Dairy Industry Co-Opts Science, Bullies Parents in Pursuit of Profits from Chocolate Milk

by: euclidarms

Thu Apr 28, 2011 at 03:27:31 AM PDT

Los Angeles schools are prepared to announce they will no longer serve flavored milk beginning in the fall, according to a report yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. Superintendent John Deasy says he will make that recommendation to the L.A. school board in July. Could this surprise development in the nation's second-largest school district spell the end of chocolate milk as we know it?

Faced with a cultural shift away from milk in favor of drinking sodas, the U.S. dairy industry has pulled out all the stops to scare parents and school food service directors into believing that kids will collapse in a heap of rickets and osteoporosis unless they have access to milk tarted up with sugar.

It's no surprise that kids love sugar and sweets of all kinds--including chocolate milk and strawberry milk and grape milk and any number of other flavors. The question is whether the dairy claims are true, and whether enticing kids to eat foods laced with added sugar is a good thing in the midst of an obesity epidemic that threatens to cut short the lives of a generation of children and send the nation's health care bill through the roof.

D.C. Schools Food Chief Calls Chartwells Contract "Crap"

by: euclidarms

Tue Apr 19, 2011 at 05:59:01 AM PDT

D.C. Publice Schools food services chief Jeffrey Mills is deeply disappointed with the district's contract with cafeteria giant Chartwells, The Slow Cook has learned, calling the agreement "crap" and outlining plans to establish nine satellite production kitchens the schools can use to make their own food sometime in the future.

Lunch Ladies Tell USDA to Stuff New Meal Guidelines

by: euclidarms

Wed Mar 30, 2011 at 04:42:22 AM PDT

The School Nutrition Association, representing some 53,000 of the nation's cafeteria professionals, has told the USDA it objects to nearly every aspect of proposed meal guidelines that call for bigger helpings of fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, fewer French fries, and less salt.

Food policy advocates--including first lady Michelle Obama--have hailed the guidelines as a giant step forward toward healthier school meals. But lunch ladies complain the federal government is sticking them with a bill they can't afford, that the rules in some cases may be impossible to implement, and that kids may not eat the improved cafeteria fare the government is proposing. The SNA says key provisions of the guidelines should be delayed, softened or abandoned altogether.

The SNA's formal comments, submitted to the USDA this week, point up the huge disconnect that sometimes exists between policy makers and those who work on the front lines of the school food controversy. For instance, Congress in its recent re-authorization of the school lunch program increased funding by just six cents per lunch. The USDA now estimates that the proposed meal guidelines will require 15 cents more for lunch and 51 cents more for breakfast.

Decoding Congress' Stealth Formula for Raising the Price of School Lunch

by: euclidarms

Mon Mar 07, 2011 at 15:09:39 PM PST

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing-especially when it results in a stealthy government formula for raising lunch prices at the nation's schools that will cause hundreds of thousands of children-perhaps millions--to abandon the program.

In its recent re-authorization of the school meals program, Congress included a provision that would force schools to raise the price they charge students who don't qualify as low-income.

Some hailed this little-noted mandate as a way to generate what the USDA estimates could be a $2.6 billion windfall for schools over 10 years. But I wondered, did this estimate include all the kids who will stop buying the much-maligned school lunch if it gets more expensive? And how could the federal government possibly know how many kids would drop out of the lunch line rather than pay the higher tab?

It took some weeks of prodding, but I finally obtained an internal document from the USDA's Food and Nutrition Services branch revealing how the agency at the Senate's behest formulated the magic number--$2.6 billion-that it then passed on to the committee where the price mandate was hatched.

It also confirms what I originally suspected: The government can't really know what will happen to participation in the lunch program if schools raise prices. You might expect the federal government to bring every possible resource to bear and weigh ever so carefully a decision that stands to affect some 90,000 public schools. But that is not the case.

"We do not prepare or publish cost estimate memoranda in the way that the Congressional Budget Office sends such materials to members of Congress," explained a USDA spokesman. "There was no formal document or methodological write-up given to the committee.  The agency gave the committee a number in answer to a question."

