School food is a heated topic for sure. My huge thanks go to Jenna for offering to write a guest post on her recent experiences with this very important issue. She’s making a difference in her school, and I hope we’ll all be motivated to do the same! Stay tuned and subscribe to the blog if you don’t already, because soon (as soon as I get it edited) I’ll be sharing a powerful interview I did on this very subject…
Here’s Jenna from FoodWithKidAppeal.blogspot.com:
I was forced to deal with school food a year ago when my oldest started public school in Kindergarten. Initially I solved the “school food sucks” problem just by sending my son to school with real food in his lunch box. Then came my visits to him in the cafeteria, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, and eventually, his request to eat school food. Most of his peers bought lunch. He wanted to buy lunch so he could sit with the lunch line kids.
I would go to school to eat with my son and come home in tears.
The kindergarteners participating in school lunch barely ate anything. The majority guzzled chocolate milk, ate anything that came in a wrapper (pretzels, animal crackers), poked at the fruit on their tray and nibbled at the entrée item. Almost none of the kindergarteners were taking the fresh vegetables offered on the line and I watched dozens of whole apples go into the garbage can with nary a bite taken from them. I wondered what the kids were like in the classroom. With only sugared up low fat milk and processed grain snack to nourish (sabotage) their brain, how much learning was going on? The thought of 400 undernourished kids in the same building, well, it made me cry.
My heart was so heavy, I was compelled to act.
I decided I wanted to help the students at Sherwood learn how to eat the real food they had access to, but were not taking or worse, throwing away uneaten. I’m not saying produce is the holy grail of nutrition, but it is some of the least processed food available to kids in the current school lunch program. Also, produce contains antioxidants that combat inflammation. Anyone routinely eating processed food is going to be suffering from inflammation of __________ (fill in the blank). I’m not foolish. Eating a few veggies won’t heal the Standard American Diet. But it’s what I have to work with. And it’s a step in the right direction.
What I’d learned from countless hours of research and networking with other school food revolutionaries was that initiatives like changing menu items (recipes), bringing salad bars in, getting rid of chocolate milk, farm to school programs, school garden programs, sourcing and cooking more food from scratch, was that these programs take time to push through to action. They require additional budgeting than what is already allocated for school food and often the changes never occur or are reversed after parents complain (chocolate milk). (Kelly here: I’m picking my jaw up off the floor – I had to verify it with Jenna – parents really do complain when there’s no chocolate milk! Only in America… This will be the topic for another post soon, as Jenna has more to share on this.)
The Now Solution – Eat to Learn
I wanted a program I could do now; a program that I didn’t need school board directors to approve of, one that I could pull off by collaborating with the administration of our local campus. I wanted to start with something that wasn’t going to ruffle feathers of parents or district nutritionists. I knew if I had to ask permission from anyone outside our campus the brakes would be applied and precious time would be lost. Time lost when kids could be learning how to make better food choices, but weren’t because school board decision makers were pointing at increased costs and shaking their heads.
At the end of last spring I learned about a grant program through National Parent Teacher Association. I decided to roll the two initiatives together. Instead of trying to change what’s available to kids, I intend to change the way kids view food and increase the odds they’d eat what decent food was available to them.
I took the concept I’ve used in my classes for years, making food relevant to kids, and applied it to the existing school food menu.
I believe if you connect food in a meaningful way to a child’s life (their activities), they want to eat it. I made a list of the realish foods on the menu, and planned to make fun food factoid flyers for each food to go home with kids. I pitched this to our PTA, principal, and Child Nutritional Services, and got the green light to proceed. Instead of delivering the content on the flyers to kids at lunch like I proposed, our principal wanted to deliver the content during morning announcements.
To grow the initiative for the grant, we added several events and came up with a catchy title, Eat to Learn.
Events include a Parent Healthy Lunch Demonstration, a campus wide Taste-Off competition, Turkey Trot in addition to a few literacy (journaling), science (produce research project) and math (graphing taste-off results) curriculum projects. The kids will also conduct an evaluation of their own lunch line choices (or lunch box) at the beginning and end of the program.
For the morning announcements, I dig up research studies that link the foods on the list to improved memory, learning and overall brain function. Then I write some grade school age appropriate factoids about the foods. The program focuses on one food each week, and food announcements are read daily. At this age kids are still excited to learn. When kids connect produce with bigger, better, smarter thinking brains they will be much more likely to eat produce when it’s available. Check out the spinach and apple morning announcements.
