Civil Eats

In response to nationwide concern among parents and school service providers about ‘pink slime’ being purchased by the national school lunch program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last Thursday that next year it will give school districts the ability to choose whether they will serve the ammoniated beef product.

The USDA said that while it believes all products it buys for the school lunch program, including Lean Finely Textured Beef, are “safe and nutritious” it would respond to customer demand to give schools additional options, so they can opt out of purchasing LFTB if they wish. Read More

New York City was among the earliest of the urban school districts to implement a consistent school lunch program in the United States. More than 50 years prior to its formal integration into city schools, New York City’s Children’s Aid Society began a school lunch program in 1853. These and other scattered volunteer and non-profit efforts were taken up nationwide by municipal school boards and integrated into the larger efforts to address the growing nutritional needs of America’s urban schoolchildren.

As a federally funded school food program evolved from its inception in the first half of the 20th century to become a permanent fixture in the educational landscape across the country, the NYC school food program became a leading influence in the country’s experiments, failures, and successes in school food service. School and city officials sorted through the wrong ingredients for school lunches and exposed the detrimental effects of decreased funding for school lunch programs. Read More

I never imagined myself cooking for kids. I spent most of my first three decades as a chef not knowing or caring what kids ate, and not really wanting to feed them. In fact, as a restaurant chef, my worst nightmare was the host coming into the kitchen on a Saturday night, saying, “Chef, there’s a screaming kid on table 19. What do I do?”

My response: “Tell them to leave. Why did they bring kids here on a Saturday night, anyway?”

What a difference a decade makes. Today all of my work surrounds feeding kids healthy food, teaching them how to eat well, and working nationally to assure that all kids have access to delicious, nutritious food in school every single day. Read More

The successes—and shortcomings—of the Berkeley Unified School District’s revamped school food program received equal billing at yesterday’s premiere screening of short films collectively known as the Lunch Love Community Documentary Project. Read More

New school food standards proposed last week by the Obama administration could nearly double the amount of fruits and vegetables that more than 32 million kids eat every day. If these standards come into force, they could set American children on a healthier eating track that could last a lifetime. The proposed rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the newly-passed Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, could also save billions of dollars in future health care costs.

Putting this plan into action seems like a no-brainer, but its expense, which USDA estimates at  almost $7 billion over five years, is a major stumbling block. Nearly half of that cost would go to put more fresh produce on school breakfast and lunch menus.

As we see it, $7 billion is a bargain when you consider the price of doing nothing.    Read More

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act signals a significant change in how we invest in our children and their health. Thanks to the tireless efforts of thousands of people who are working hard to get America’s schools to serve healthier food, including First Lady Michelle Obama, the $4.5 billion “Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act 2010″ prevailed in the lame-duck session of Congress, and is being signed into law by President Obama today. The new law marks a key step toward potentially transforming the food served in America’s public schools. Read More

We all want our kids to be healthy. In the midst of hectic lives, we try our best. Sometimes, we have good days—an astounding victory for spinach, squash, and sparkling teeth. On bad days, convenience trumps health and teeth stay fuzzy. Such is life. But good or bad, there’s one thing I do every day: make my daughter Helen’s lunch.

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We are preparing for the most thoroughly planned meal in America, and it’s not Thanksgiving dinner. It’s school lunch.

Once every five years school meals are put on the Congressional kitchen’s front burner through reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. In the process of cooking up this legislation, school meals have been researched, reviewed, rallied for and railed against. And while the resulting stuffed turkey that is the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids’ Act, is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good.

Congress must stick a fork in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session, get it done and finally serve the kids. Read More

When the House returns to work this week they will likely be considering the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, twice extended as legislators struggled over the details. According to The Hill 80 percent of Americans support expansion of the act to “provide healthier food and cover more kids.” Yet in the current climate of economic crisis, finding the funding for this expansion has been a nearly insurmountable challenge. If this bill is not passed within the current lame-duck session, the new session of Congress will have to start over, perhaps with a diminished commitment to its expansion. In fact, there is reason to believe that there will be no work done the week after Thanksgiving, which means this week is make-or-break week for the bill. Read More

A new compelling documentary tells the complicated story of the federal school lunch program, its origins, challenges, and opportunities, teasing out nuances without leaving viewers in the weeds. Lunch Line, a film by Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, resists taking sides on this divisive topic even while it deals with vampires and wolves. Read More

In a surprise move yesterday before heading out for five weeks of recess, the Senate passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act with unanimous consent, which means all 100 senators agreed to pass the bill without an individual vote. The bill allots an additional $4.5 billion dollars over ten years to fund federal child nutrition programs including school lunch.

First Lady Michelle Obama supported the bill as part of her Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity, writing in an op-ed in The Washington Post last week,”This groundbreaking legislation will bring fundamental change to schools and improve the food options available to our children.”