So here's where the number came from:

School food experts for years have known that raising the price of lunch means some students who pay "full price"--about 12 million of the 32 million who participate in the school lunch program on any given day-will stop buying it.

In 2005, Mathematica Policy Research, contracted by the USDA to conduct one of the agency's periodic reviews [PDF] of the school meals program, created a statistical model that estimated 56 percent of paying students would buy lunch if the price were $1.50, but that fewer-50 percent-would pay if the price were $2.00.

It's important to note that Mathematica did not conduct a study of children's actual purchasing behavior at different price levels. What they gave the USDA was a modeled prediction based on all sorts of data the firm collected from 2,314 students at 398 schools that year, including the types of food served, the amount of time kids were given to eat, prices charged, and interviews with children and their parents revealing what the kids typically ate in the course of a day and family income.

Based on Mathematica's prediction within this narrow price range, Food and Nutrition Services extrapolated its own formula in order to respond to the Senate committee's request for an estimate: For every cent the price of lunch increases, students who pay full price will drop out at a rate of .11 percent. It then calculated that the Senate's proposed lunch price mandate would generate $2.6 billion more income over 10 years-and cause nearly 500,000 paying students to stop buying lunch.

But that's hardly the end of the story. Under the new mandate, schools will be required to raise prices each year by an amount equal to the rate of inflation plus two percent until they are completely caught up with what the USDA estimates is the actual cost of providing a school lunch, currently $2.72. Many schools now charge as little as $1.50.

As if things couldn't get any more complicated, the government's baseline is a moving target. What the USDA calculates as the cost of providing lunch-the amount it gives schools to pay for a fully-reimbursable meal--is adjusted upward annually with the rate of inflation. Thus, the vast majority of schools will take longer than 10 years to reach the government's baseline. Nearly half will take more than 20 years.

Could the USDA's formula for calculating drop-outs possibly hold up that long and under all sorts of different economic conditions?

"They [the USDA] asked us that, and we told them we had a problem with it," said Mathematica senior researcher Anne Gordon, one of the report's primary authors. "I don't remember exactly, but I think it was around $3 we couldn't make a prediction. We can't know what will happen at that price, because none of the schools we looked at charged that much."

In other words, accepting the USDA's predictions years into the future requires a leap of faith. "It's probably the best they can do," Gordon said.

The prospect of annual price hikes out to the horizon has caused great alarm among the nation's lunch ladies. In the current recession, they are grappling with millions of dollars' worth of meals eaten by children whose families are deemed able to pay, but haven't.

School food service directors opposed a congressional edict to raise prices, but would have preferred a House version that "sunsetted" the law after 10 years and required the USDA to conduct an impact assessment after four years. In a last-minute rush to enact the child nutrition legislation, that version never came up for a vote.

When I asked the School Nutrition Association, representing some 53,000 school food workers, to comment on the new law, they reported results from some recent price increases in different school districts.

When the lunch price rose 15 cents to $1.75 in Munster, Ind., in 2008, for instance, nine percent of the kids dropped out. In Caroline County, Md., the price rose 35 cents to $2 in 2007 and participation plummeted 16 percent. In Franklin Township, Ind., schools hiked the price 15 cents to $2.10 in 2009 and 12 percent of the kids stopped buying. Schools in Willoughby-Eastlake, Ohio, raised the price 10 cents in 2008 to $2.60 and participation fell 10 percent.

SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner said that while food service directors accept Mathematica's 2005 report as "the most comprehensive data available to FNS, they question it's accuracy in portraying how families will react to current price increases."

"The economy is worse than in school year 2004-2005, and their own experience tells them that participation drops when you increase prices," Pratt-Heavner said.

The School Nutrition Association is asking the USDA to test increasing lunch prices on a pilot basis before imposing the congressional mandate nationwide.

Besides higher prices, other looming factors will likely suppress school lunch participation and upset the cafeteria business model.  Upgraded nutrition standards-including more helpings of vegetables, more whole grains, fewer French fries and other potato products, and much less salt in food-are expected to cause more paying kids to reject the federally-subsidized hot meal.