Road Blocks
Cost may be an issue for us if we don’t receive the grant. If that happens we’ll be looking for other ways to fund the Taste-Off competition. I’m having a hard time getting my hands on the data from Child Nutritional Services that we need to show what our current fruit/vegetable participation is. If we get the grant, we’ll need to measure effectiveness of the program. Before and after program participation data would be one measure.
I expect there to be far more roadblocks in the concurrent initiative to improve the school food menu. Our Healthy Lifestyles committee has our next meeting with Child Nutritional Services in November to begin that process. See this article for the back-story on our first meeting. This post is a review of what’s happened since that meeting and includes a list of the changes we’d like to see to the menu.
Compromises
What’s available to kids at school through the school lunch program is not what’s coming from the farm. There are no farm eggs, grass fed beef or locally and sustainably grown produce on the lunch line. What’s available to them is a processed CAFO meat patty with any number of factory made additives and baby carrots. When you compare that to a baked bone-in chicken quarter, the chicken is better. The chicken is still not pastured animal protein, but at least it isn’t cut from the bone and processed to death with scary chemicals added. Sadly, kids don’t, and may never, have access to optimal food at school. But of what is currently available there are some choices that are better than others.
I look at school food like a continuum. I don’t think it’s possible to get school food to be optimally nourishing. But if we can move the indicator from 100% crap towards better choices, that’s progress. Is it a compromise for me? Yes, huge. I’m torn, because the recommendation I make to a kid whose choice is what is in the cafeteria is not how I feed my family at home.
Addressing the problem with solutions that are huge compromises to my own food standards is better than throwing up my hands and doing nothing. I believe kids need advocates for better food. If we can’t make optimal food available to them because of all the misinformation in the medical community, the lack of funding for wholesome ingredients, the lack of kitchen equipment to cook on campus, the lack of staff to prepare food from scratch vs. heat to serve items, and a long list of other obstacles, then I will focus on what I can do NOW. Right now, this week, I can share some facts about produce and the benefits to learning with kids and get them to take more fruit and veggies when they’re offered. If I can get kids to choose plain cheerios over cinnamon toast crunch, at least I’ve got the added sugars out of their breakfast. Are cheerios as good as soaked oatmeal, or a farm egg and sourdough toast with grass-fed butter? No where close.
The other upside is this program teaches children be mindful of the food they consume. It teaches them that food has an impact on their body. When they are older, and making decisions about what to buy and eat, they will be able to think critically about food and will be more likely to continue to move closer to ‘optimal’ food on the continuum.
That’s how I sleep at night even though I’m pushing factory chicken and chlorine soaked baby carrots.
Jenna is a recovering picky eater who believes all kids can learn to eat real food, and enjoy it. She is a School Food Revolutionist, swimming upstream without a map trying to get better food to school kids. She blogs about finding ways to make food relevant to kids and food revolution adventures at Food with Kid Appeal.
Melodie says
There are no school lunch programs anywhere where I live as far as I know. I didn’t grow up with them either, so all the information I’ve learned about school lunch programs just floor me. Thank goodness for parents like you Jenna. You know, if this was something I was faced with I’d be right there alongside you!
Raine Saunders says
Jenna – I applaud you for your efforts and commend ANY parent willing to do the kinds of things you are doing in your school district. Many parents are dismayed and frustrated with what their kids are eating. Some lack the time or energy to fight back, and some do fight back and get nowhere. The latter was my experience. I spent over a year trying to make changes in our school district – we live in Boise, ID and my partner went on a year beyond and tried to no avail to get the district to make changes with two other women, one is an M.D. who is a good friend of mine that I respect very much. The first thing we did when I was working on the project was to bring Amy Kalafa and Dr. Susan Rubin’s movie “Two Angry Moms” to our city. We did a lot of fundraising to get the license to show the movie and bring Amy here to speak at our event. The event went off fairly well, but only about 60 parents attended (in a district that has 50,000+ students in attendance). The district believed that we were “one of the good guys” even after watching the movie which showcased some of the revolting food from different lunch rooms around the country (and our food is easily similar to what they were featuring). To this day, still nothing has been done, which is the most sad part of all this – two years later. Last year I home schooled my son and so I didn’t take part in continuing on with the district. Even if we had been in the district that year, I really needed to get out of that effort because it was like talking to a wall and became such a source of stress and frustration for me that I think it was beginning to affect my well-being.
