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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.
Mother Jones
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Striding past samples of Pop Tarts and pizza and cookies, Jessica Shelly made a beeline for a booth selling individually packaged sliced fruits and veggies. She picked up a pouch of sliced mangos and let out a yelp of delight. “This could be really fabulous,” she said. “I’m thinking yogurt. I’m thinking granola. I’m thinking make-your-own breakfast parfait!” She waved the peaches around in the air triumphantly. People began to give us odd looks.
Before meeting Shelly, I hadn’t known it was possible to muster quite this much enthusiasm for sliced peaches. Then again, someone with any less energy probably wouldn’t be able to do Shelly’s job: As the director of food services for Cincinnati’s public schools, she is wholly responsibly for providing nutritious breakfast, lunch, and snacks to 34,000 public school students, three-quarters of whom are on free or reduced-price meals.
Here in the exhibition hall at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food professionals, Shelly wasn’t the only one with a tough job—all 6,500 attendees had their work cut out for them. They had to find food that would appeal to kids, otherwise it would go right from a child’s tray to the garbage can. The food must be easy to prepare; some school kitchens are too small to do anything more than heat up a prepared meal. It also has to be very, very cheap. Most of the nutrition directors told me that once they pay overhead costs, they are left with only a dollar or two per student.
This month, their job got harder still. A new set of federal nutritional standards—including a requirement that students must take a fruit or vegetable with lunch and a rule that 51 percent of a food’s grains must be whole—went into effect on July 1. Even stricter rules are coming: Later this year, the whole grain requirement will be raised to 100 percent, and the sodium limit will be reduced. (Read Mother Jones‘ Alex Park’s guide to the food companies that lobbied on the new rules here.)
The School Nutrition Association supports some of the changes that have already been implemented—the 51 percent whole grain rule, for instance, and the stipulation that only skim milk can be flavored. But it opposes others, such as the fruit or vegetable requirement, and the increase to 100 percent whole grains.
Patti Montague, the School Nutrition Association’s CEO, blamed the rules for a 1.2 million-student decline, since 2011, in daily cafeteria attendance. “It got to the point where we felt like we needed to do something,” she told me. “We’re looking to get some flexibility for our members.”
Some of the school food directors I talked to echoed Montague’s concerns. Yvette Burrows, from Picayune Memorial High School in Mississippi, worries that her students will turn their noses up at unfamiliar foods. “It’s not that we don’t try to get them to try it,” she said. But most of them end up not liking the healthy stuff they’re required to taste.” Earlier this year, when her kitchen switched its biscuit dough from white to whole grain, students were not pleased. “One white biscuit is not going to make them unhealthy,” she said.
But Shelly has found that with a little creativity, it’s possible to tempt kids to the lunchroom. Ohio tightened its nutrition standards several years ago, so Shelly has had some time to develop tricks. One winning strategy, she says, is to encourage kids to personalize their meals. She worked with her produce distributor to create affordable salad bars, where kids can load up on the veggies they like. She also installed spice stations—think ranch, lemon pepper, and hot chili—so that kids could decide how to season their food. One day a week, she invites teachers into the lunchrooms to model healthy eating. On these mentoring days, teachers eat free.
Another part of the job, she says, is marketing. She regularly asks students to score foods served in the cafeteria. When she changed the name of a sandwich from “chicken patty on a whole grain bun” to “oven baked chicken sandwich,” the students scored the sandwich three points higher on average. She also made lunchrooms more inviting, ditching the long tables for booths she picked up for cheap at restaurants that were going out of business. During a conference session she led, she underscored the importance of letting parents know that healthy food was available at school. “They don’t know,” she said. “They think we’re feeding them carnival food. They think I’m making mystery meat in the back kitchen with road kill.”
Her tactics seem to be working. While the rest of the nation’s lunchrooms have seen historic declines in attendance over the last few years, cafeterias in Shelly’s program have actually grown more popular—and turned a $2.7 million profit.
Similarly, Steve Marinelli, a school food director from a rural Vermont district where 43 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch, told me his schools “had no problems whatsoever implementing the new changes.” He attributed the success to partnerships with nutrition-education nonprofits that offer taste tests of healthy foods in classrooms to help get students used to unfamiliar flavors. Marinelli believes that it takes time to change a child’s diet, and that schools shouldn’t be forced to implement the new changes too quickly. But “I think SNA has to fix their PR. They are so negative about these standards.”
Indeed, when I suggested to SNA’s Montague that maybe the students just needed more time to get used to the new foods—and maybe the cafeterias needed a few years to figure out how to make the healthier options appealing—she shook her head. “They don’t have enough money to wait for kids to get used to these new regulations,” she said. “Where is that money going to come from when the kids aren’t going to the lunchroom anymore?” And “even if you got all the money it wouldn’t solve all the problems,” she said. “Kids want what they have at home.”