In a 2010 report to the USDA [PDF], Mathematica predicted that adopting a full range of improvements to make meals "healthier" would result in 5 percent of elementary school children dropping out of the program, and even more-12 percent-at the secondary school level.

Sociologist Janet Poppendieck, whose book on the national school lunch program, Free for All, has become a widely-cited text, rejects the idea of forcing schools to raise prices across the board.

Undercharging may give an unfair advantage to some families who can afford to pay at the expense of low-income children. But Poppendieck says the USDA is probably underestimating the number of parents who will react angrily to higher prices and pull their children out of the lunch line. And that could hurt the entire program's ability to function.

She fears for millions of children on the margins--those who aren't exactly affluent, but don't qualify as "low income" either.

"If we lose them, it's not just the loss of children, we lose the claim that this is not just a welfare program," Poppendieck said. "And the more school lunch has the label of being a welfare program, it imposes a kind of a shame tax on kids who do want to participate. I think that's the wrong direction to go."

Buyer's Remorse Over Better School Food?

by: euclidarms

Mon Feb 21, 2011 at 05:20:13 AM PST

School food is poised to look less like prison fodder and more like a Moosewood Restaurant buffet if new USDA guidelines are adopted. Colorful vegetables-lots of them-more whole fruit, more whole grains, less salt, less processed junk-that's the plat du jour. The only question now is, who picks up the check?

A tight-fisted Congress would only ante up six extra cents for school lunch in its recent re-authorization of child nutrition programs. Now the USDA says that's not even close to covering all the goodies school food advocates have been asking for. Between more expensive ingredients and the increased labor needed to turn them into meals, the USDA estimates [PDF] school lunch soon will cost an extra 15 cents, and breakfast a whopping 51 cents more.

That compares to the $2.72 the federal government currently pays schools to provide a fully-reimbursable school lunch, $1.48 for breakfast.

According to wonks in the USDA's Food and Nutrition Services branch, the money to pay for these long-awaited changes will just have to come from state and local governments that at the moment are worse than broke. In other words, schools will be switching out frozen tater tots for fresh sweet potatoes and replacing processed beef crumbles with scratch-cooked spinach lasagna at the same time law makers are sending pink slips to teachers, shuttering health clinics for the poor, and unscrewing light bulbs in street lamps to resolve the worst budget deficits since the Great Depression.

Is anyone else feeling a teeny bit of buyer's remorse?

I count myself among those who think the food served to kids in school could be a whole lot better. But something about the notion that kids must have fresh local broccoli on their lunch trays while teachers worry about the next mortgage payment doesn't sit right. I'm doubly conflicted, because after a year of writing about school food on a daily basis, and monitoring what goes on in the cafeteria at my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia , I know that kids routinely refuse to eat and throw in the trash vast quantities of those very same vegetables and whole grains that constitute such a large portion of the looming school meals bill.

And it's not just me. Here's a Chicago Tribune story exposing the same thing in cafeterias there.  The Tribune found hundreds of pounds of food being tossed in the trash in a single school, including unopened cartons of milk and juice, uneaten oranges and bananas, whole cartons of cereal. Just as they do here in D.C., Chicago school children describe the healthier food as "nasty."

We are about to embark on a multii-billion-dollar culinary experiment with unknowable results. This is faith-based nutrition on a huge scale. Nationwide, the USDA says the proposed changes will add $6.8 billion to the cost of preparing school meals in the first five years. The federal government spends $13 billion annually on school feeding programs.

State and local governments currently contribute around nine percent of the total cost of school food service. In California alone, the new guidelines will add $75 million to the annual bill just for fruits and vegetables, according to the Environmental Working Group. Where will Sacramento, currently in utter budget meltdown, come up with such a sum? The EWG proposes diverting money currently paid to subsidize dairy, cotton and rice farmers.

In an effort to wrap my head around all this, I recently spent a few hours reviewing financial briefs for all 50 states. I could hardly have assigned myself a more dismal task. It truly is a blood bath out there. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [PDF], states are seeing the worst decline in tax revenues ever recorded.  So far, at least 46 states have reduced services and 30 have raised taxes to some degree. With billions in federal stimulus dollars drying up, local budget woes will only get worse-and stay bad for years to come. Even education spending is now fair game for deficit hawks.

