When I first started researching school lunch in earnest, I had the pleasure of stumbling across The Slow Cook, a blog written by former Washington Post writer, now personal chef and urban farmer, Ed Bruske.
The Slow Cook is broad in scope, covering everything from the local food movement, sustainability, and even, in Ed’s own words, “the fate of planet earth.” But what drew me to The Slow Cook were two multi-part series, each written from inside actual school lunch kitchens.
The first takes place in the kitchen of Ed’s daughter’s public school in DC, operated by a huge food services company (Chartwells-Thompson). The second is written from a cook-from-scratch school kitchen in the heart of Alice Waters country — the same school district in Berkeley, CA where Chef Ann first revolutionized school lunch.
Reading the DC series completely resonated with me. Everything Ed described (crates of processed, chemically preserved “scrambled eggs,” for example) was all too familiar to me after having had the chance to tour Houston ISD’s huge central cooking facility, operated by Aramark (another behemoth in the food service world). While Aramark is making strides in my district toward more scratch cooking, I saw, as Ed did, that school meals are often
constructed around foods that have been heavily processed and reconstituted in distant factories, then shipped pre-cooked and frozen. Meal components have been industrially designed to require the least amount of time and minimal skill to prepare. It’s all part of an institutionalized effort to hold down costs–especially labor costs, which constitute half the cost of school food service–and squeeze school meals into tight local food budgets that hinge on subsidy payments from the federal government.
What I liked about the Berkeley posts, on the other hand, is that they aren’t sugar-coated. While Ed’s descriptions of school chefs chopping up fresh cilantro and ginger might make you cry if you live in a huge, urban district like my own, it’s not all rosy. For example, even the possibly-more-enlightened kids in Berkeley often turn up their noses at what sound like beautifully executed vegetable side dishes, either refusing to take them in the lunch line or dumping them in the trash (actually, in the compost pail, since this is Berkeley, after all). And it’s clear from Ed’s detailed reporting that a place like Berkeley has advantages — a much smaller student population and additional funding — that my own district does not.
In this age rapid-fire Internet surfing, taking the time to read two multi-part series might seem a bit daunting, but I felt it was well worth it. For the same reason I wrote the School Lunch FAQ’s on this site (see tab above), reading Ed’s posts will help parents who want to effectuate change to first understand the realities of government constraints on school lunch programs and what’s actually happening on the ground.
Happy reading. (And, by the way, if you live in the DC area, you’ll also want to check out Ed’s other blog, Better DC School Food.)
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Bettina Elias Siegel
Mendy says
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time…I wish there was a way to get school kitchen workers (and also teachers, secretaries, and other school employees) more involved in the school lunch fiasco!
I know these people work hard and they are underpaid, but lots of people work hard and are underpaid. Most of the jobs that involve working with kids do not pay well (day care workers, school cafeteria workers, school secretaries, teacher aides, teachers, etc.), but I think we can assume most of the people who take these jobs like and care about kids – kitchen workers included. I’ve had jobs where I made minimum wage or a little more than minimum wage, and I still cared about the work I did and how it affected others. Right now I teach in the one of the lowest paying districts in my state – does that give me a right to say, “I don’t get paid very much and that’s not right, so I don’t really care if what I’m doing is good for kids.” ???
I think a lot of school cafeteria workers know that the food they are serving (or selling through a la carte windows) isn’t good for kids, but they don’t know what to do about it or they don’t care. A lot of them need their job to support their families, but for some it is the work schedule and hours that draw them to work in the school cafeteria. Everyone who has a job (especially right now) wants to keep that job, but if something is going on where you work that isn’t right – I don’t care how much money you make or how scared you are – you’ve got to help fix it. And if you work in a school and it involves the health and well-being of kids, then you’ve REALLY got to help fix it.
Unless you live under rock, you have to know about the health crisis (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc.) our country is facing. Maybe I’m expecting too much, but if enough people working in the schools would acknowledge this problem and help – I think we could get it fixed!
Kristin says
I hate to say it, but I think you may be painting too rosey a picture. I think that often, not always, people take jobs involving children because for the most part they do not require any education, thus the low wage. It is not always because they are searching for the ideal career. Therefore you may not find these workers care all that much for what they are doing. A lot of them may have been raised on the same type of food and see nothing wrong with it.
It is a sad statement that the jobs involving children are so low-paying. It certainly tells us where our priorities are. However, I know Slow Food USA was campaigning to change the Child Nutrition Act and provide more money and training for school food workers. If more training and wages were available for these jobs, it will attract those types of people you are speaking of and perhaps then you will see change. The best way to make this happen is to support these types of changes — write your representatives and vote.
Lenee Theriault says
Many years ago, I was the cafeteria ‘lunch lady’ at my son’s school. I’m well educated (college degree), love good, clean, organic food, and have worked in many fields within the food industry. I took the job so I could be home with my kids when they were out of school, and be on the same schedule with them throughout the year. I was extremely over-qualified for the position, and got the job because I had some computer knowledge and was hired to implement and train our district to use a new computer program to be used in our cafeterias.