Though providing less than the requested $10 billion suggested by Let’s Move, this marks the first major step towards the most significant increase in funding on the child nutrition programs in 30 years. In a statement yesterday, the First Lady said, “While childhood obesity cannot be solved overnight, with everyone working together, there’s no question that it can be solved. And today’s vote moves us one step closer to reaching that goal.” Read More

Chef Ann Cooper, also known as the “Renegade Lunch Lady,” has been working to improve public school lunches from the inside first in Berkeley, and now in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. I asked Chef Cooper a few questions for our series, Faces & Visions of the Food Movement. Read More

An ex-Washington Post reporter, who now blogs about school food, recently spent a week embedded in the central kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Northern California.

Ed Bruske’s mission: To find out how one school community manages to cook food from scratch for its students. Read More

Remember when Fox pundit Michelle Malkin accused Rachael Ray of being a terrorist sympathizer because she wore a Middle Eastern-ish scarf in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad? I’m not sure what was more absurd about that episode: Malkin’s unhinged hysteria, or Dunkin’ Donuts’ profile in cowardice (they yanked the ad.)

But Malkin got one thing right: Rachael Ray is far more radical than I even dared hope. She took Capitol Hill by storm yesterday, armed with some very sharp talking points, and fired them directly at the lawmakers who actually have the power to improve the lousy school lunches we’re dis-serving our kids: Read More

With one in three children (and one in two children of color) overweight or obese in this country, the health of America’s kids is under the microscope and, for the first time in our history, children born now will not live as long as their parents. Michelle Obama has launched her Let’s Move campaign, and chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution brought the school cafeteria to television. But as Oliver’s program showed, one of the biggest barriers to changing kids’ health outcomes is a lack of dedicated labor and expertise.

That is where FoodCorps comes in, an AmeriCorps program that would put service members to work building school gardens and establishing farm-to-school relationships in towns across the United States, specifically in places lacking regular access to fresh produce. A collaboration between the National Farm to School Network, Slow Food USA and other groups, the FoodCorps team has raised more than $215,000 from the Kellogg Foundation and AmeriCorps to develop the program, which could begin as early as 2011. Read More

With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s Kerry Trueman corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:

KT: Monday’s New York Times had an editorial supporting the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, a bill that would give the US Agriculture Department “new powers to set nutritional standards for any food sold on school grounds, particularly junk foods that contribute to obesity.”

The current standards leave a lot to be desired, as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution has revealed. In the first episode, Jamie stood accused of shortchanging the kids on carbohydrates because he omitted the bread from a meal that already included rice.

Last Friday, in episode three, Jamie found himself charged with the violation of “insufficient vegetables,” despite the fact that his noodle-based entree featured seven different vegetables. The remedy? Add a bunch of french fries to the meal to meet the veggie quota.

How did the USDA’s school lunch standards ever get so nutritionally nutty? Would passage of the CNA support the wholesome, made-from-scratch meals that Jamie Oliver’s trying to bring back to our cafeterias? Read More

Could school lunch get the universal overhaul it needs — not unlike, say, health care — and some time soon? You betcha, says Janet Poppendieck, author of the recently published Free For All: Fixing School Food in America. (Read a review at Civil Eats.)

At a midday panel held at the California Endowment Conference Center in downtown Oakland, hosted by California Food Policy Advocates, and attended by anti-hunger activists and school food folk, Poppendieck, a sociologist at Hunter College, City University of New York, outlined why there’s no time like the present for reform in the lunch room. Read More

The heated debate over health care reform sparked a slew of nasty name-calling from folks who fear that their taxpayer dollars could somehow wind up financing an abortion, a practice that they equate with murder.

But aren’t our taxpayer dollars already killing our children? That’s essentially the premise of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution reality show, which debuts on ABC tonight.

The first episode (which had a sneak preview last Sunday and can also be viewed online) highlights the dismal state of our school lunch program, which is woefully underfunded, hamstrung by ham-fisted USDA guidelines, and far too dependent on government-subsidized processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutrients. Read More

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is cooking up more than home made meals from fresh ingredients. The show has already stirred up deeply seeded emotions about school food feeding systems…all before the first episode airs tonight!

Conversations and critiques over Jamie Oliver’s 6-part U.S. reality TV show has created quite a cacophony on listservs and talk shows, including Letterman and Oprah. The Washington Post already gave a negative review. So I can’t help but chime in, as should you. (teaser, there will be an opportunity below for possible ABC air time if you want to voice your opinion) Read More

Early in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010) former Texas Agriculture Secretary Susan Coombs declares that, “it will take 2 million angry moms to change school food.” Based on what we now know of the dreary state of our children’s cafeteria fare, there must be at least that many mamas, as well as a good number of papas who are ready to storm the barricades. Fortunately for them and America’s 55 million students who gulp down something resembling a meal every school day, they’ve been joined by Hunter College sociologist Janet Poppendieck who gives us the best reasons yet for unconditional school food reform. Read More

Many kids in the U.S. eat half their daily calories at school. And what a sad, super-size me state of affairs that is in most parts of the country. Highly processed and packaged food laden with sugar, fat, and salt fill in for whole grains, fruit & veg, and protein — you know, the kind of nutrients that might actually help a child learn and stay lean.