Consider these factoids:

Newly-elected California Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed closing a $25 billion budget gap by cutting salaries for non-union state employees, slashing funding for higher education by 20 percent and even reducing aid for K-12 schools if voters don't approve tax increases.

Los Angeles, described as on the brink of bankruptcy, is planning to send pink slips to 4,000 teachers, just in case the city needs to let some of them go.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has called his state "functionally bankrupt," and proposes to close most of a $10 billion budget shortfall by reducing education funding and Medicaid.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tells voters he will not raise taxes, but his approach to addressing an $11 billion budget deficit would include cutting $820 million in education funding.

Arizona is so broke, lawmakers are considering mortgaging state office buildings.

And in Madison, Wis., thousands of state workers-including teachers--recently rallied to protest Gov. Scott Walker's plan to cut their benefits and bargaining rights--and his threat to call out the National Guard if things get out of hand.

Here in D.C., extra funding for school meals approved under a "Healthy Schools Act" narrowly avoided budget cuts last year. But now the city faces a huge new shortfall of some $600 million, much larger than anticipated.

How does all of this square with the idea that schools should be feeding kids fresh chicken on the bone rather than re-heated chicken nuggets? Advocates would say we need to embrace the USDA guidelines in order to head off an epidemic of childhood obesity--and the nearly $300 billion estimated annual cost of medical care and lost productivity due to weight-related illness. But do kids really need a full-blown restaurant meal covering all the food groups every day?

Already schools on average lose more than 30 cents on every lunch they serve.  They may soon be forced to start charging students higher prices. Yet Lucy Gettman, director of federal programs for the National School Boards Association, says the outlook for funding school meals may not be so dire. Some states and some school districts have already been moving toward the kind of food service the USDA is proposing.

But there's more turbulence on the horizon. Pending standards for food sold in vending machines and in school stores-presumably requiring healthy choices rather than candy, chips and soft drinks-will likely cut into food service revenues, Gettman said. Congress has also told the USDA to examine how schools assign operational costs to food service, another potential drain.

"Over the last few years, three dozen states have either changed state laws or have considered changing state laws regarding school nutrition," Gettman said. "Every state and every school district is probably going to be in a different place. Some may be very close to meeting some of the standards. But for those that haven't, there may be a very wide gap."

The School Nutrition Association, representing some 53,000 school cafeteria workers across the country, is looking for ways the federal government can contribute more to pay for the new meal standards. For starters, they are asking the USDA to consider giving schools credit toward commodity food purchases for serving breakfast.

The USDA currently awards schools about 20 cents toward purchasing commodity goods for every lunch meal they serve. The program does not cover breakfast, and many schools are now trying to increase breakfast service by offering it in the classroom, which serves the dual purpose of ensuring kids aren't forced to learn on an empty stomach while also generating more federal reimbursements for the food program.

Still, I can't help thinking there ought to be a way to make school food much less complicated. There must be a better funding mechanism that doesn't pit kids against other worthy government programs for the needy.

Maybe it's time for a national guilt relief act in the form of a big, fat federal tax on soda and junk food that pays for school lunch. Now that's something I would not lose any sleep over.

Eating Rainbows

by: Jill Richardson

Sun Feb 20, 2011 at 20:50:29 PM PST

But today, I gave cooking a shot. I was inspired when I saw the most beautiful bunch of rainbow chard (truly in all shades of the rainbow, except blue) at the Archi's Acres booth at the farmers' market. Then I got yellow carrots, red and green lettuce, and a green bell pepper at Sage Mountain Farm. And then I called my room mate and told him I was making dinner.

When the kids got home, I told them we were eating rainbows for dinner. We began with a rainbow salad (at least, three of us did... the fourth decided that that many vegetables in one bowl can't be a good thing) made from cooked red and chioggia beets, cooked orange sweet potato, yellow carrots, green bell pepper, chickpeas, walnuts, red and green lettuces, alfalfa sprouts, and a hard boiled egg. Our chef made the dressing (I know when I shouldn't push my luck). We followed that with rainbow colored pasta (dyed with veggies) topped with a tomato sauce, and sauteed rainbow chard. It was a fun meal, although I'm sure I enjoyed it more than the kids did.

