Monthly Archives: June 2010

Summer plans

I decided against being an actual lunch lady (instead I’m going to do something else see bottom). I hope that doesn’t disappoint you guys too much. It was a great idea but here’s why it’s not feasable:

1) Exhaustion

I’m wrecked. The blog project has been a huge undertaking in addition to all my other responsibilities. I’m not getting a lot of sleep and I’m not eating that great (ahem). I need to rest, to eat right, and to exercise. It became obvious over the past month or so that I don’t have the energy to actually work through the summer.

2) Childcare

Our budget can’t cover full-time childcare during the summer. Plus I don’t want our kid to spend every day at daycare during the summer. It’s nice for us to have some time together at home and doing things in the community. We can afford a couple days a week of care so we’ll do that for socialization and for me to volunteer with kids.

3) Employment

I didn’t want to be an employee this summer (see number one). Working as a lunch lady is not about “the money” but instead it’s about the experience, which I can get as a volunteer. Plus an employee has to stick to a schedule and get vacations approved. Sorry to say but I’m going on vacation this summer. Do not try to stop me!

HOWEVER I’m going to be volunteering a couple days a week working with kids…and there will be food there too. But it’s not being a lunch lady. I’ll write a series about what I’m doing over the summer when I’m actually doing it.

To recap — my summer plans include:
1) Volunteering — to be detailed more in July and August
2) Being a cell phone journalist — (what I do best) taking pictures of children’s food environment and blogging about it
3) Being a Mommy — need I say more?
4) Taking a break  from school lunches!

And Wednesday is the last school day with students and Friday is my last day of work… So close! Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly….I’m still going to be paranoid until Friday rolls around!

Open thread: School lunch reformers

I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to interact with many different professionals devoting their working lives to changing school lunches. From what I can tell everyone wants change, but there seems to be a lot of fragmentation within the school food reform movement. There are many different viewpoints from chefs wanting to cook from scratch in every school to others merely desiring an increase in funds for school lunches. Who is your favorite reformer? Can we find middle ground to gain more momentum? Where do we start? (I’ll answer later in the comments — we have limited internet connectivity today…)

Day 98: pizza

Today’s menu: whole wheat pizza (not the “french bread” kind I usually have), carrots, fruit cup, milk

Now this sort of looks like what I imagine what prison food might be like. I walked to the cafeteria knowing that I would be getting pizza today and the thought of it made me queasy. Sometimes I don’t look at the menu for that extra “surprise” (also because many little kids don’t know how to read and so every lunch is unexpected for them). I got the cheese pizza instead of the “pepperoni” because I couldn’t face the little mini-squares of “meat.” I ripped open the top of the pizza box and this is what I saw. It’s on the “well done” side. (Should I do a prison scene with the pizza slice? Or is that overkill?)

I ate it and it was better than I suspected it would be (my taste buds have really changed dramatically, which I’m sad about). The carrots and the fruit cup went down too. I didn’t take a picture of my trash because I plain forgot. I’m rushing through lunch these days. On the bright side I think that’s my last school pizza until the Fall! I ate 17 pieces of school pizza this year…. Way more pizza than I ever normally eat. HOWEVER… I think I twittered about having a craving for pizza delivery a couple weeks ago. For me that was really quite odd since we get pizza delivered once every few years. But I got my wish earlier this week when we ordered two large pizzas because of a promotional flyer we got in the mail. Needless to say they were delicious. My favorite one was the bacon and black olive pizza. I’m sure it was bad for me, but it was so good. I’m really wondering what happened to me and if I can get back to normal one day.

***

I made an appointment to visit the doctor next week Friday (my last day of work — kids are done Wednesday). I’m going to have a discussion with him about the project and tell him I would like a follow-up blood test. I’m going to ask for a fasting glucose test to see how I process sugar as compared to my previous results. Going over my medical records, I realized that not only do I have the results of my blood work from 2009, but I have 2008 results too. Every year I submit to blood work and get a physical to receive a discount on our insurance. In December 2009, the doctor noted that my “good” cholesterol was low, but thankfully my overall cholesterol is in the normal range (my total cholesterol was 158 mg/dl in December 2009 and 164 in December 2008). I’m not worried about my cholesterol increasing with increased school lunch consumption (it seems like they aren’t very fatty), but I’m curious about my glucose (my glucose was 82 mg/dl in December 2009 AND the same number in December 2008). I’m anxious to see how I do this time around.