The conference’s exhibition hall certainly reflected Montague’s belief. As I reported earlier this week, it was filled with new food formulations that follow the letter of the law, but offer little by way of nutrition: 51 percent whole grain funnel cakes and Rice Krispies Treats, for example.
A display of Pop Tarts in the conference’s exhibition hall Photo by Kiera Butler
I asked SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner whether the group had considered limiting junk food. “Exhibit floors in general reflect a vast array of company sizes and offerings,” she responded via email. “Exhibitors were required to only offer items that meet USDA regulations for Child Nutrition programs.”
Shelly isn’t giving up, though. The first time her cafeterias served chicken nuggets breaded with whole-wheat flour, the kids thought something must have gone terribly wrong in the kitchen. “They went back into the lunch line and said, ‘you burnt these,’ Shelly said. “Practically all the nuggets ended up in the garbage.” Undaunted, she scoured her suppliers for an alternative and finally she found a nugget with a lighter-colored breading. It also happened to contain whole-muscle meat instead of processed chicken parts.
“Some people think making kids eat healthy food is an impossible task,” she says. “I think it’s an opportunity.”
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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.
This $199 Cup Knows What You’re Drinking
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Climate Change is Making Our Food Less Healthy
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The New Farm Bill: Yet Again, Not Ready for Climate Change
Mother Jones
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Imagine you’re a policy maker in a large country in an era of increasing climate instability—more floods and droughts, driven by steadily increasing average temperatures. And say the policy you make largely dictated the way your country’s farmers grow their crops. Wouldn’t you push for a robust, climate change-ready agriculture—one that stores carbon in the soil, helping stabilize the climate while also making farms more resilient to weather extremes?
There’s no real mystery about how to achieve these goals. I profiled a farmer last year named David Brandt who’s doing just that with a few highly imitable techniques (spoiler: crop rotation and cover crops), right in the middle of Big Corn country. This peer-reviewed 2012 Iowa State University study tells a similar tale. The question is, how to turn farmers like Brandt from outliers into to trendsetters—from the exception to the rule. The obvious lever would be the farm bill, that twice-a-decade omnibus legislation that shapes the decisions of millions of farmers nationwide, while also funding our major food-aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be called food stamps.
Well, after more than a year of heated debate, Congress has finally cobbled together a new farm bill, one likely to be signed into law soon by President Obama. Unfortunately, the great bulk of that debate didn’t focus how to steer the country’s agriculture through the trying times ahead. Instead, it concerned how much to cut food aid for poor people. The Democrats wanted relatively minor cuts; the Republicans, animated by the tea party wing, wanted draconian ones. The (relatively) good news: the new bill will cut SNAP by $9 billion over the next decade, vs. the $40 billion demanded by austerity-obsessed GOP backbenchers. My colleague Erika Eichelberger has more on this sad business of pinching food aid at a time of record poverty.
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Tagged country, events, food and ag, national, Nutrition, policy, president, tom philpott
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6 Reasons to Love Cranberries & 10 Eco-Friendly Gift Ideas
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GOP Food Stamp Cuts Would Kick 170,000 Vets Out of the Program
Mother Jones
Republicans will salute America’s veterans Monday, while simultaneously trying to deny them benefits. In addition to reducing housing aid, and denying health care to vets, the GOP is also trying to remove thousands of vets from the food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
At least 900,000 veterans rely on SNAP. The House Republican version of the farm bill, the five-year piece of legislation that funds nutrition and agriculture provisions, would slash funding for the food stamps program by nearly $40 billion and boot 2.8 million people off the program next year. That includes 170,000 veterans, who would be removed through a provision in the bill that would eliminate food stamps eligibility for non-elderly jobless adults who can’t find work or an opening in a job training program.
CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps.
Veterans returning home from service have more trouble finding work than other folks, and rely more heavily on the food stamp program. The unemployment rate for recent veterans—those who have served in the past decade—is about 10 percent, almost 3 points above the national unemployment rate. War-related disabilities are one reason why. About a quarter of recent veterans reported service-related disabilities in 2011. Households that have a disabled veteran who is unable to work are twice as likely to lack access to sufficient food than households without a disabled service member, according to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
This month, SNAP funding was reduced by $5 billion as extra stimulus money for the program expired. While the Senate will never approve the $40 billion in further cuts to the food stamps program that House Republicans want, deeper cuts are pretty much inevitable. The two chambers are in the middle of negotiating a final version of the farm bill, which will contain food stamp reductions somewhere in between the $4 billion level the Senate wants and the level the Republicans want.
Whatever the final number, veterans will likely feel the pinch.
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GOP Food Stamp Cuts Would Kick 170,000 Vets Out of the Program
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Omega J8006 Nutrition Center Juicer – Black and Chrome
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Omega J8005 Nutrition Center Single-Gear Commercial Masticating Juicer, Chrome and Black
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