Still Think Raising the Price of School Lunch is a Good Idea?

by: euclidarms

Tue Feb 15, 2011 at 04:45:31 AM PST

At a time when many families are least able to pay-and are racking up millions in debt at local cafeterias-Congress would profoundly alter the school meal landscape by forcing schools to raise prices.

Schools that now charge only $1.50 for lunch would, over time, have to increase the price to at least match the federal contribution for a fully-subsidized meal--currently $2.72--according to a provision in Congress' recent re-authorization of the federally-subsidized school meals program.

The Truth About "Whole Grains" in School Meals

by: euclidarms

Fri Jan 28, 2011 at 03:39:41 AM PST

If the U.S. Department of Agriculture has its way, kids will soon be seeing lots more whole grain food on their cafeteria trays--up to 80 percent more at breakfast under the agency's proposed new meal guidelines [PDF].

But as my colleague Lisa Suriano pointed out in this space recently, if you thought that meant spelt and quinoa suddenly making an appearance in the nation's lunch rooms, you might want to re-assess. In fact, federal rules permit products containing just 51 percent "whole grain" flour to be classified as "whole grain."

Head of Harvard Nutrition Unit Says Schools Should Just Say No to Chocolate Milk

by: euclidarms

Thu Jan 13, 2011 at 16:19:05 PM PST

Many children start their day with a government-sponsored breakfast consisting of strawberry-flavored milk containing nearly as much sugar ounce-for-ounce as Mountain Dew, poured over a bowl of Apple Jacks or other sugar-enhanced cereal. Until recently, kids as young as five in the District of Columbia routinely were being served the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar before classes even started, and experts say that's not at all uncommon in school districts around the country. Some are even worse.

The dairy industry thinks that's no problem. But Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, disagrees.

Obama's New Normal: Tax Breaks for Billionaires, Higher Lunch Prices for School Kids

by: euclidarms

Tue Dec 14, 2010 at 04:19:03 AM PST

Somehow Congress can find money to give tax breaks to billionaires. But in a little-noted provision of its reauthorization of child nutrition programs, signed into law yesterday by President Barack Obama as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, lawmakers have told schools to raise lunch prices to at least cover what it views as the full cost of making a meal. Entitled "equity in school lunch pricing," the new mandate could, by increasing prices gradually for students whose families aren't low income, pump an additional $2.6 billion into the school meal program over the next 10 years, according to one estimate.

My Daughter, Grassfed Steak Fanatic

by: euclidarms

Thu Aug 26, 2010 at 01:26:12 AM PDT

Like every family, we've had our food battles with our 10-year-old daughter. With great dismay, we watched a pre-schooler who amazed us with the range of her palate (she couldn't get enough Altoids or wasabe peas) morph into a bratty pre-teen who turns dinner into a slugfest with a litany of foods she refuses to eat.

"What's for dinner?" is no longer an innocent question, but the opening salvo of our nightly culinary donnybrook.

Meanwhile, we've been trying to teach Leila to lay off the sugar and also the refined carbohydrates. She would eat pasta three times a day if she could. In our house, we try to focus more on proteins and green vegetables. So I can't really complain that she's found a food she is absolutely wild for, and something her parents also love.

Turns out she's got Tiffany taste: Her new favorite food is steak. And she wants it every night.

She's become a real pest about it. "I want steak," she announces nightly. "Steak, steak, steak, steak, steak!"

On our Sunday walks home from the farmers market, we usually stop by the local Whole Foods. These days, she stands in front of the meat counter and stares longingly. In the condensation on the glass over a stack of thick rib-eyes, she writes "Leila was here." She loves rib-eye, the fattier the better.

Coincidentally, I ran across a newly published book called, aptly enough, Steak: One Man's Search for the Tastiest Piece of Beef. I ordered a copy from Amazon thinking we could make a bedtime reading project out of it. But when the book arrived, she grabbed it out of my hand. She put it in her backpack and took it to school. (Her fifth-grade teacher was surprised to see it.)