This year my son has started at a new charter school very close to our house. There is currently no lunch program, but there is a lunch committee, and I along with the other mom I worked on the previous lunch effort with are the co-chairs of this committee. I am happy to say this school is very sustainable-minded and the principal has let us do a lot of things we would have never been able to do at the other schools our children attended. We created a brochure for the families with guidelines about what types of foods parents should be feeding their children at breakfast and dinner, and what sorts of things should be sent to school in their lunch boxes to provide nutrition and energy for a full day of school. I am also absolutely elated to report that we have a couple of great women coming to our school, holistic health counselors and who teach cooking classes, who are well-versed in the Weston A. Price philosophy of nutrient-dense foods and will be teaching parent-education classes at our school in just a couple of weeks! I was so thrilled when I talked to these fantastic ladies and they told me they were going to teach not only about whole foods, but balanced meals without processed foods and REAL fats!!! This would never have happened at any other school in our city – except for maybe a private or charter school.
I am going to write up a post about our classes for the parents when they have occurred and give a report of the parents’ experiences and reactions, and also a follow up on other activities we organize throughout the school year to help educate and inform our school community. The holistic counselors also said they were really interested to see my copy of Nourishing Our Children from the Weston A. Price Foundation. I am hoping to somehow incorporate this wonderful presentation into our educational process at the school before the year is over. Keep your fingers crossed for us! Great work Jenna, and keep up the effort…it’s so worth it! 🙂
jenna Food WIth Kid Appeal says
Raine – In the hours when I stay up late developing content, grasp to understand a system I know nothing about and run into numerous other obstacles I wonder if all this effort is in vain. Will school food reform ever come to pass? The more I learn, the bigger the rock feels and the higher the mountain grows and the weaker I feel to push it up the hill. Then I think of the kids who eat garbage all day and what their lives will be like if they never learn to eat real food and I remind myself that kids need an advocate. they need a guide to learn to eat real food. I’m sorry to hear your efforts bear fruit. Perhaps there is hope that you planted a seed that will eventually grow into progress. Perhaps too late for your family, but others will benefit in the future. my principal asked me to slow down. i thought “slow down? and continue to waste the students health? why not speed up?”
Megan Jenelle@A Blossoming Homestead says
Thanks so much for posting! I am currently a public school teacher for a Missouri high school, and I witness first hand every day the horrible school lunches. I think many parents as well as the public don’t truly know how bad the lunches our now because people have always complained about school lunches. When my husband and I were in high school the school hired lunch ladies who ordered and decided how much and what kind of food they would be cooking. Some cooks even turned in recipes to the state and received awards for their recipes. Our school had a salad bar, and extras, and the food was actually pretty healthy considering what the students are getting now! Right now many schools (ours included) are under contract with a food company. They are in charge of hiring the cooks and getting the processed food to heat up before serving, and then our school pays them. I am not sure how it works but the food is awful! I mean literally, yesterdays meal was: a slab of hamburger on a bun, a few french fries, and yea an apple! I am pretty sure the option of ketchup was considered the vegetable. Thanks for the post, and for all the efforts! I know we can make changes when we all work together!
~AFG
Megan Jenelle
Heather@Food Ponderings says
In my town, the public schools have dumped all of the fried foods! There are no fryolaters in the buildings. They don’t have chocolate milk (though they have 1% and skim, so not ideal to our point of view). There are islands of hope here.
jenna Food WIth Kid Appeal says
heather, what school district and town are you in? one thing i’m doing now is looking for case studies of districts who have accomplished school food reform with positive results.
Heather@Food Ponderings says
I live in Ashland, Massachusetts.
Melissa Gilbert says
School lunches have been horrible as long as I can remember! Fortunately, my daughter attends a charter school that does not even have a lunchroom! The children all bring their own lunch (children who do not have a lunch for whatever reason are provided lunch from Earth Fare) and their own snacks. Sometimes the school will supply snacks – today, for example, they’re all getting an apple for snack. I love this school and the fact that is doesn’t have a lunchroom was one of the biggest factors that influenced my choice. The students eat outside at picnic tables, weather permitting, and their parents choose what goes into their bodies! No one feels different for not getting to buy lunch, and the lunches are usually so different, we haven’t noticed any jealousy over other kids’ food. The school is http://www.yorkprepsc.org if you want to check it out.
P.S. I am shocked about the outrage over getting rid of chocolate milk!
jenna Food WIth Kid Appeal says
I wonder how aware public school districts are that one main deciding point for some parents about whether or not to send their kids to public school is food. I know I was shocked to learn that it is close to issue #1 for some parents deciding between public school and private, as well as a big factor in the decision to homeschool. maybe public schools would have more “customers” if the sustenance the offered was more nourishing??
