How to Bring the Food Revolution to Your Child's School

Who cried, gasped or shuddered while watching Jamie Oliver's show the Food Revolution? Who gets angry when parents and administrators take one step forward in getting better food at school, and the USDA pushes us one step back with outdated and misaligned nutritional requirements that favor the processed food industry? Who wants to scream at articles like this one that depicts the mindset of some nutrition experts who think chocolate milk is better than no milk.

"We can tell your kid here's your white milk, you need to drink it. But if it goes in the trash, what good does that do?" Nationally, schools report most of the milk kids consume in their cafeterias is flavored — about 70 percent.

Does every adult in this country think that kids aren't capable of learning to like wholesome nutritious food? Our schools can teach pre-K kids to read and write, but generally speaking we don't think kids have the aptitude to adopt good eating habits? WTF? The answer is to flavor, sugar coat and spike with petroleum based food coloring an otherwise nutritious food so they'll consume more milk? Ridiculous!

I agree. Taking flavored milk away and expecting kids to adopt white milk without assistance and guidance from wiser adults won't work. My kindergartner went from knowing the alphabet and handful of sight words to reading in 9 months. Why would I not have confidence that he could learn how to swallow milk without sugar and flavor? My kids can do anything they're taught. Teaching kids why their body and brain need good food, and how to eat it is the right thing to do.

The wrong thing to do is for parents and school districts is to keep flavoring up, deep frying, and processing a bunch of raw ingredients just to get kids to eat up. Of course milk tastes better with sugar. And potatoes taste better when fried. Those are sometimes foods, treats. They don't belong on the menu every day. Come on America! Empower kids to like whole, natural foods. They can handle real food. They are hungry for real food! Administrators are you listening to this? Kids will automatically pay more attention to studies, and misbehave less if they consume less added sugar and more nutrients their body and brain need. Are you sure reading programs and standardized testing rescue teams need more funding?

If your heart was touched by the Food Revolution and you want to DO something to make a difference, you may be scratching your head, trying to figure out where to start. I know I was back in April.

In the coming months, I'm going to document my journey with Spring Branch ISD's Child Nutritional Services (CNS), school administration, lunch ladies, and PTA (PTO) to get better food on the lunch trays of kids in my district. I hope this helps other parent groups and schools make small changes that over time will add up to better food for kids. You can sign up to receive email updates (click that link) so you don't miss a move I make (even the mistakes!). SBISD is located in Houston, TX.

What's Happened So Far- 2010
April - met with Elementary School Nurse and Kitchen Manager to determine how food is ordered, and what discretion the campus had on food ordering. Inquired as to whether we could eliminate sugary cereal, or flavored milk. Was told by kitchen manager that she had to get all orders approved by her manager in CNS.
May- Volunteered to start a Wellness Committee, an initiative that was approved by the incoming PTA President.
June - Met with Child Nutritional Services Coordinator to determine how food is ordered, distributed, prepared in the district. Proposed to make Sherwood Elementary a Pilot campus for

• student education on 9 "super" food items by parent volunteers during lunch, supplemented with take home flyers for parents with the intent of increasing participation in healthier school lunch items that are already available (white milk, fresh vegetables, salads, beans, whole fruit, brown rice, broccoli, chicken on the bone, eggs and others).
  
• eliminating flavored milk from lunch and sugar cereals from breakfast menu
• adding hard boiled eggs and oatmeal to breakfast offerings
• introducing Limited time - menu options. This is a way to try out potential healthier menu items for the 2011-2012 menu.
  
• have some produce tasting days. CNS will bring their produce vendor to our campus and let kids sample some of the items.

Please note, all these initiatives are proposed. None have been approved by all relevant stake holders, although I'm hopeful most of them are doable.
The Good News

• The campus Kitchen Managers are empowered to choose from a list pre-approved reimbursable food items when ordering for their campus. They do not need sign-off from anyone to elect not to serve Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast!
  
• Most of the kitchens in the district have cooking equipment and can prepare food with recipes.
• If the school serves more kids (participation in school lunch increases), they can hire more staff.
• More beans are on the menu in 2010-2011. Once every 5 weeks spicy beans, charro, black-eyed peas, hummus or baked beans will appear on the menu. Huzzah for the super bean, a vegetable and protein all tucked in one neat and tidy package! May our kids all eat more beans.
  