We get most of our meat delivered from our local dairy, where a herd of beef cattle grazes on pasture. This week, I promised Leila a steak and ordered a sirloin that was on sale. She pitched a fit because it wasn't rib-eye. According to her new book, she said, sirloin was listed last for flavor, way behind rib-eye. How could I be so stupid as to order sirloin?

Ignoring her, I cooked the sirloin -- but of course I can't prepare her steak any old way. She insists I grill it over live coals. When I brought the finished steak to the kitchen -- a thing of beauty, perfectly browned -- she gave it a good, long looking over and declared it didn't have enough fat. I cut a slice. It was rare, just the way we like it, and obviously grass fed, with its deep hue.

Leila tasted. Leila chewed. Leila smiled.

She liked it. And who wouldn't? The flavor was intense, even from this humble sirloin. If only there were more fat, she moaned, as she bit into another slice.

Things could be worse. I think of all the other things a daughter could be addicted to: drugs, sex, texting. Steak doesn't seem so bad. But this could be a very expensive habit. If she wants rib eye for dinner every night, she's going to have to start saving her allowance.

D.C. Schools Wait Nine Months for Rebate Accounting from Chartwells

by: euclidarms

Wed Jul 14, 2010 at 16:23:25 PM PDT

D.C. Schools Chief Operating Officer Anthony Tata told The Washington Post on Tuesday that he has been waiting some nine months for Chartwells, the school system's hired food service provider, to furnish an itemized accounting of the rebates it receives from food manufacturers in connection with its purchases for school meals.

Tata made the disclosure to Post education reporter Bill Turque after I reported here Monday that Chartwells since beginning its contract with D.C. schools in the fall of 2008 had collected more than $1 million in rebates from major food suppliers who are seen as discounting popular brands in order to place them before impressionable children on cafeteria trays. Under federal laws governing the national school meals program, food providers such as Chartwells are required to credit the schools for any rebates they receive and furnish a detailed accounting of where the rebates come from upon request from the school district.

Tata told Turque I was "just flat wrong" when I reported that school officials had not asked Chartwells for such an accounting until after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request last month seeking the information. In fact, Tata said, he had been pressing Chartwells for the information since last October, and it had only just arrived.

Under its contract with the city, Chartwells receives a $1 million administrative fee annually from the schools, plus fees on each meal served that total more than  $1 million each year. Chartwells provides food service in 122 D.C. schools. In a number of ways, Tata and other school officials have indicated they are not entirely happy with the industrially-processed convenience foods Chartwells has been serving. DCPS recently sought bids on two pilot programs that would each ostensibly provide improved food to seven schools across the city "to create some competition," in Tata's words.

I filed my FOIA request for the rebate itemization June 1. On June 4, I asked schools spokeswoman Jennifer Calloway in an e-mail, "Has DCPS ever requested from Chartwells a breakdown of where the 'rebates' are coming from according to specific manufacturers or suppliers, or even by category of product?" Calloway replied, "Tata's team is reviewing your request, we'll get back to you Monday." But they did not get back to me.

More than a month later, on July 8, I again asked Calloway, "whether DCPS has ever asked Chartwells for a breakdown on where--meaning which manufacturers or vendors--all of the rebates come from that are reflected on Chartwells' monthly invoices." Later that day, Calloway responded: "We have requested a breakdown. You need to file a FOIA for DCPS to share it--and you've already done so. When it's complete, the General Counsel's office will contact you."

I regret if I misinterpreted what the schools spokeswoman said. Apparently, the information Tata had been trying to get hold of from Chartwells since last October arrived sometime between my last e-mail exchange with Jennifer Calloway on Thursday and Tata's conversation with The Post on Monday. It was also on Thursday that I interviewed a procurement official with Foodbuy, a sister company of Chartwells that is responsible for negotiating food purchases and rebates with manufacturers.

