Eleanor Su of California Watch published a piece late last week reporting that 60% of California schools reviewed in the last five years failed to meet at least one federal nutritional requirement for school meals, with some schools significantly out of compliance with respect to saturated fat and recommended sodium levels.
But the report is worth reading not just for these findings but as an excellent overview of the many challenges schools face in trying to serve healthful meals on limited budgets, often with inadequate cooking facilities, and with a student population that often rejects healthier fare.
Check it out here.
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Dana Woldow says
There are several versions of this story which include details about various school districts relevant to the area in which the version appears; this one,
http://tinyurl.com/7caenfd
from the Bay Citizen (focusing more narrowly on the SF Bay area) includes this about San Francisaco’s school meals:
“Virtually every hot cafeteria meal served to students in the San Francisco Unified School District – from the mac and cheese to the bean-and-cheese burritos – is a reheated frozen entree. The food is prepared at a processing plant in Illinois before it’s shipped across the country.
“San Francisco Unified lacks the kitchen equipment and space to prepare meals from scratch. But it pushes its food processor to provide healthy meals made with whole grains. The district met every nutrient requirement in its last state inspection.
“Many districts mirror San Francisco’s reliance on processed food. About 72 percent of California high schools serve reheated processed meals more than half the time, according to recent research by Woodward-Lopez. Shifting to more fresh vegetables and fruits and healthier preparation techniques will require sinks, steamers and other equipment that schools don’t have and can’t afford.”
The most important (to me) part of this section is buried there in the middle: ” The district met every nutrient requirement in its last state inspection.”
That’s no mean feat, given that the article mentions 4 out of 5 California school districts exceed the sodium limit, and that only 7% of schools nationwide are meeting all nutrition standards.
It’s also worth mentioning that while the article says that SFUSD serves only frozen reheated meals, that is not exactly true. The meals served at elementary are the frozen meals, but the middle and high schools increasingly are offering sandwiches and a daily special made fresh that day. These items are always more popular than the frozen meals also being offered.
For more on the challenges of improving school food, including what helps and what doesn’t, please read:
http://tinyurl.com/6q9h88n
EdT. says
One item worth noting: the reliance on “processed” (vs. fresh, local-sourced) foods is probably essential for large, urban school districts – especially those not located right next to large areas of farmland currently under cultivation. This is one of the paradoxes of how we “do” agriculture, we have converted large amounts of cultivatable land to housing, pushing the farms further away from us, and increasing our dependence on large agri-business and food processing industries to make sure we get the food we need.
This may change, the day that fuel for transportation becomes prohibitively expensive – but until that day comes, simply adding money/equipment/staff training will not be enough to reverse this trend.
This does not, of course, mean we shouldn’t try, nor that we shouldn’t take advantage of fresh, locally-sourced food where we can.
~EdT.
Dana Woldow says
“Local” is an interesting term which, so far as I know, has never been precisely defined. When I was first working on school food in 2002, we defined “local”, for purposes of our Wellness Policy, as being “within California”, because at that time, we were mostly looking to avoid reliance on, for example, fruit brought in from the other hemisphere (that’s where those peaches you see in the grocery store in January are coming from), or too much produce from Mexico or other countries where pesticides which had been banned in the US were being dumped.
Oakland (CA) defines “local” as being from within 250 miles, an area which extends pretty much down to the southernmost part of the San Joaquin valley, and encompasses plenty of “real” farmland.
Some purists believe that “local” means within 30 miles, or 50. Some want the food grown right there on school grounds. I do think it would help the movement toward using more “local” food if everyone could agree on what that term meant.
mommm!!! says
I think local can be a few things rather than just one thing. I don’t think being 100 miles away over 30 miles away makes one product more “local” that another one. And I don’t know of anyone that thinks of “local” in those terms. We generally assume that local = in the vicinity.
EdT. says
While it would be nice, I am not sure that standardizing on a definition for “local” is either practical or really desirable. For some people (rural California or Iowa, for example) local might mean “across the street”, while for someone in Dutch Harbor AK, local might mean “it can fit on the airplanes that will land on our runway”. And, I would even say we probably try to resist some over-arching federal mandate around how much “local content” is present in the school lunches (as this would just encourage folks to re-define the term so they could meet the mandate: see also “nutritional guidelines”.)
I am personally of the opinion that local means just that – grown in the local area, such that the farmer can easily deliver it to the customer. Which, for Texas, probably means within several hundred miles (or El Paso, once Houston annexes Midland/Odessa – sometime around 2030 or so.) To me, the closer the better – but it is OK to leave yourself an out, for example under a “local source only” model I suspect our kids would not eat a whole lot of stuff – but they would have plenty of beef (but no LFTB! Yea!) and butter and corn chips.
What “local” means, however, would make for some interesting discussions!
~EdT.
