School Lunch Food Needs HELP!
Did you watch the school lunch series with Jamie Oliver last spring? Were you left feeling more frustrated than ever about school lunch food when it was done?
Recently Jenna gave us a good look at what’s going on with school lunches here in the U.S., and shared the awesome work she’s doing in her district – she is only one person and is still making a huge impact. (“Eat to Learn – Real Food Compromises in the School Food Revolution”.) My hope today in continuing our discussion on school lunches, is that this interview with Jane Hersey of the Feingold Association, will motivate you to make a difference, too.
Jane shows HOW to transform school lunch food and says that it’s NOT difficult!
You will love Jane Hersey. She takes what many have made seem complicated and simplifies it into something DOABLE. She shows what baby steps to work on in your district first, what you can do next, and so on, until you have transformed what kids are putting into their bodies every day!
Sorry I didn’t get this up before Halloween, as Jane gave great advice on which candy to buy; and then she elaborates on why she’s giving any advice at all on WHICH sugar to buy, instead of saying NO sugar. Anyway, be sure to note her advice in your calendar for early October next year so you know what to buy.
Who is Jane Hersey?
Jane is the director of the Feingold Association, an organization that helps families find foods that won’t make their kids (and them) sick. In teaching how to avoid fake foods with fake chemical colors, flavors, preservatives, etc., they have helped many many families get their kids back again. Children can then concentrate, behave, and grow properly!
The interview ended up being a little over an hour, but Jane is so interesting to listen to, you’ll want to download it to your MP3 or iPhone and take it with you on a nice fall walk (early winter walk?), or on a car ride. 🙂
Download the audio interview with Jane Hersey on school lunch food.
Here are some of the points Jane made, beginning with the different baby steps each district can take to improve school lunch food.
—First level: At very least, if a school wants to keep using convenience food from distributors, they can get it with natural ingredients if you ask and make them look for it, and chances are it won’t cost any more money. (Tell them for example that you want a fruit drink actually made with fruit.)
—Second level: Do the above, but figure out where they’re spending a lot of money, and just encourage them to start making a few things homemade. (Such as salad dressings to start.)
—Third level: Some schools are doing a lot of food prep from scratch and finding that it saves them big dollars!
—Fourth level: Some schools even have school gardens! (Can you imagine how cool that would be?! Teachers would have a blast incorporating it into their lessons!)
HOW CAN THIS SAVE THE SCHOOL DISTRICT MONEY?
The school that does go to super healthy foods are going to save a lot of money because of the enormous cost to educate a child who is reacting to all the junky foods, or diagnosed with ADD, etc. (Not all kids issues are due to diet, but an awful lot of them are.) When a school has a child who needs special education services, the cost to educate that child can be double. If a school can move ONE child from special education to mainstream, that’s around $10,000/year, and they can EASILY move more than one child by feeding them better foods! (Just changing school foods has increased test scores significantly, even when their food at home didn’t change!) We’re talking about billions of dollars that could be saved…
If school administrators see you can actually SAVE money, and it tastes better (Real Food always does), there’s no reason NOT to do it!
Asthma, ear infections, childhood diabetes, depression, and obesity were not always the health epidemics they are today. There have always been difficult or naughty kids, but not like teachers deal with now, and we didn’t have the number of kids diagnosed with hyperactivity disorders that we have today, either.
Food Matters
Maybe food isn’t the whole answer, maybe there are other things too, but we know that eating petroleum in place of food is bad for humans. Feingold has been helping parents since 1976 and have decades of experiences of children being sick for no reason and smart kids who are failing in school, who get better when they go off the really bad foods. MAYBE food really does have something to do with it?!
People today understand that good food is connected to good health.
Here are the links Jane mentioned in the interview:
- www.school-lunch.org – For more on how to transform the food in your school district. Hint: never go to your food service director first. Find out more ways to avoid the mistakes others have made when trying to change things in their school food program.
- www.ADHDDiet.org – Learn more about becoming a Feingold member and getting the list Jane mentioned, which tells all the foods on their “OK” list.
I’d love to hear what you think about the interview and Jane’s plan?
More you might like:
- Eat to Learn — Real Food Compromises in the School Food Revolution
- Teaching Middle Schoolers About Real Food
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
Hi everyone: Just wanted to let interested readers know that this initial exchange with Jane set off quite a debate over on The Lunch Tray, one which intensified this week after a guest post from Dana Woldow, a school food reformer in San Francisco. Ed Bruske, the Slow Cook, commented as did several people from Chef Ann Cooper’s former district in Berkeley, CA. My attempt to synthesize all the debate is here, and it includes all the links to the other discussion for those interested in digging deeper: https://bit.ly/fHXvZO — Bettina
Viki says
Ah Jenna, participation…it becomes circular does it not, in order to succeed the menu must improve in order to improve more kids have to participate so there is enough money and so it goes.
I think that is where I would have a hard time. It is where Janet P and I differ too…the whole participation thing…you can lead a horse to water…you can give a kid a wholesome meal, but you can’t make him eat.