Tata further told Bill Turque that I was "irresponsible" for referring to the food rebates as "kickbacks." But I did not coin that term in reference to food rebates. It may be that Mr. Tata is simply unaware that "kickbacks" is a common usage in food service circles to describe the system whereby powerful companies such as Chartwells, Sodexo and Aramark expect and receive generous rebates on a host of products, much the same way that grocers expect and receive payments from manufacturers in order to give their products prominent display on supermarket shelves.

In fact, Ann Cooper, one of the most prominent school food directors in the country, now in charge of food for schools in Boulder, CO, used the word "kickbacks" in a Twitter item about my story that she broadcast Monday.

The $1 million-plus in rebates Chartwells had collected through February of this year represented five percent of the total purchases reported on invoices the company submitted to D.C. Public Schools for reimbursement. In other jurisdictions, that percentage is much higher. It will be interesting to see the details of where Chartwells says the rebates came from, and how quickly the schools make that information public.

Meanwhile, Tata told Turque that schools food services director Jeffrey Mills is reviewing menu changes in the food Chartwells serves for the upcoming school year with an eye toward improvements. "And the rebate, if there is one, will not factor at all into our decision making," Tata said.

Corporate Rebates: The Million-Dollar Gorilla in the Cafeteria

by: euclidarms

Mon Jul 12, 2010 at 18:28:39 PM PDT

D.C. Public Schools in the last two years have taken in more than $1 million in corporate rebates -- referred to by some as "kickbacks" -- paid by giant food manufacturers as an inducement to place their brands on kids' cafeteria trays at school.

Documents I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that Chartwells, the company hired by D.C. Schools to provide food services at 122 schools across the city, through February of this year had declared $1,076,738 in rebates it received since its contract began in the fall of 2008. That represents 5 percent of the $18.7 million in purchases Chartwells billed the school system during that period. Under federal law, Chartwells is required to credit D.C. schools for any rebates it receives.

"Tof Chef" Flunks School Food Math

by: euclidarms

Wed Jun 16, 2010 at 03:55:58 AM PDT

Bravo's new season of "Top Chef," set in D.C. and billed as "from the White House to your house," debuts tonight with a big wet kiss for Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity.

Even the White House assistant chef, Sam Kass, who has become more and more of a TV presence, gets into the act as a judge for episode No. 2 of the contest on June 23. That's when the 17 contestants -- all competing for the "Top Chef" designation, plus prize money -- are supposed to make a meal with only $2.68, the same amount the federal government gives schools for reimbursable lunches.

The Obama Foodorama blog expects that this episode will "be loaded with drama, thanks to the astonishingly low budget the chefs, all pros from top-level restaurants, have to work with." Except that $2.68 would be astonishingly high, if that were in fact the amount schools could spend on the food they serve to kids in the nation's woefully underfunded cafeteria meals program.

Apparently, the writers at "Top Chef" failed to do their homework where school meal finances are concerned. Only a fraction of that $2.68 federal subsidy actually goes toward purchasing food. The majority is eaten up by labor and overhead costs. What schools actually spend on the food component of the average lunch is more like $1 per kid -- or less. And the average school loses 35 cents on every meal it serves.

Makes you wonder what Kass, whose White House title is "Food Initiative Coordinator," was thinking when he agreed to play his part. Or doesn't Kass know how school lunch works either?

"The National School Lunch program's funding leaves less than $1 for the cost of food on our kids' plates, and yet its policies demand that we serve milk, fruit, and 650 to 750 calories [per meal]," said school-lunch reformer Ann Cooper, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady. "Feeding children delicious and nutritious food -- never mind regional or organic -- is tremendously hard on that budget, yet school food professionals all across the country strive hard to do that every day."

Cooper has a suggestion for the "Top Chef" producers: "Perhaps instead of restaurant chefs trying to cook a meal for $2.68, we should have 'Lunch Ladies' competing to showcase what's actually possible when we cook fresh food from scratch for our kids. After that, let's give the professional chefs the USDA commodity food to deal with."

Michelle Obama, It's Time for an Eat Lunch with Your Kid Day

by: euclidarms

Sun Jun 06, 2010 at 23:53:55 PM PDT

Has anyone else noticed that the one thing they never talk about at all these White House events around childhood obesity is the food kids are actually eating at school every day?