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!

  

The Naysayers

They are in too many school kitchens.  They want everything to stay exactly as it’s always been.  It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, or if there’s an easier way to do things, a more logical, cheaper, healthier way, the answer’s always no.

I’m so glad in the last episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, he was able to get rid of the naysayer in Rod the radio host.  I wonder if he does the same to Alice in the school kitchen.  I sure want to see how he manages that!    

Behind The Kitchen Door Series: Dishwashing and Reusable Glasses

When I first started working at my school kitchen, we were already using reusable plates, some utensils, and coffee cups.  I advocated for a few other items that were added this year - soupspoons, soup bowls, and glasses.  It makes financial sense – with 500 people going through the cafeteria each day, the amount we spend on paper cups easily justifies the cost of glasses and washing them.  The biggest problem to adding any more reusable items to our load is space and labor.  If one or two members of the kitchen crew are out sick one day, we have disposable items ready.    

Right now only the last of our five lunch periods uses glasses.  We have ten minutes in between each lunch period, and that’s simply not enough time to deal with glasses while setting up for the next meal.  During our last lunch, using glasses saves about 150 paper cups each day.  That’s 750 each week or 27,000 for the school year.

While I'm no expert on environmental science, the environmental cost of running our commercial dishwasher a few extra times each day to save 150 paper cups from a landfill makes sense to me.  We use a dishwashing system that "reduces environmental impact" according to the company's website.  Our dishwasher system technician happened to stop by today so I asked him for some details and learned quite a few things: the detergent we use is low in phosphates and BPA, and the system minimized water use.  (In fact, speaking to him I realized I should learn more about my kitchen's dishwashing system and its environmental impact.  I will put up a post about the details later.)   

Getting glasses into our cafeteria wasn’t as easy.  People objected to the extra labor it would involve.  To make this possible, I worked with five teachers on lunch duty, one for each day of the week, to set out the glasses and supervise the collection of them at the end of lunch.  With teacher help, our kitchen needed only to run the glasses through the dishwasher and cart them away.  That’s about ten minutes of extra work for one person. 

Our commercial dishwasher isn’t like a home dishwasher.  One load of dishes through our commercial dishwasher takes less than a minute to wash and sanitize.  Dishes come out of the machine hot but still damp, and they need to sit for about 5 minutes to air dry.  Space is limited when we run the dishwasher load after load.  Each day we go through dozens of loads.

      

Behind The Kitchen Door Series: Dishwashing and Reusable Glasses

Though not a glamorous topic, dishwashing is a big piece of the puzzle to improving school lunch.  Cooking from scratch uses lots of pots and pans, and more of the kitchen's resources need to go towards washing those items.  For example, replacing a frozen pre-panned mac-and-cheese requires us to boil lots of pasta and make a cheese sauce using pots and pans that we need to wash at the end of the day. It’s a lot harder than dishing out the thaw-and-serve version in foil pans.

My school used a huge chunk of our equipment budget this year purchasing

 a new commercial dishwasher when our previous one broke down.

Time is a big issue. Someone’s time needs to go toward washing dishes instead of serving or preparing lunch. Another concern is space. With increased use of pots and pans, there needs to be enough space in the dish washing area to hold the pans before and after they go through the dishwasher.

In an effort to be more environmentally friendly, my school kitchen stopped using paper plates, foam bowls, and plastic utensils.  Now there's even more dishwashing and little space for it. We’re bulging at the seams.

A school nearby recently unveiled a new and spacious kitchen that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. I hear that their salad prep room compares in size to that of my school’s entire kitchen. But that new kitchen lacks a commercial dishwasher. This suggests that they produce tons of trash with the daily use of disposable plates and utensils and that they aren’t aiming to produce their food in-house, which usually warrants the expense of a commercial dishwasher.

On Monday: some pictures of our dishwashing area in action and more about how my school switched from disposable dining-ware to reusable stuff.

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The Behind the Kitchen Door Series is a collection of pieces about the different component that make up my school kitchen. The reason I’m writing these pieces is to shed some light on how my school is making improvements to our school lunch. I covered the salad bar last week in two posts, The Salad Bar and More About the Salad Bar.  Next week I'll write about the soup bar.