Melissa Gilbert says
You’re so right! Schools are businesses too. They have budgets and, unfortunately, it seems our little ones are the customers who are receiving low quality products! (Well, as far as food goes…)
Tonya Y says
I agree Jenna! One of the deciding factors in sending 2 of our boys to private school was the ability to regulate what they eat. Not only does the cook at their school actually cook most foods (unlike most cooks learning to heat up pre-packaged foods, not to mention the cook’s son is my son’s friend), they also don’t hassle me when it comes to my food “rules”. They know that my boys are to not touch the skim milk at school, even if they forget the raw milk at home, they serve them water. They also know that my boys get real butter, etc… It isn’t perfect as they still have to follow state guidelines. But when they do serve not-so-healthy food, it is usually better than what public school kids get, such as homemade brownies for dessert instead of prepackaged, real homemade pizza instead of frozen pizzas, etc.. Our eldest son goes to public school and he is always complaining that he wishes he could eat the food that the other two boys get for lunch. He gets the typical food options…so he usually packs a lunch instead.
I think that private schools could certainly use this as a selling point. We would save a lot of money sending our younger two boys to public school, but like choosing to spend extra money on the sacred foods, we have decided that it is worth it and we will cut costs elsewhere to offset the tuition cost. I personally cannot home-school our kids due to my job, but this is the next best thing for us.
Ellen@BodyEarth says
Way to go, Jenna! It’s so hard swimming upstream, but you have been doing a great job. One comment of yours stood out for me especially. You said, “I believe kids need advocates for better food.” It’s such a basic idea, but somehow it struck a chord that these kids can’t do anything themselves to make their situation any better. It’s up to us. If we don’t speak out and take steps (even baby steps), we can’t expect anything to change.
Thanks!
Elizabeth @ The Nourished Life says
This is fantastic. Jenna, your work could not be more necessary in this day and age, and I am so glad you see that sometimes compromises must be made in order to make steps in the right direction. You have to work with people where they’re at. And who knows, this may someday open the door for even more exciting food changes for our children!
Tara says
I watched Jamie olivers food revolution this summer and thought “those poor kids, at least my kid will be going to a wonderful public school in a relatively affluent area and we won’t have that problem.” Boy was I wrong!! My oldest started kindergarten and I literally got queasy when I saw the menu. Shamefully I’ve been ignoring the problem and just packing my daughters lunch. FYI as a dentist-I just saw another journal article that links decay of childhood obesity.
Tonya Y says
My son started Kindergarten this year also at a Christian school. Luckily they serve mostly homemade foods there. They are able to do so since they are such a small school. However, his teacher knows that he is NOT allowed to drink the milk the school provides. I send him to school with his little Spiderman thermos full of raw milk in his Spiderman lunch-box packed in freezer packs. Luckily, his teacher seems to completely understand and it has never been a problem. However, this is one of many reasons we decided to send him to a private Christian school. I’m not sure what I would’ve done if this school wasn’t available to us.
Jen @ Miss Organic's Kitchen says
Wow! That’s amazing what she is doing. I did part of my internship at my kids’ school district nutrition office and it was eye-opening. The junk they feed kids and pass off as food is ridiculous. And they had the nerve to brag about the nutrition awards they had won. In our area, school lunch programs are run by people with business majors, not dietitians. I do want to jump in here and say not all dietitians have it wrong. (The comment about ruffling the feathers of the district nutritionist rubbed me the wrong way.) There are dietitians out there, like me, who instruct people to soak their grains, etc. I promote whole foods constantly to patients. However most people look at you like you are a freak when you start talking about soaking your grains and other nourishing traditions practices. I hope at the very least I am planting a seed and people will look into it further.
I think Jenna made an valid point that you need to make changes gradually. Still not ideal nutritionally, but it’s a start. If you overwhelm people with too many dietary change at one time, they are just going to ignore it all together. So small changes are the best way to go. Thanks for such a great post. I wish Jenna the best of luck in bringing about change in her local school district.
jenna Food WIth Kid Appeal says
Jen – I should have linked to the “type” of district dietitian I was referring to. I did not mean to imply that all district dietitians think that chocolate milk is good for kids. our district dietitian reassured me that whole grain is important to our district which is why chicken nuggets have whole grain breading. Talk about a compromise! Needless to say I did not congratulate her on that one…
Here’s a link I should have included, the end is a caution from cafeteria manager and school nutritionist… https://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-09-21/news/os-soda-in-florida-schools-092210-20100921_1_board-member-public-schools-board-meeting