Not a day goes by without the media addressing America's obesity crisis, and lately the discussion has settled on our children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has concluded that if U.S. children don't get their weight in check, their anticipated health problems will significantly shorten their lives and make them the first generation in U.S. history to die at younger ages than their parents. It's predicted that one of every two black and Latino children born in 2000 in the United States—and one of every three white children—will contract diabetes in their lifetimes, most before they graduate high school (CDC, 2011). By 2018, this may mean that 30–35 percent of all school-age children are insulin dependent. The health ramifications are overwhelming. Yet most of these problems could be prevented—if we improve our children's nutrition.
The state of our nation's food supply is unconscionable. Agribusinesses control 90 percent of that supply (National Family Farm Coalition, n.d.), and too much of that supply is highly processed and unhealthy. As a chef, an advocate for children's health and lifelong wellness, and currently director of nutrition in a midsize school district, I hope to inspire parents, school administrators, and advocates to act for change—before it's too late.
Why Start with Children?
Children are the people most affected by the chemicals used to produce and process food. Pound for pound, they eat more food than adults, which means that antibiotic and hormone residues in their foods collect in greater concentrations in their bodies. And because they're young, they're the ones most easily influenced by change. If we educate children from the start to make better food choices, they will likely carry these "lunch lessons" well into adulthood. Affecting the attitudes, food tastes, and habits of this generation should also help ensure the sustainability of the world's future food supply. A crucial place to start—a place where school leaders can make a tremendous difference—is school lunch programs.
My journey to creating healthy lunch programs began in 1999 at the Ross School, a private school on Long Island. We transformed the lunch program by hiring professionally trained chefs, redesigning the dining area, and—most important—expanding the menu to include regional, organic, seasonal fare. Meat moved off the center of the plate, replaced by vegetables, grains, and legumes. Salads became a school favorite. Best of all, Ross adopted wellness and nutrition education as permanent elements of its curriculum. The program was a success, but everyone wondered whether something like it could be established in public schools.
I found out when I was offered the opportunity to jump into the belly of the beast (public school food) by implementing change throughout the food system serving the Berkeley Unified School District in California. Chef Alice Waters had already brought food awareness to Berkeley's public schools with her Edible Schoolyard program. I built on this momentum by encouraging the district to put salad bars in all school cafeterias and switch from serving processed foods to cooking from scratch (eventually the district moved to 95 percent scratch cooking).
Today, I'm director of nutrition services for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. I coordinate 200 employees who provide and serve more than 10,000 nutritious meals each day and touch the lives of all 28,000 students in the district. We also support hands-on cooking and gardening classes for students. I've learned in both Berkeley and Boulder that creating a nutritionally sound school food program within the current system requires questioning many givens and getting around formidable obstacles. Allow me to share how we've made it work in Boulder, with the hope that districts and schools elsewhere might adopt similar measures.
Our Recipe for Success
A strong school lunch program emphasizes whole foods cooked from scratch. As you might imagine, choosing fresh, locally grown foods presents schools with all kinds of challenges. For one thing, inadequate and sometimes restrictive funding makes it extremely difficult to shift from processed to locally grown food.
Taking on the National School Lunch Program is no small task. The system is riddled with red tape and systemic problems, not the least of which is that, at its heart, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the lunch program, has a dramatic conflict of interest.
According to the 1949 Farm Bill, one of the USDA's main areas of responsibility is to assist farmers and producers through a commodity foods program. Today, the commodities program offers a high level of support to food producers who have considerable lobbying clout in Washington, D.C. Many of those producers distribute products that are made into foods that are high in fat and low in nutrition. The USDA makes commodity foods available through the national school lunch program and hunger relief programs. Commodity foods are available as "brown box" unprocessed ingredients. School districts can choose to send commodity foods they purchase to processing companies; they usually get back something highly processed, like chicken nuggets. Once delivered to the public school system, by law these products cannot be sent back, sold, or given away (USDA, 2011). Thus, it's almost impossible for the USDA to act in the best interests of both the United States' food producers and its children.
In Boulder, we identified five challenges we needed to meet to switch from serving processed food to serving meals based on fresh produce, whole grains, and healthy protein: food, facilities, finance, human resources, and marketing.
Challenge 1: Food
When to Say No
To effectively implement a healthier program, we first had to say no to foods that are ubiquitous in most school cafeterias, including
- Highly processed foods full of sugar, salt, fat, additives, preservatives, and coloring. Ingredients in many such foods have been linked to attention deficit disorder (Wallis, 2007).
- Trans fats, which are directly linked to high levels of "bad" cholesterol.
- High-fructose corn syrup. Since this highly processed, controversial, and extremely prevalent substance was introduced into the U.S. food marketplace in the late 1970s, the rate of obesity in this country has more than doubled. Before that, obesity rates had been stable (Bocarsly, Powell, Avena, & Hoebel, 2010).
- Fried foods. A recent study that surveyed 14,000 people over a three-year period found that 9- to-14-year-olds who increased their consumption of fried foods gained weight at a higher than normal rate (Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs, 2005).
- Foods produced with hormones and antibiotics. These foods are more dangerous for children because antibiotic and hormone residues in foods collect in children's tissues in greater concentrations. The overuse of antibiotics in raising food animals may create strains of bacteria that are resistant to those same antibiotics. Experts are also concerned about how hormones such as estradiol affect the puberty rates of girls, and they have noted that increased hormones are directly linked to higher rates of certain cancers (Gandhi & Snedeker, 2000).
- Refined sugars and flours. Instead, we promote whole grains, overall a healthier choice.