I was appalled at what I was required to feed the kids daily. Thank goodness I had some control over the ordering and would lean toward the more healthy options available to me, and I learned to move very quickly in my food prep to get these healthier options done in time for the 2 meals I served each day. But for the most part, my hands were tied, and the guidelines I was required to follow were laughable, to say the least. And this was a new, healthier option than what the school had been using in the years prior to my employment.
We would have meetings with our supplier’s nutritionist, and we would brainstorm healthier options with her, and she was really great with implementing them, but trying to win a battle within the school community was the most daunting task I had ever faced. It was the most powerful, back-stabbing, senseless bureaucracy I had ever been exposed to. And if you were to call them on it, express an opinion, try to implement change that interfered with people deemed more important than yourself, or display a voice of reason, they were really good about finding loopholes to ‘let someone go.’ I saw this firsthand with 2 employees in the district. This is one system where the squeaky wheel does not get the grease. Instead, you lose your job on fabricated accusations that are impossible to fight. Again, I saw this firsthand. Needless to say, my boss did NOT like me. I’m too outspoken and opinionated.
Most of the people I worked with cared about these kids and what we were feeding them. Most were educated and only doing this job to be on the same schedule as their kids, like I was. Many needed this job much more than I did, and over the years learned to keep their mouths shut about their concerns for fear of being let go on ‘bogus charges,’ as they had all witnessed it in the past.
I thought this may have been unique to our district, but in talking to each kitchen manager and their assistants as I made my rounds to the schools within the district to conduct my training, I found that many who had been doing this longer had worked for many different districts and found the same or similar conditions within those school bureaucracies.
Many years later, I worked for another company as an independent contractor. My job was to try and set up appointments with the school or district webmasters–a variety of teachers, principals, vice principles, web specialists, and parents– to introduce a web program developed by a colleague that could be used as an invaluable tool for communication among students, teachers, parents and the community. Talk about pulling teeth! Good thing I had some knowledge of what I was up against, and once I was able to get my foot in the door at a few schools and districts, my job got a bit easier. I had some support from the inside and it was easier to get these people to trust me when they saw we had a great product. BTW, the company is thriving now and has many, many districts on board, but getting there was quite a battle.
My point is, I dealt with hundreds of schools and dozens of districts all over my state, and the fear and reluctance displayed by someone in a position deemed higher than a food service worker on the totem pole was rampant and extremely evident! “What? Go against policy? Make a change for the better? Try and redirect funds to something I know will be great for our school, but now I must convince those in power of this? What?!” AND, we were offering a full YEAR of our service for free with no obligation to sign up if the school didn’t like it! And most people were still shaking in there boots at the thought of having to convince their superiors of this. I had the opportunity to pick a few brains and ask a few questions regarding the policies within the schools and districts, and found many faced the same frustrations and situations I faced when working within the school.
People tend to have the attitude that those working in food service are uneducated, unintelligent, unmotivated, and not worth listening to, especially within the school districts. The lunch lady label is almost an embarrassment, believe me. Although, I try to embrace it as an important sacrifice I made for my kids! Hahaha! Within the field, you learn to keep your mouth shut if you really need that job and know you could lose it if you make any waves. Of course there are exceptions to this, but I really wish people would stop judging a book by its cover, so to speak. You don’t know that person’s story and what led them to that particular job. Do I sound uneducated and uncaring! I’m here to say that most people I worked with felt the same way I did.
So please understand, the responsibility of change can NOT be left in the hands of the food service workers. We were literally put down in the lowest position on the totem pole, lower than the crossing guards, lunch and recess supervisors, and janitors, regarding pay scale. I don’t say this to knock the other positions, as they are all very valuable too. I say this to prove a point. People deem their childrens’ health and well-being very important, pay those who protect that through supervision, traffic safety, and cleanliness better than those who provide the fuel and nutrition needed to sustain a healthy child. Then they refuse to listen, and sometimes dispose of, those who see a problem, or who have access to a solution or better alternative.
PARENTS must be the ones who speak up and demand change. Because there are those of us in food service who have tried, but we are not respected for having a brain in our heads, or original thoughts an ideas that could benefit our most precious resource. And it’s difficult to live day to day banging your head against a brick wall.
Okay, off my soapbox……
Disclaimer: I understand the above opinion is just that, an opinion. It is based on my personal experience, and my experience alone. But please take into consideration that my experience has covered contact with schools in nearly a full state, a large and very populous state. Of course there will be exceptions to the so-called ‘rule’ I’ve stated. I’m sure someone will read this and say, “Not at MY school/district!” I get it. Really. There were some schools where I didn’t have these problems, but more often than not, I regularly encountered these issues.
Katie says
Not only is the food bad nutritionally, but most of it is completely disgusting. When I start this year, the first lunch I can get is a “Haddock Fish Sandwich w/Cheese
tossed salad w/SD drsg
Luigi ice or canned fruit choice”
Isn’t that great! And last year for like 3 months at the beginning and a month towards the end all we had was cheese burgers, pizza, or way too sweet yogurt parfait. There are no vegetarian/vegan options other than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but they use white bread for that and most if the white or itallian breads I’ve seen have animal fat in the ingredients.