Loads of folks have been working their buns off to try and make schools a healthier place for children to eat. Check out Ann Cooper, the self-styled Renegade Lunch Lady, who revamped school lunch programs in Harlem, NY, Berkeley, CA, and now Boulder, CO. Or visit Slow Food U.S.A.’s Time For Lunch Campaign, or Susan Rubin’s Better School Food. And yes, for the record, we know we’re spoiled here in Berkeley with our made from scratch, fresh ingredients lunch menu. We also know what’s going on here is the exception, not the rule.

But maybe that’s about to change. Yesterday, as part of the federal government’s “Let’s Move” launch, the First Lady’s much buzzed about campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama announced plans for a renewed effort to raise the quality of school food, feed more kids, and feed them better. Read More

Don’t make us tighten our belts on child nutrition programs while the girth of the nation grows. The government spends $1 million per soldier in Afghanistan, yet barely spends $1 on the food in a school lunch.

When President Obama addresses the nation in his State of the Union, he will outline his priorities for 2010: jobs, the deficit, and health care reform. The President will then call for a three-year freeze on domestic programs. Will a program created to “promote the health and well-being of the nation’s children” survive the freeze? Read More

How is it that a country can put a man on the moon, but can’t seem to feed it’s children school lunches that are safer than those eaten at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box?

In the past 10 years more than 23,000 school children have become sick as a result of hundreds of food poisoning outbreaks in our nation’s lunchrooms. A recent investigation by USA Today found that the meat served in U.S. school cafeterias faces less testing and lower safety standards than the mystery meat in Big Macs and Whopper Juniors.

USA Today reporters discovered that meat served at McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco is tested as much as 10 times more often as the ground beef served in America’s school cafeterias. While fast-food chains take samples on their production lines every 15 minutes, the USDA only tests 8 times a day.

In addition to testing more frequently, fast-food chains also set more stringent limits on so-called indicator bacteria. In the case of generic E. coli, the USDA allows 10 times more bacteria than Jack in the Box!

This fact should be a national embarrassment to all members of Congress, USDA officials and meat industry executives who have allowed our nation’s school lunch programs to become the dumping grounds for cheap commodity products that feed the bottom line of corporate agribusiness. Read More

As I entered the gymnasium of Lakeview Union School for Harvest Dinner, students buzzed busily around tables piled with plates of food – quinoa salad, beet and apple salad, pita bread, local Jasper Hill Farm cheese, turkey, squash, corn and mashed potatoes. Many are dishes that these students made themselves in the classroom using local ingredients, and most of the rest was grown in the school garden. A third-grader takes a bite of the pita bread made by the fourth graders and chews thoughtfully. Then he checks a box underneath a smiling face that proclaims, “I liked it!” Read More

It was lunchtime at Harbor High School, and the cars were backed up three stories down to the parking lot at the bottom of campus. The thump of the bass resonated from jacked-up trucks and Toyota Forerunners as students tried to break out for a burrito or at Joe’s sub before their afternoon classes started. At the top of the hill on the other side of campus, a throng of teenagers waited to cross over to the gas station that sells slurpies and Hot Cheetos. These students, including my daughter Carly, hadn’t heard that chef Jamie Smith was at that very moment serving noodle bowls with the veggies he’d stir-fried in the Harbor High kitchen.

Jamie is not just flipping broccoli; he’s trying to “make it cool to eat at school.” He knows it is healthier on multiple levels for high school students –not just at Harbor but all across the country– to stay on campus during lunch. Read More

Sometimes change happens in the most unexpected places. When I learned that Baltimore City Public Schools was on a mission to change the way its more than 80,000 students thought about food, I have to admit, I was surprised. The cash strapped school system has long faced difficult challenges and the last place I expected to see noticeable reform was with its food services department. To top that off, you could have bowled me over when I heard that the City Schools’ new chef/dietitian, Melissa Mahoney, convinced her boss, Tony Geraci, to let her develop her own Meatless Monday lunch menus. To be honest, I doubt that Mahoney needed to do a lot of convincing. When it comes to dreaming up innovative and cost effective ways to feed kids healthy, tasty, whole foods, Geraci isn’t shy about pushing the envelope. It’s Geraci’s bold and sometimes brash entrepreneur spirit that has captured the attention of food policy experts across the country, including the White House. Read More

The Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization by September 30. This is a federal government policy that sets the rules and standards and uses tax dollars to—among other things—provide a daily reimbursement for school lunches. Right now this amounts to $2.57 for a free lunch, including labor and ingredients. It is nowhere close to what most school districts need to put healthy foods on our cafeteria tables and reward all the people who make that possible. Congress will soon consider adding one dollar per meal to the reimbursement, and this still might not be enough. Read More

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.” Read More

At the most recent Kitchen Table Talks session on August 25, the challenges affecting school lunch programs, particularly in San Francisco, was on the menu. With the impending reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act and recent articles in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, it seems that now is the time to capitalize on the momentum and advocate for healthier school lunch food policies. Read More

The Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization this fall, which means Congress will be debating whether it can afford to provide kids with food that benefits their health. This is a worthwhile time to examine the lunch that Congress eats everyday. Read More