The most common question I get as it relates to school lunches is “Have you gained weight?” No. I have not gained weight. In fact I think I’m down two pounds from my “pre-project” weight. But I have become much more cognizant of what I’m eating in school and out. I read that if you keep a record of what you eat every day you have a good chance of losing weight. Well, this is one hell of a warped food diary.

***

Doing this blog project has changed my life. I’m going to spend a lot of my summer thinking about where I should go from here after the project ends. Thanks for reading and participating you guys! One of the coolest things about the project is that you have taught me things and the blog evolved in response to what you told me. For me it was very interactive especially in the beginning when I dived right in without a clue. All I knew was that what the kids at my school ate was bizarre and came in strange packages. It just didn’t feel like real food. Here I am 98 lunches later and I’m still processing this whole experience: what I eat every day and the “notoriety” of the blog. What a wild ride for one small person!

Part One: What have I learned? (so far)

1) The quality of school lunches has declined. I moved around a lot as a kid and was able to sample cafeteria fare from all over the country. I don’t remember a lot of those meals, but I always attended schools with functional kitchens. Some of my favorite school lunches were grilled cheese with tomato soup and turkey with mashed potatoes. And the school pizza from my childhood came off of large sheets and served by lunch ladies.

Of the food delivered to school cafeterias 95% is frozen to be reheated on site. School food corporations provide school lunches to hundreds of thousands of kids per day including the food I eat at my school. Cafeteria staff? There to pass out containers but not actually cook. The grilled cheese I enjoyed so much before? Now it’s encased and re-heated in plastic. It’s a processed cheese sandwich, which is no longer “grilled.” Tomato soup is a thing of the past.

2) The USDA guidelines are warped. Even after eating *almost* 100 school lunches, I still have a hard time understanding the strange regulations governing school lunches. For example, fries and tater tots count as vegetables (contrary to what you might have heard in the 1980’s, ketchup does not qualify as a vegetable). I realize that they do come from potatoes, but something seems to be wrong there. Because of rules like this, 46% of kids’ vegetable servings come from fries (Lunch Lessons, p. 74, Ann Cooper).

And what about fruit? The USDA thinks that a frozen juice bar (“icee”), a fruit cup, fruit jello cup, or a fruit juice cup equal a serving of fruit. Sorry to say but none of those options equal a piece of fresh fruit. When the kids see the fruit icees being served, they get excited. And with less than 20 minutes to eat (including lining up, getting your meal, sitting down and unwrapping packaging), kids have enough time to eat an “icee” and drink their milk. It’s no wonder that an hour after lunch the kids’ attention spans decline and they glaze over.
Additionally, the USDA requires more than five grains per week to be offered to students. That means that every week an extra package of pretzels, a cookie, or even an extra slice of bread is sitting on a lunch tray looking out of place. Because of this rule I eat odd combinations like yesterday’s rice with bread or a package of pretzels with a cheese sandwich. It doesn’t make sense.

3) Packaging and plastic are the norm. My school may use hard plastic trays, but that’s the only thing going through the dishwasher. Paper containers covered by plastic film, plastic sporks, and the occasional Styrofoam tray are used once and then thrown out to the order of hundreds of thousands every single day.

***

The project has taught me that our nation’s school lunch program is broken. I believe that it’s not a matter of increasing the funds: the National School Lunch Program needs to be re-engineered. We need a renewed emphasis on fresh food. We must invest in our “lunch ladies” and teach them how to cook properly. The current USDA guidelines need to change so that they make sense. Finally school cafeterias have to “go green” by returning to metal spoons, forks and real plates.

Hey, this is a big problem and the solution isn’t pretty. It’s going to be hard work. But the longer we wait, the higher the cost, the more barriers to change. We need to act now.

Day 97: chicken teriyaki

Today’s menu: chicken teriyaki, rice (with peas and egg), bread, carrots, fruit cup, milk

Yeah for rice! I’m shocked at how infrequently it appears in school lunches considering it’s a staple for billions of people every day. I guess that there isn’t much of a “rice lobby” in Washington. This serving of rice wasn’t enough to qualify as a grain so bread is offered. I’m telling you right now that rice is not a “second class” grain and it should not be served with bread. I know there are people who take issue with “white” rice instead of brown rice (I personally like brown rice more than white rice). Hey, I’m just pleased about a little variety… not wheat, wheat, wheat, corn, wheat…. day after day.
So I liked this meal. I ate it up even the fruit cup and I drank the fruit cup juice.