Dana Woldow says
Defining “local” becomes important when it is part of the contract with the produce vendor. If a district wants “local” produce, but they don’t define what “local” means, then the vendor is legitimately able to supply produce from pretty much anywhere in North America and still say it is “local.” That why Oakland says “250 miles”; at least that way they know they won’t get anything from Mexico, or out of state.
mommm!!! says
Why leave it up to the vendor then? Schools could always follow the sustainable restaurant model which is rather than depending on a distributor to source foodstuffs for them, they went directly to the farms and said, “Hey, we want to but food from you because we like local and we like your farming practices. Any farmer will tell you, “If you buy it we will grow it.” Ask any one of them.
Dana Woldow says
If you read the article I linked to above
http://tinyurl.com/6q9h88n
you will see why San Francisco doesn’t contract directly with farmers – because our nutrition department office is so short staffed that there is no one to go out and “forage” for produce, meet with the farmers or manage the contracts. Additionally, our kitchens are so ill equipped that there is literally nowhere to clean and prep fresh fruit or veggies in most schools.
Running a school food service is far more complicated than most people realize, but here is a basic rule of thumb – if your great suggestion begins with the words “Why don’t they just…”, you are probably not the first person to have thought of it, and if it isn’t happening, there is probably a good reason why. That doesn’t mean we should give up on trying to make these things happen; it just means that it is harder than you might realize.
mommm!!! says
Weird, because I was under the impression that there was an entire summer available to people who work in the school district. And it wouldn’t be hard to reach out to parents and or teachers to help “forage”. Also, farmers could be invited to the school, which would certainly help ease time constraints. It wouldn’t be that hard to ask farmers to deliver clean produce in light of a kitchen’s shortcomings. You see, there are answers to dilemmas, you just have to ask people the questions rather than say “we can’t do it and you’ll never understand why.”
If there is equipment to reheat frozen foods there is no reason why that same equipment can’t be used to heat vegetables. Serving whole pieces of fruit doesn’t require any prepping at all.
Where there is a will there is a way. I’m from the “We Can Do It” school of thought, however. I don’t believe in “can’t”. I think it’s easy to point to all the flaws, but it takes ingenuity to rethink broken systems and then change them.
Dana Woldow says
Well, I hate to pop your pretty bubble, but you are misinformed on several counts. First, you seem to be under the impression that everyone who works for a school district just sits at their desk all summer with their feet up, perhaps reading a trashy novel. School district continues to feed students through summer school, and also through Seamless Summer Feeding programs.
Summer is also the time that contracts get renegotiated, meal applications are printed and distributed to schools, improvements to cafeterias are carried out, new staff is hired to replace those who retired at the end of the school year, planning for the upcoming school year is finalized, and yes, most admins do take 2 weeks off, which I am sure you do not begrudge them. No one is sitting around on their butt.
Re farmers delivering “clean” produce to the schools – no one delivers anything for free in San Francisco. The city is far too inaccessible, traffic is a nightmare, parking is well-nigh impossible. Do you really imagine that farmers have the time to spend driving their farm fresh crops around to the 111 school sites in our city? Certainly anyone who would be willing to make even a weekly delivery would not do so for free.
Further, few if any farmers have the necessary space or manpower to process the quantities our schools need. We are doing 22,000 lunches a day.
Our schools are already serving much fresh produce, and the kids get fresh fruit twice on most days (breakfast and lunch.) Our kids love the fresh produce they get on the salad bars, and individually wrapped in the schools without salad bars.
I have to ask – how much time have you spent working on school food reform? I’ve been doing it for 10 years.
Ever try to prep lunch for visiting dignitaries in an ancient urban school kitchen? I have – and it totally sucks.
The idea of cooking vegetables in the creaky old rethermalization ovens which are all most of our schools have to reheat meals is laughable. Have you ever even seen one?
Do you ever talk to anyone running a school meal program, or sourcing produce for 22,000 meals a day? How is it that you feel qualified to make such sweeping blanket statements and wrap it all up with your simple homily of “Where there’s a will, there’s a way?”
mommm!!! says
There’s no need to be hostile. And I’m very familiar with all the logistical challenges that exist in SF. Even with all of the existing road blocks that you post about there are solutions. It just takes a different approach to the challenges. I’m not ignorant to the process just because I am not employed in a school cafeteria. However, don’t make like there is no time for them. Because there is plain and simple.
Dana Woldow says
As you say you are very familiar with all of the challenges to running the school meal program in SF, I wonder if you have a solution to propose to one of the largest barriers to improving the food – that is, the enormous bite that labor costs takes out of the nutrition budget. Our salaries here are among the highest in the nation – with lowest paid caf workers starting at over $14/hr (although pretty much all workers in this category are already at top step of over $19/hr) and going up as high as $29/hr, plus benefits which add 44% for those who receive them.
Despite our higher labor costs, SF receives the same government reimbursement as districts where the labor cost is half of ours. Contract negotiations are ongoing, so I would love to have your suggestons for how we can get these costs under control.
mommm!!! says
Ed, actually urban farming is not hard to do. Also, urban farming could be applied to any school in the country and frankly, it’s a travesty to me that more school don’t do it. Urban farms teach us a lot of things like sustainability, seasonality (is that even a word?), engineering, agriculture, and relationships in nature as well as getting people actually connected to food and where food comes from.