We were able to make these changes by using only unprocessed commodities foods available through the USDA's school lunch program, avoiding sending foods out to be processed, and buying the rest of our lunch ingredients on the open market. In general, districts and schools need to take stock of what resources they have available and what they can do in terms of food preparation before making this switch. The central question is whether the district has the facilities, human resources, and finances to cook from scratch.
We also said no to "treats" popular with many children that undermine nutrition. We removed vending machines selling soda, candy, and chips, and stopped serving competitive foods, that is, foods that are sold in school cafeterias but are not regulated by USDA nutritional guidelines for school lunches. When students can easily buy such nonnutritious items as French fries, cookies, and candy bars they are less likely to sample healthy offerings.
When to Say Yes
To give Boulder's students the rewards associated with nutritious food—and the satisfactions of producing it—we said yes to
- Cooking from scratch. All school lunches in the district are cooked from scratch in five regional kitchens. We roll our burritos by hand, and we've been working on perfecting our pizza crust since the beginning of the school year. We procure local ingredients from local providers within our price range; we also use surplus food from local farms, and sometimes from our school's gardening classes. Cooking from scratch should be the focus of any school lunch program. Schools must say goodbye to chicken nuggets and hello to roast chicken, and they must toss out French fries and get busy roasting potatoes and other root vegetables.
- Salad bars. Giving children a variety of fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, and proteins is a great way to augment their diets, help them try unfamiliar foods, and encourage healthy choices. Repeated exposure encourages children to try new foods; if they see jicama on the salad bar every week for six weeks, eventually they'll get curious. One day they'll put a few pieces on their salad, and whether or not they like it, they've taken a risk and expanded their awareness.
- Gardening classes. Hands-on learning is extremely effective in connecting children with healthy food. The Growe Foundation runs gardening classes in some of Boulder's schools; we use the produce in tasting sessions. Students learn, for instance, that carrots and potatoes grow underground and that a freshly picked ripe tomato tastes remarkably different from one bought in a store.
- Cooking classes, run by our school chefs. Not only do students learn a valuable life skill in cooking lessons, but they also expand their palates while taking ownership of their creations.
- Food tastings. Tastings are a great way to get students to try unfamiliar foods. Even something as simple as tasting different varieties of an apple can be a palate-widening experience. Perhaps a student's caregivers only buy Red Delicious apples, and a school tasting is the first time the student has a chance to sample a green or yellow apple. Because Red Delicious may not have been to that particular child's taste, he assumed that he simply didn't like apples—now he can't get enough green ones.
- A 30-minute recess before lunch. No one likes to be rushed through a meal; we like to savor what we eat and take time to digest our food. Children are no different. Holding recess before lunch helps ensure that when it's time to sit and eat, children will be hungry. And that they'll return to class energized and ready to learn.
Challenge 2: Facilities
Most cafeterias in today's schools lack fully functional kitchens and trained staff to operate them, which makes actual cooking a virtual impossibility. When I came to Boulder, I found the district's kitchen facilities, like those of most school districts, in a state of disrepair or inadequate for cooking with fresh ingredients. I had refrigeration, heating, serving, and cooking equipment installed in numerous locations, and I had five regional kitchens remodeled so they could provide the fresh-cooked food for the district. Building, rebuilding, or retrofitting cooking facilities is a mandatory part of making school food systems healthier.
Challenge 3: Financing
U.S. public schools need more money to adequately finance their breakfast and lunch programs. Currently, the federal reimbursement rate is $2.72 per lunch; in addition, all districts receive 19.5 cents more per child if they buy commodities foods. Most schools spend less than $1 on food per child per day, with the rest of the money being spent for staffing and organizational costs. If the amount spent were increased to $1.50 per child per day, we could feed kids healthy food. Think about it; many of us spend more on our daily coffee (a large latte often costs $5.00) than most schools allocate for a week's worth of student meals.
In Boulder, we have reduced our costs by buying whole ingredients and cooking from scratch, which cost less for us than buying processed foods. Moving to five production kitchens has shortened the time we need to prepare the food, and thus lessened our staffing costs.
Challenge 4: Human Resources
Most of today's school kitchen workers lack adequate food-service training— something we had to tackle in Boulder before change was possible. We provided uniforms and culinary training programs for our school food workers. We developed guides for professionalism, pay scales, new job descriptions, and staff configurations—all essentials for running safe and healthy kitchens.
Challenge 5: Marketing
It's one thing to make the food, another to get kids to eat it. Many successful school lunch programs around the United States employ traditional marketing techniques that treat children as potential customers; they "sell" the food. Attractive advertising, packaging, and service have been shown to increase consumption of a larger variety of school lunch foods. A marketing campaign both supports and augments nutrition education as part of the basic curriculum. "Big food" spends $20 billion a year marketing nonnutritious food to children (Brownell & Warner, 2009). Schools need to focus on marketing school food as cool food. In Boulder, we hold fun events like an annual Iron Chef competition for our high school cooking classes. We add the winning meal to our menu for the next school year.
If we're going to positively affect the health of our children, and our children's children, then we must demand the following actions:
- Offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. Healthy school meals should be a birthright in the United States.
- Make school meals a public health initiative and equate healthy school food with long-term health.
- Raise the federal reimbursement rate for lunch by $1.00, with a sliding scale based on local demographics.
- Raise the dietary guidelines to ensure that, for example, chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk, and canned fruit cocktail isn't a reimbursable meal. Eliminate highly processed and nonnutritional foods from school meals.
- Promote fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
- Institute farm-to-school programs and hands-on cooking and gardening programs nationally.
- Dedicate federal funds to rebuild school kitchens.
- Provide federal funding for culinary "boot camps" to train school food service staff to cook real food.
We need to make the health of our children and our food supply a priority. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we do all this we might save our children and the health of the planet as well.