***

Trash is a big concern. I believe that the reason single use items are cheap is because the true cost of burying garbage is hidden. Where does your garbage go? Do you recycle? Does your workplace? Thinking about landfills is no fun, but I think if we want to be good citizens, we have to worry about this stuff. Illinois Landfill Capacity Reports (more info from IL state government).

Some states do great, but others don’t even try. For example, from what I know about Wisconsin, recycling is practically part of the culture. Illinois? Not so much. Should there be national recycling standards? Maybe there should be some kind of regional recycling contest to get residents excited about competing state by state?! Personally I’d love to see the state-by-state breakdown in recycling statistics, but I couldn’t find it online. But I found this though: EPA (search EPA databases to get more info about your community).

***
I’m going to have to do more fun stories about processed foods…thanks for your feedback!

Day 96: bagel dog

Today’s menu: bagel dog, tater tots, peach(!), cookie, milk

The lunch that started it all…the bagel dog meal that I ate last Fall was what got me thinking… The bagel dog that launched a thousand school lunch photos…

A commenter wanted to see some of the trash so I took some extra shots. I’ll try to do that again. I’m just pressed for time at lunch. Today there wasn’t as much trash as usual because the bagel dog was in a plastic wrapper versus a little container. The packaging is really part of the story. It’s just crazy to me how the packaging is cheaper than real plates and a commercial dishwasher. Of course there is a significant expense upfront, but doesn’t that dollar-cost-average out?

I think that’s a peach that I ate. I thought maybe it was a nectarine, but looking around online (I found out that there isn’t much difference between a nectarine and a peach genetically) I believe it was a peach. Of course I know you guys will correct me if I’m wrong. Whatever it was, it was good! Bring on new fruit!

***
An anonymous commenter mentioned he/she was “consistently disappointed by [my] lack of hard critique” of what I eat every day. Well. It is what it is. I’m not sure what else I can say. Should I be hopping mad day after day? I’m 96 meals into this. I’m a little fatigued.

But in an effort to “take no prisoners” (my words) I’m going to revise yesterday’s post: 
Me and a rib-b-que in an interrogation room Law-and-Order-style. At a steel table, I am staring down a processed beef patty aka Mr. Rib-b-que.
Mrs. Q shuffling papers: “I have ways to make you talk.”
titanium spork gleams from side of the padded room.
Mr. Rib-b-que nervously: “I didn’t think I would be caught.”
Mrs. Q matter of factly: “There’s a new sheriff in town and alls yous guys better watch yourselves. That goes double for Mr. Cheese Lasagna.”
beat
Mrs. Q pointedly: “What were you doing on a kid’s tray today?”
Mr. Rib-b-que sneering: “Someone put me there.”
Mrs. Q, dubious: “Likely story –” Mrs. Q grabs Mr. Rib-b-que and hurls him against the wall.
Mr. Rib-b-que starts crying
beat
Mrs. Q walks over to Mr. Rib-b-que and picks him up by the “ribs” and presses him against the wall
Mrs. Q inches from Mr. Rib-b-que: “I don’t want you hanging around kids anymore. You’re a bad influence. And you smell.”
Mrs. Q drops Mr. Rib-b-que on the floor she says, “I’m fed up with your kind.”
Mrs. Q’s heels click as she walks towards the door and slams it.
Mr. Rib-b-que is a mess on the floor.

Oh that was fun!

Day 95: rib-b-que *grain forgotten*

Today’s menu: “rib-b-que,” beans, peach fruit cup, milk, (buns forgotten!)

No buns were grabbed for this post (juvenile humor…couldn’t resist). So whole wheat buns were offered, but I was in a rush and I didn’t get them. I know the picture of the “rib-b-que” looks awful…but I have to say that when I opened the package up, the aroma that filled the room was not bad. It smelled meaty. Its taste was…passable and the baked beans were ok. The beans didn’t taste bland to me like they used to. Makes you wonder about my tastebuds….they might not be that reliable. Even though I ate everything today, I wouldn’t want my kid to eat this meal. Processed beef is not for us.

