs in their school.   

I will still be continuing to work on the Behind The Kitchen Door Series, which are blog pieces about the different part of my school kitchen.  I plan on writing about our snack service this week. 

Please leave a comment if you have any ideas or suggestions for Brave New Lunch!  

Happy Earth Day!

In time for Earth Day, my kitchen began rolling out the school's composting program.  While we don’t have a composting facility on school grounds, a local company, Save That Stuff, will take away our food waste (and paper products and biodegradable plastic cups) and compost it for us.       

We began the testing phase of the program last week.  Beginning with our middle school lunch, the kitchen asked students and staff to separate food waste from trash.  I stood in front of the bins to direct traffic for the first three days.  Everyone has caught on by now.  This week we introduced it to our upper school lunch.  Eventually, most of the school will participate, and we will have enough waste to make it worth it to Save That Stuff to come haul away the waste.  At that point our school will have to switch over to using biodegradable garbage bags instead of the regular black bags in the picture above.  I’m hoping that we will be saving at least 60% of cafeteria waste from going to a landfill.  

Where Does One Begin?

A lot of people want to do something about their children's school lunch and have asked me, “where does one begin?”  

It’s a tough question.  Every school is different.  Every situation is different.  However, drawing on my limited experience, I have a few suggestions about the first steps you can take. 

Read the Rethinking School Lunch Guide.  I wrote a recent blog piece about last week.  Even if you don’t believe everything in it, it will give you a picture of school lunch and all the players involved in the making of it.  It gave me a surprisingly accurate description of the many oobstacles I’ve encountered as I’ve worked on changing my school lunch.     

Gather as much information as you can about your school lunch.  Is it thaw-and-serve or cooked on premises?  Who writes the menus and orders food?  Are ingredient and nutrition info available?  Befriending your school lunch ladies or managers would be helpful.  See if they have any information they might be able to offer you in your quest to improve school lunch.

Find other likeminded individuals.  If you are unhappy about school lunch, there are probably others around you that feel the same way.  With other parents, students, and staff, you may have a critical mass to set up a meeting with decision-makers at your school. 

   

  

Kids Like Asparagus!

Earlier this month, I reported that my school cafeteria is featuring asparagus as the item of this month.  Despite my concern that it wouldn’t go over well with kids, it worked out just fine.  Not every student took asparagus off of our main meal line, but some did and said they liked it!  We’ll be serving again soon.  

Rethinking School Lunch

Let's get rid of this stuff!

If you have been inspired to do something about school lunch and want to learn more about the issues related to changing your school lunch program, start by reading the Rethinking School Lunch Guide.  Available for download online and completely free, I turned to it when I first started working in my school kitchen.  Trying to “rethink” my school lunch without much guidance, it became my go-to-source for advice.  The Rethinking School Lunch Guide comes from the Center for Ecoliteracy.  

  

The Guide has two basic premises:

1. Frozen, preprocessed, and canned foods in lunch are unacceptable.  We should adopt an alternative, a "farm-to-school model, which provides fresh food from local, sustainable family farms.  Meals are prepared using fresh, seasonal, sustainably grown produce and products from local and regional sources.” 

2. The idea that lunch is an isolated meal without relevance to the rest of the school day or the world is also unacceptable.  The guide emphasizes an "integrated curriculum approach. It connect students to their food source through meals and field trips, improve the nutritional content and quality of food in schools, and help local farmers remain economically viable."  

With these two ideas, it discusses change in the context of ten interrelated subjects: Food Policy; Curriculum Integration; Food and Health; Finances; Facilities Design; The Dining Experience; Professional Development; Procurement; Waste Management; Marketing and Communications

Full of advice from people affecting change and sources for more information, the guide covers all the possible topics I could think of that are needed for change.  When I presented my head-of-school with a proposal for changing lunch after I started working at my school, I summarized the guide in four pages and turned each topic into question-and-answer format specific to the issues of my school. 

Please read the Rethinking School Lunch Guide!