Have you ever looked at any tree planted at any school and wondered why they aren’t fruit or nut trees? Have you ever looked at any ornamental shrub and thought….They could have planted a blueberry bush instead? Farming does not have to actually happen “on a farm”. In fact, there are urban farms popping up all over the United States. It’s time to rethink our definitions of what farming actually is.
My son is fortunate enough to have gardens at both his school and the Boys And Girls Club. Granted, they are both learning gardens, in the sense that they are more like a backyard home garden, but it’s SOMEthing. And he’s learned to grow things I didn’t even know about…..like dinosaur lettuce! (which he insisted that we eat when he brought some home)
mommm!!! says
Dana,
There was no option to reply under your post, so I’m starting over down here. By the way, I found this…
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/29/school.food.investigation/index.html
….and I applaud what you’ve done! It sounds to me like you ARE a person (from the above story) that ALSO thinks where there is a will there is a way.
In regards to labor contracts…YIKES. Those go well beyond the scope of any problem solving that could possibly be handled in a food blog. If it were me, I would make a serious stab at weaseling in an urban garden. And it doesn’t have to be necessarily located on school grounds, either (although how cool would that be….perhaps a pilot program like mentioned in the above article I read?) There are many longtime professional urban gardening engineers that I think would help you and advise you to present a concise plan. Because 30 bucks an hour should be getting you SOMEthing. The other thing is that I would hunt down someone that has union negotiations expertise that is willing to be on YOUR side. I know the cost of living is pretty high in SF, but 30 bucks an hour? To operate a microwave? Sheesh. And this is where the media might be able to help. Although, the idea of being cast as someone villainous in the media by asking that those wages be reconsidered is a dodgy proposition and not for delicate flowers. Lastly, I would arm myself with an arsenal of the above mentioned, rather than trying one thing and then something else. This way they will have a harder time of shooting you down on a single idea. If you come in with a group of “experts” willing to “help the kids” you might have a better shot of getting some leverage and it could be a positive media spin rather than a “down with evil unions” spin (which would zap the energy and focus out of making positive changes). Does anyone have Jamie Oliver’s phone number? lol!
Dana Woldow says
I wouldn’t say that I believe that where there is a will, there is a way. I would say that I choose my battles wisely, and that I do not believe in magical thinking. I tackle problems for which there are reasonable solutions, and I don’t just insist that everything can be fixed if we all just keep clicking the heels of our ruby slippers together.
SFUSD has loads of school gardens, but as I am sure you know, these serve better as instructional tools than as sources for fresh produce in the cafeterias. Schools each serving hundreds of meals daily cannot possibly have their produce needs met by the yield from a schoolyard garden.
At best, the harvest of salad greens (for example) can make a nice big salad that every student in one classroom can enjoy as part of a class lesson (and here the teacher’s creativity comes into play – the lesson can be math, with the kids figuring what percentage of the salad is romaine and what percent arugula, or it can be science, or even spelling.) But that is not the same thing as serving veggies from the school garden in every school lunch every day for 176 school days.
That said, I am a huge supporter of school gardens as teaching tools (because it is the quickest and most fun way to introduce kids to, and interest them in tasting, veggies they may not already know.) School gardens also provide restful spaces for kids who are easily overwhelmed/overstimulated by too much classroom time. They can attract butterflies and birds, both of which I love, and so do the kids. They are just plain nice to have around! But I would never dream of proposing that cafeterias get their produce from their school garden – even at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley (arguably the most famous school garden in the world, and certainly one of the most extensive) the cafeteria is not being stocked daily from the garden.
There is already a thriving urban agriculture movement in SF (beyond school gardens) but again, this is not necessarily a source for school cafeterias. There is no urban garden/farm in this dense city that could alone supply the needs for over 22,000 meals daily. Each additional farm brought into the mix requires it own contract, and someone to oversee that contract. This is a project I handled for a year as a volunteer when my own son’s school got a USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable program grant a few years ago. We were bringing in only about 1,000 pieces of fruit twice a week, and yet it took up an enormous amount of my time, between ordering, tracking the paperwork, filling out the endless forms to get paid, making sure the fruit was delivered on time to be sent to classrooms, and then there were the 6:30 am calls from the school when the delivery was late….and the time when our supplier suddenly went out of business over a weekend and we were left with no one to deliver the fruit….seriously, I appreciate your “can do” attitude, but until you have actually performed some of the jobs which you seem to think take no time at all, you really are not in a position to insist that you “know” that there is sufficient time for our poor overworked nutrition director to carry out all of your schemes.
As to your labor suggestions – I am not even going to go there. Suffice it to say that the school district handles labor negotiations. This is not something where volunteers can be involved.
Oh, and SFUSD student nutrition services does not own or operate a single microwave.
mommm!!! says
Ok I’ll leave you to it.
Monika says
That ‘free soda coupons’ commercial under this article puzzles me… 🙂
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Oh, no – seriously? I’m on it.