The school food news is coming in so fast and furious this week, a blogger can’t keep up! But while we’re all mulling the depressing thought of pizza continuing to qualify as a school food vegetable, let’s revisit a more promising story (on which I reported a little bit already): the introduction of antibiotic-free chicken in the Chicago Public Schools (“CPS”).
To recap, CPS recently announced that it made a landmark purchase of 1.2 million pounds of local, whole-muscle chicken raised without antibiotics, the result of a months-long collaboration between CPS, School Food FOCUS, the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, Whole Foods, Miller Poultry, Michigan State University and Healthy Schools Campaign. When combined with another large purchase of whole-muscle chicken (and to correct my previous post, this second batch of chicken came from USDA and was not necessarily raised without antibiotics), CPS has enough frozen chicken to serve scratch-cooked chicken entrees in 473 schools, two to three times a month, throughout the current school year. In its most recent newsletter, FOCUS reports that “the new chicken has been a huge hit, with participation already going up on the days it is menued.”
Any way you look at it, this is really good news: fewer highly processed and par-fried chicken nuggets and patties on lunch trays, and significant support for a farm willing to raise livestock without antibiotics, a practice that may well be undermining the medicinal use of such drugs and contributing to the rise of dangerous “superbugs.”
I did, however, have some follow-up questions for FOCUS about the new chicken to find out if this initiative is replicable in other districts. In one of its public statements, FOCUS had said the antibiotic-free chicken costs “a few pennies more,” but a few pennies can add up significantly in a large, urban district like Chicago. To answer my questions, FOCUS put me in touch with Kathryn Colasanti of the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State. Here’s what she had to say:
You’re absolutely right that even pennies per student can add up quickly. Generally speaking, school food service directors often try to adjust their budgets to purchase slightly more expensive items by finding savings in other categories, so even if the cost for a particular item goes up, their total budget may not. It’s also possible that the additional cost for certain food items may be offset by increased revenue from larger numbers of students who choose to participate in the lunch program that day because of that particular food item. Anecdotally, CPS has observed that the scratch-cooked, bone-in chicken is extremely popular with the students and I’m sure they are hoping to attract more kids to the lunch line with this offering.
Colasanti also told me that CPS isn’t receiving any outside funding to purchase the chicken, although it did receive a stipend for participating in the FOCUS’s Learning Lab (more on the Learning Labs in my recent interview with FOCUS, here) and some “in-kind” assistance from the Pew Campaign, FOCUS and Michigan State, all of which helped in “the process of identifying opportunities for sourcing chicken produced with minimal and responsible use of antibiotics and distilling the science behind the issue.” And Whole Foods helped deliver the chicken to CPS, another form of in-kind assistance.*
I also asked whether the poultry farm was offering CPS any price break and was told:
We don’t have any reason to believe that Miller Poultry is offering CPS a low-ball price that will go up later. Though we are not privy to the financial records of the company, based on their interest in selling to CPS, in continuing to expand the volume of those sales and expanding to other districts, we are assuming that the CPS program is in the financial interest of Miller Poultry. That said, it’s certainly possible that CPS could be outbid in the future by other buyers who can more easily pass on the costs to the final consumer. In other words, if the restaurant industry decided it wanted to start buying ABF drumsticks in massive quantities, the current situation could change dramatically.
Finally, I asked about labor costs. As we’ve talked about before on TLT, preparing school food from scratch demands more and sometimes better skilled labor, and this is especially true when we’re talking about the handling of potentially dangerous raw proteins like chicken. Colasanti responded:
CPS has had to develop new training programs, including a training video, to move to raw protein. This was not in place previously, but they see this as an investment in the continued improvement of their school meals program.
So the answer seems to be, yes, CPS did receive outside assistance that has a monetary value (e.g., the cost of transporting the chicken*, personnel costs in figuring out how to source it, etc.) and it also incurred up-front costs in staff training, and presumably will incur higher labor costs from here on out, to the extent whole chicken is being prepped, sauced and cooked vs. someone throwing nuggets into a warmer. Without access to CPS’s books I can’t say whether, if all of these costs were taken into account, there would be some adverse impact to its food services budget, but it’s hard for me to believe that there wouldn’t be.
That said, this initiative has also led to the creation of resources that could help ease the way for other districts wanting to follow suit, specifically, new purchasing guidelines and a sample RFP (request for proposal) for sourcing antibiotic-free poultry. (Those documents and a link to a webinar on how to use them are here.) And in my prior post about this development, I saw that a representative from ChoiceLunch, a private school food catering business, noted in a comment that with CPS in the picture, it might be easier to obtain antibiotic- and hormone-free meats from suppliers.
I’m looking forward to the day when kids all over the country will be able to trade in their nuggets for drumsticks. It’s going to take promising initiatives like this one to get that ball rolling, and the efforts of the many organizations involved in bring it to fruition should be applauded. But I also think it’s an inescapable fact that going from nugget to drumstick nationwide is going to cost more money; sadly, given this week’s pizza = vegetable scandal, it doesn’t look like Congress is going to come through with that any time soon.
[Ed Update: Kathryn Colasanti just informed me that she was mistaken when she told me that Whole Foods is transporting the chicken; in fact, CPS is doing that on its own.]
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Sophie Johnson says
Wouldn’t be nice if the media focused more on these types of innovations, rather than beating *only* the pizza as a veggie drum? More can be learned from this! Thanks, Bettina!
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Sophie – I know! I have more good news to report from my own district but stuff like this keeps pushing it off my posting schedule. Will get on it, and thanks for your comments on this story as someone who works on the inside of school food.
Sophie says
Let’s face it, the sourcing of antibiotic-free foods is not nearly as sexy as poking fun at the political system. It’s why us bloggers have to change our game, because those are the things people want to talk about. You rock, as always, Bettina!