| Whole Foods held a competition, promising the winner a school lunch makeover by famed "Renegade Lunch Lady" Ann Cooper. As luck would have it, the winner was Albert Einstein Academies, here in San Diego. And the store putting on the Ann Cooper events and working with the school was the very same Whole Foods where I used to work! The school lunch makeover with Chef Ann is a two-day event and today was day one.
Part of today's activities focused on bringing together local farmers with the San Diego school lunch staff and talking about how they could work together to bring local produce into the schools. Chef Ann kicked off the meeting with an absolutely brilliant set of props:
What you have here is a pretty standard American school lunch. Chicken nuggets (which serve as the grain and the meat), French fries (the vegetable), and some fruit cocktail (the fruit... and the high fructose corn syrup). Plus a carton of chocolate milk. Pathetic. We make fun of Reagan for making ketchup a vegetable, but calling French fries a vegetable ain't much better.
Now add a piece of whole fruit (maybe even fruit from a local farm):
Okay, the meal still pretty much sucks. It's junk food plus an apple. Yay. A little more fiber, a little less sugar. It's still not a healthy meal. Ann said that step one is replacing the chicken nuggets and the fries:
Ta-da... healthy lunch! Chicken breast, broccoli, brown rice and beans, with an apple. With white milk, not chocolate milk. Now that's a healthy lunch. And if the apple and broccoli are local, that's even better.
Ann deals with seasonality and local food by writing all of her menus with a specific entree plus generic "fresh fruit" and "salad bar." Then she works with local farmers and her distributors to figure out what's local, what's seasonal, what's affordable, etc. And, because supplying large quantities of a single item is often difficult for small or even mid-size local farms, she offers a variety of seasonal veggies in a salad bar. That way she only needs to get a little bit of 24 different items instead of a whole lot of one item.
Chef Ann explained what she did in her current school district in Boulder, CO and it's really quite amazing. When she showed up they had tons of freezer space but not enough refrigerator space. That means they could easily store and serve frozen meals, but not fresh fruits or vegetables. Switching over to healthier, less processed foods required getting not just refrigerator space but also knives and cutting boards. And the staff training so everyone knows what to do with the knives and cutting boards. She gave her staff 12 full days of training this year. As you can see, schools don't just need more money so they can buy better foods. They need the labor, training, and equipment to go with it.
More about the day's other events below... |