The Bad News

• Most of the food served is pre-prepared and reheated prior to serving, only a few items per week are cooked on-site following a recipe.
  
• The kitchens are short on labor and on the days that require cooking, it's a struggle for the "lunch ladies" to get food out on time as well as manage their other responsibilities.
• I think the premise behind increase in staff to match increase in participation, is they'd have another set of hands to prepare food on cooking days. But with more kids to serve, I'm not sure that extra pair of hands would stretch as far as we might think.
• The lunch ladies only have 30 minutes to prepare for breakfast, so while we'd like to add hard boiled eggs to the menu, we may not be able to make that happen due to time constraints.
• the kitchen managers have 4 hours of nutrition training and limited cooking skills. Many are not educated or empowered to help kids make better food choices, yet they are the ones ordering food for each campus.
  
• The menu is already set for 2010-2011, which means there is little to be done for this school year. The silver lining is we can start talking about some new ideas for the 2011-2012 school year and test drive them as "limited time" menu options at Sherwood.
• There is an ingredient called "beef crumbles" used in some of the meals. We looked up the ingredients, and it actually had less preservatives than I expected, but it's frustrating that we have to serve beef with "caramel color" to kids. I did not inquire about the ingredient list on the chicken nuggets. I didn't want my heart to break. I was reassured the breading was "whole grain" but I'd rather breaded, fried anything be a special occasion food, rather than a regular rotating option.
  
• In addition to the 1 ) main entree, elementary students can choose 2) hot sandwich or 3) yogurt or 4) Baked Potato (MWF) entree salad (T,TH). That's right. Your kiddo has 4 entree choices every day! I suspect we'd have an easier time teaching kids to eat wholesome food if they had fewer choices. If a kid can always pick sweetened yogurt (which is the same mentality as sweetened milk IMO) which would he choose? Baked chicken and salad or sweetened yogurt with syrup packed fruit?
  

Things I still don't have my brain wrapped around

• Commodity Food - The district has a 700K budget for commodity food. This is excess food (whole chickens and produce from farmers) collected by the USDA that SBISD can accept, process and incorporate into their annual menu plans. If I understand it, food comes in by the truck load and the district sends it out to be processed (chickens turn into chicken sticks and chicken patties via Tyson, raw vegetables turn into canned items). The district doesn't consume any of the commodity food as an ingredient in a recipe. I'd like to know if there's any way we can use those chickens or produce with less processing.
• Staffing/Labor - How can we get more hands available in the kitchen to prepare more food on-site from raw ingredients? CNS funds itself, so between the money coming in from school food purchases and reimbursable lunches from the government the district has to balance the cost of labor used to procure and prepare food for the kids.

What's Happening Next

• CNS has invited me and a parent group to meet with the CNS Director to discuss next steps on the pilot, including the possibility of eliminating flavored milk at lunch. Meeting time TBD.
  
• I need to get a "parent group" assembled! If you're a Sherwood Elementary Parent and you want to shape the food changes at Sherwood, please join the Wellness Committee, and send the URL for this blog post to anyone else you know at Sherwood who would like to join us. Also comment here and let me know what you'd like to see done at Sherwood with regard to school food.
  
• I'm working on designing 9 food flyers to be used A) in the cafeteria to connect real food to kids' activities & teach them to eat wholesome food and B) send home with parents so they can reinforce good habits with real food facts at home. Here is the draft of the egg flyer for kids. (when I say I, I mean Hubby is designing 9 food flyers. I love that man!)
• The Wellness Committee will be formed, a kick off meeting held and an agenda set for the 2010-2011 calendar year. Come on, join me! It's lonely being the only member.
  

If you're an existing Food with Kid Appeal reader, I hope you don't mind these interruptions to recipes so I can share our school's journey. And by all means if you're already working with your school to make changes in school food, please comment here and let us know what you've accomplished and what your plans are moving forward. We can learn from each other.

A huge thanks to Michelle Stern of What's Cooking for documenting her school's journey to better food. Without her leadership I might have lost courage and never gotten this initiative off the ground.