We used to be afraid of the Lunch Lady. Now we’re afraid of the lunch. Will things be different this fall?
By Ed Bruske
© Ed Bruske
What kind of lunch could you make for $1?
That’s the dilemma school kitchens face every day under the federal school lunch program. Most of the $2.68 schools receive for a fully subsidized meal goes to labor and overhead, leaving that solitary buck for ingredients. I hadn’t given it much thought when I signed up to spend a week as an observer in the kitchen of my daughter’s elementary school here in the District of Columbia. The schools were advertising something new in the cafeteria—“fresh-cooked” food—and I was anxious to see our local “lunch ladies” making meals from scratch.
Depends on How You Define “Fresh-Cooked”
Boy, was I in for a surprise. Would you believe eggs scrambled and cooked in a factory in Minnesota and then shipped frozen? The flavorless eggs were simply dumped into a steamer out of a six-pound bag. Then the kitchen manager stirred in grated Land O’Lakes cheese “for flavor.” Lunch wasn’t any better: frozen “teriyaki beef,” frozen chicken nuggets, frozen bite-size shredded potatoes, frozen pizza, frozen hamburgers.
I quickly realized it’s true what they say: The most important tool in a school kitchen these days is a box cutter. By the time lunch service ended, there was a pile of cardboard boxes near the door to the dumpster, representing all the frozen food that had been served to the school’s 326 kids.
Vegetables, when they weren’t served out of a can, also arrived frozen and were cooked to death. Most ended up in the trash, because the children wouldn’t eat them. But even worse was all the sugar the children consumed every day. They were served Apple Jacks cereal, Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams, Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, orange juice, and strawberry-flavored milk—which has nearly as much sugar, ounce-for-ounce, as Mountain Dew.
When I added it all up, kids as young as five were consuming highly processed convenience foods with as much as 60 grams of sugar—15 teaspoons worth—before they even started classes. How, I wondered, could this be happening barely a mile from the White House, where first lady Michelle Obama had declared war on childhood obesity?
Farewell, Flavored Milk
I wrote about what I saw at H. D. Cooke Elementary School in January as a six-part series for my personal blog, The Slow Cook. Readers were so scandalized that I formed a parents’ group to agitate for changes in food service. We started a new blog—Better D.C. School Food—to document the food the schools were serving. And here’s the good news: Changes are happening already.
Only a few months after I started publishing daily photos of meals at H. D. Cooke, school officials quietly decided to discontinue flavored milk in D.C. schools and to serve only cereals with fewer than six grams of sugar (say goodbye to Apple Jacks and Mini-Wheats Little Bites). They also announced two pilot projects that would serve upgraded menus at 14 schools. Indeed, 2010 may be remembered as the year when D.C. school food turned a corner.
The Conglomerate in the Kitchen
After Michelle Rhee was installed as chancellor of D.C.’s public schools three years ago, she effectively declared that the schools were incapable of managing their own food service. Over a three-year period, the district’s food-service operation had racked up an astounding $30 million deficit. Cooking, Rhee declared, was not a “core competency” of schools, so she opted to hire Chartwells, a company that manages cafeterias in more than 500 school districts across the country.
The contract stipulated that the city would pay Chartwells a $1 million administrative fee plus fees for each meal served, totaling another $1 million or more; in return, Chartwells would cut the schools’ food-service deficits in half. During the second year of its contract, Chartwells switched from serving packaged meals trucked from a factory in Laurel, Maryland, as the school district had done, to serving the “fresh-cooked” frozen items I witnessed.
To keep costs low, Chartwells relies in part on its tremendous buying power as part of a giant, $9.3 billion international food-service conglomerate called the Compass Group. The purchasing arm of the Compass Group, Foodbuy, negotiates contracts for bulk deliveries with huge food manufacturers such as Kellogg’s, Tyson, and Pepperidge Farm. As I reported recently, Chartwells has declared to D.C. schools more than $1 million in rebates from these manufacturers since its contract began—money that some critics view as an inducement to put foods of dubious quality on kids’ cafeteria trays. The news seemed to add to a sense of buyer’s remorse in Chancellor Rhee’s office, even as a newly hired director of school food services was trying to take advantage of some encouraging developments.
The Council Acts
Months before Michelle Obama announced her Let’s Move campaign to address obesity, D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) had begun to fashion the Healthy Schools Act, legislation with upgraded standards for school food, incentives for incorporating local produce in meals, and requirements for more physical exercise. The bill marked a rare instance of a local jurisdiction stepping forward with money to improve school food: It proposed a 10-cent contribution from the city for each breakfast and lunch served, as well as a 5-cent bounty on meals that include local farm goods. There was just one problem: Cheh had not found a source of money to cover the legislation’s estimated $6 million annual cost.
Just weeks before the bill was scheduled for a vote, Cheh made a controversial proposal to raise the $6 million through a new tax on sugary sodas. An excise tax that increased the shelf price of soft drinks by one cent per ounce would have the additional effect of discouraging people from buying them, helping the anti-obesity cause. Predictably, the beverage industry pounced on the proposal with claws drawn. It used radio and newspaper advertisements to kill the excise tax. Instead, the D.C. council voted to begin imposing the regular sales tax of 5.75 percent on sodas, previously untaxed, to fund the program. The Healthy Schools Act was passed and signed into law in May, but the shelf price of Coke remains the same.
Thinking Outside the Lunch Box
D.C. schools still have to deal with some tough math where feeding kids is concerned. A group of restaurant chefs—led by Cathal Armstrong, owner of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria—thinks it has the answer. These chefs have proposed taking over the cafeteria in one D.C. elementary school, Tyler Elementary, via a nonprofit organization using parent volunteers to hold down labor costs and using the savings to buy better ingredients.
Some people have a concern about the model that’s being introduced here: Volunteer labor in the cafeteria means fewer food-service jobs, so personnel who were working at Tyler will have to be placed elsewhere in the system. The previous method of reheating prepackaged meals doesn’t require much prep at all, but this is a completely different mode of food service—cooking from scratch. Training existing employees is not possible at this point.
It sounds like a page from the past, when parent-teacher associations served the food in some schools. But could that be the future of school food—cafeteria as charity?
Says Armstrong, “It’s the only way.”
D.C.’s Ed Bruske writes, blogs, and tends an “urban farm” at his home about a mile from the White House. Previously a reporter for The Washington Post, Bruske has also written for Martha Stewart Living and Edible Chesapeake. His blog can be found at www.theslowcook.com.