***
I first got a cell phone about 10 years ago. It was a very basic Nokia model and it just sat in my car for me to use “in emergencies.” Talking on a cell phone was not something I really did. We had a landline at home and we used that to talk to faraway family and friends. After about two to three years I upgraded to a flip phone and I thought it was “cool.” The phone did not have a camera as that was just coming out at the time I deemed that totally unnecessary. We started using our phones to call after 7 pm when we had “free” minutes.

When I did finally get a camera phone a few year later, I took a few pictures of family so I could program family members photos with their numbers. I also took a couple shots of nature for my phone’s background. Then I upgraded to a phone with a texting keyboard because I got into texting with my friends and my family (though not my husband because he’s just not into that). I loved that phone so much and took tons of pictures that I emailed to my facebook account and to family members. My photos consisted of the family and funny things I saw out in the world.

Finally earlier this year I made the jump to a “smart” phone. Switching phones while the blog project was underway was challenging, but an advanced phone is an absolute must. There’s no way I could manage this blog project without having instant access to the internet. I also really love taking pictures with it as you can see.

Ten years ago no one really “blogged” or took cell phone pictures and posted them online. And no one “twittered.” It’s like a whole new world. I never thought I’d be a undercover-cell-phone-school-food-journalist. But here I am.

Oh and this summer I plan on taking pictures related to our food culture (mostly screwed up food-related advertising to children) and posting them to the blog. I’ve already gathered up some very interesting photos.
***

In regards to my bashing of mashed potato flakes on Friday, I just want to say that I buy little red potatoes that I do not peel. I wash them, boil them, and mash them with their skins on. Peeling potatoes is something I try to avoid doing.