I don’t know if I could make mine eat. Of course by the time this is all solved, mine will be totally out of school. I’ll still be concerned about school food, but it wont be affecting my child personally, until the grand kids start public school anyway.
jenna Food WIth Kid Appeal says
I was curious to hear Jane’s answer to the question about Ann Cooper, the conversation strayed from the question….
my child’s school in spring branch ISD (houston) has 2 ladies that serve 400 students breakfast and lunch. They make “recipes” 2-3 times a week. Recipe might be open cans of beans, add spices. They don’t have enough labor (staff) to make any more food than that. the only way to get more staff is to sell more food. one challenge school food reform has is that when menu changes (with healthier ingredients or scratch cooking) participation goes down (kids reject the taste), and that doesn’t provide the budget to maintain the changes. another challenge is that it becomes harder for meals to meet reimbursement requirements, which also creates a drain on budgets.
i’m just not sure how feasible the cook from scratch model is for large school districts. i see how it might work for a small district like Arlington Vermont, but districts like BUSD (ann cooper, also scratch cooking) are spending 2-4x as much per meal/student as most large districts are. recent articles about BUSD say that if participation doesn’t go up, the program is in trouble.
don’t get me wrong. i’m for healthier food in schools. but most of the data that Jane points to is for small schools/districts (with the exception of the NYC district). what you can do for 2 schools and 500 students may not be feasible for large districts with 40-50 schools, thousands of students. i’d love to see more case studies with success stories for larger districts.
i liked hearing the story of the petition to the school board who eventually sourced food without chemical and petroleum additives. i’m curious the size of that district.
the more i research school food reform the more i’m convinced that schools that address menu only will not be successful. schools also have to address participation, to ensure that the students will and do eat the new menu options, rather than opt to bring in food from home.
Jane Hersey says
Dear Bettina,
I certainly understand your skepticism; in fact I believe that the biggest impediment in this issue is the belief system that says healthy food will always cost more money. The information I discussed with Kelly didn not come from wishful thinking, but from a combination of my own experience and the data I have been collecting for more than 30 years. I am interested in what works.
In the early 1980s I was one of a handful of moms who forced our school system to get rid of things like synthetic dyes, and artificial flavors. They did this by getting different versions of the same foods they had been using; they continued to buy from their giant distributor, but simply chose a better version. There was no increase in cost.
My comments on prep work from scratch come from schools that have done this. On our web site you will see the story of the Whitefish Montana schools that reduced discipline problems by 75% by making some small changes, most notably by improving the food. Each day their cooks made soft pretzels….now that’s a very labor-intensive project! But take a closer look; the ingredients cost next to nothing and they pretzels sold for a dollar apiece. The cost of labor was small compared to the return.
The suggestion about saving money by making some things from scratch came from Kathy Irion, the food service director at the Arlington Vermont schools. She knows that she can make up a recipe for salad dressing in a few minutes, and this means she does not need to buy the rather costly commercial dressings.
Kathy has single-handedly demonstrated how a school can save a small fortune and at the same time provide healthy, delicious food.
When she came on as the food service director the two schools in this small rural community were losing $27,000 a year in their cafeterias. The food was awful!
She brought in an amazing menu of delicious food that sound like they came from an upscale bistro, not a school cafeteria. I have written in detail about how she has accomplished this….serving things like spinach salad with raspberry vinaigrette, feta cheese and candied walnuts, as well as natural versions of more kid-friendly foods….and at the same time wiped out the deficit.
It would be irresponsible to create false expectations, as you have suggested, and this is something I would not do. I have provided documentation for all of the statements I have made, and they can be found on our site http://www.School-Lunch.org. I would be glad to provide you with more detailed support for all of my statements, if you wish, and in the next issue of our newsletter I will be writing about why those “low cost” school lunches are way overpriced, and why more natural food can cut costs drastically. (I will be discussing “natural” not “organic” as I certainly acknowledge that organic is more expensive.)
As I said earlier, the biggest impediment is the belief system most people have — that healthier food will always cost more. It’s perfectly logical, but it’s often wrong.
If you will look at the evidence I have assembled at http://www.School-Lunch.org I think you will find that your concerns have aleady been addressed.
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
Jane: I appreciate your response. My reply is a bit long for this gray box, so I’ll post it on tomorrow’s Lunch Tray and leave the link here. Regards, Bettina
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
Jane: Here is my reply: https://bit.ly/aaQTZr – Bettina
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
Kelly: This was so much on my mind this morning that I actually listened to the audio file of your entire one-hour interview with Jane, and then wrote this: https://bit.ly/b44IyT – Bettina
KitchenKop says
Bettina,
As I said at your blog, THANK YOU for jumping in with your thoughts – the more we hash all this out, the closer we’ll be to fixing this huge mess. Thanks for sharing!
Kelly
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
And as I said to you, thank you for entertaining opposing views so gracefully! 🙂
Amber J says
I am very glad you posted this information, I find it very disheartening the state of the food system in schools today. When I was a child the food in the cafeteria was all home cooked and freshly prepared. I feel very lucky to have that be my experience. I am frightened for when my children enter school; even in private schools the food may not be that good for you, not even looking at nutrient content.
Bettina at The Lunch Tray says
Hi Kelly:
I’m new to your site and am really glad to have found you. I blog over at The Lunch Tray, a daily blog devoted to “kids and food, in school and out.”
As regular blogger on the topic, and also as a member of my district’s (Houston’s) Food Services Parent Advisory Committee and also its Student Health Advisory Council, I’m pretty deep into school food reform — deeper than I want to be, on many days! 🙂
I have to say — and I’m sorry to be the wet blanket here — that when you’re dealing with a food service management company like Chartwells, Aramark, Sodexo, et. al (in our case, Aramark) — some of what Jane is saying strikes me as pie-in-the-sky. For example, I think it’s patently untrue that “chances are, [food with natural ingredients] won