Guest blogger: The Slow Cook, Ed Bruske

Ed Bruske, the author of The Slow Cook blog, is a personal chef and master gardener and teaches “food appreciation” at a private elementary school in the District of Columbia. He also blogs at Better D.C. School Food.
Can you name a federal program that provides vital services to 10 percent of the U.S. population every day, yet has not a single reporter from the mainstream media assigned to cover it on a sustained basis?
That would be the federal school meals $12 billion program, which feeds some 31 millions kids across the country Monday through Friday. As best I can determine, there is only one journalist who is investigating this program in any depth: me.
And I don’t even get paid to do it.
This sad state of affairs says less about me, I think, than the ambivalent attitude with which most Americans regard school food. I fell into this role by accident. Before assuming the mantle of School Food Crusader, I was minding my own business, composting and growing tomatoes and collards in my kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House, and writing about it on my blog, The Slow Cook. A Washington Post reporter in a previous life, I quite innocently one day asked permission to observe the kitchen operations at my 10-year-old daughter’s elementary school after I learned that Chartwells, the company hired by D.C. Public Schools to provide food service, was preparing food “fresh cooked.”
That, I thought, would be something for my blog: seeing food cooked from scratch at school. Boy was I in for a surprise. The first day, I watched the kitchen manager pull five-pound bags of something called “beef crumbles” out of the walk-in freezer. Made in a factory in Cincinnati from government surplus ground beef and processed soy protein, the “crumbles” were an odd, grayish color that looked to me like baker’s chocolate. She dumped them in a steamer for a few minutes, then stirred in some off-colored tomato sauce out of a can along with curly egg noodles also cooked in the steamer and some pre-shredded cheddar cheese.
Voila: “Baked ziti!” she declared.
“Fresh cooked” went downhill from there. The next morning it was “scrambled eggs,” meaning eggs cooked with 10 other industrial additives in a factory in Minnesota and shipped frozen, also destined for the kitchen’s steamer. Even the hardboiled eggs in Chartwells’ version of egg salad came frozen.
But breakfast was the worst: The kids were pouring strawberry milk nearly the sugar equivalent of Mountain Dew over candy-colored Apple Jacks cereal. On the side they were eating Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and swilling orange juice as well. I calculated that these grade schoolers—kids as young as five–typically were consuming 50 to 60 grams of sugar before they even started class. That’s the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar.
Where were the adults?
My week as a fly on the wall in an elementary school kitchen turned into a six-part series of articles, then an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. Apparently, it was the first time a journalist had staked out a modern school kitchen. Readers were so scandalized by what I wrote, they practically demanded that I find a school district that was making food right. Ann Cooper, the “renegade lunch lady,” arranged for me to spend a week in the central schools kitchen in Berkeley, CA.
In Berkeley, I was handed a hair net, an apron, and a pair of Latex gloves and put to work. No chicken nuggets there. Cooper, who’d been hired by Alice Waters five years earlier to switch school meals made out of the same processed junk kids in D.C. were eating to food made from scratch, insisted on serving real chicken on the bone. My first assignment was to sort 1,400 pounds of government commodity chicken pieces, the first step in what turned out to be an eight-day process of brining, roasting and eventually serving that chicken to 2,350 kids in the Berkeley Unified School District.
During my week there, I weighed pasta for shipping to outlying schools. I packed bins for simple breakfasts of organic cereal, plain milk and an apple to be eaten in the classroom. And every day around 11:25 I prepared to serve hordes of middle schoolers who descended on the “Dining Commons” at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School for lunch.
My supervisors during the week I played “lunch lady” were two highly seasoned chefs from the restaurant world. But as I discovered, the kids at Berkeley are really just like kids everywhere. What they wanted to eat was the same familiar food. Granted, it was cooked from scratch, often with locally-sourced ingredients. But it was still pizza twice a week, lots of pasta, chicken and even re-engineered nachos (lose the gloppy, Dayglo cheese, add freshly cooked beans).
I wrote another six-part series (Berkeley). Now, all of my school food writings have been bundled together and presented as an ongoing series at the online environmental magazine, Grist.
My reporting—my journey into the outer reaches of the school food universe—continues. I sit in on meals almost every day at my daughter’s school and take photos. The pictures and written analysis I gather now appear on a daily blog called Better D.C. School Food, the house organ of a parents group I helped form here in Washington to agitate for change in school meals.
It’s a strange balancing act, trying to play objective journalist and food activist at the same time. But I think it’s fair to step out of my role as reporter for a moment and share what have I learned so far.
First, we could make school food healthier overnight. There’s no reason to wait for more standards or money from Washington. Simply remove all the sugary foods from kids’ meals. Did you know that in all of the hundreds of pages of regulations that govern the federal school meals program there’s not a single standard for the use of sugar? Insiders call it the “stealth” ingredient, a cheap source of empty calories. Thank the nation’s sugar lobby for blocking any regulation of its use in school food. And you thought we could solve the problem by getting rid of sodas?
Second, disabuse yourself of the idea that just by writing more standards in Washington, we can improve the quality of school meals. The school meals program already has plenty of standards, but schools have proven in spades that they can easily translate those standards into lousy food. What really matters is the quality of the ingredients and how they‘re prepared. What does the food look like on the plate? Is it palatable? Will the kids eat it? Or are the vegetables cooked to death and destined for the trash bin, presented simply to satisfy the government’s idea of what a reimbursable “meal” should look like? As I learned, an acceptable “meal” can consist of re-heated potato wedges, a bag of Sun Chips and a carton of strawberry milk.
Finally, there must be a reason why school meal programs have been driven into a state of perpetual poverty where the average school loses 35 cents on every meal it serves. Unfortunately, there exists on the local level a kind of circular firing squad where everyone blames everyone else for the poor quality of school food, but complaining is frowned upon because “we’re all trying as hard as we can.” Meanwhile, lawmakers in Congress and in state capitals across the country sit blithely above the fray, tossing pennies at the problem. I don’t normally subscribe to conspiracy theories, but the only people profiting from school food are giant food manufacturers like Tyson and ConAgra, and big food service contractors like Chartwells, Sodexo, Aramark. The folks with fat lobbying budgets are making billions serving kids frozen pizza and chicken nuggets.
Photographs like the ones published here and on other blogs reveal school food as grotesquely out of synch with an emerging American food ethic that prizes fresh ingredients without additives grown close to home and cooked from scratch. The federally-subsidized meals program began as a conduit for America’s farm surplus in the Great Depression, became a weapon against hunger during the Great Society, and now seems to be groping  toward a third incarnation: teachable moment in America’s struggle to embrace a healthful, sustainable diet. Is there any way school food can get there from here?
Hold on to your hats, because it would certainly cost a lot of money, much more than what’s currently on the table, and perhaps even a complete re-imagining of the federal meals program itself. But if you are mad as hell about school food and don’t want to take it any more, you need to make your voice heard. And if you aren’twell, maybe you need to spend some time in a school cafeteria and see up close what kids are eating. You just might be convinced to get involved yourself.