Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way America Feeds Its Child

A man’s palate can,

in time,

become accustomed

to anything.

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

Introduction

Outside Mullen Hall, a Massachusetts public elementary school on Katherine Lee Bates Road just across from the Falmouth Public Library, there is, inevitably, a traffic jam just before nine o’clock each weekday morning. Caused in no small part by the crossing guard who works at a perplexing pace, the confusing beehive of activity seems endless. Children hurry out of minivans by the dozens, backpacks dragging the ground as they run toward the school’s front door.*

Since these children are still quite young, most aren’t showing signs of obesity yet, but if their eating habits don’t change now they’ll soon be on the wrong end of the statistics. Many already are. The percentage of obese children in America today has more than doubled since 1970. More than 35 percent of our nation’s children are overweight, 25 percent are obese, and 14 percent have type 2 diabetes, a condition previously seen primarily in adults. Processed foods favored by schools and busy moms for their convenience not only contribute to obesity, they also contain additives and preservatives and are tainted with herbicide and pesticide residues that are believed to cause a variety of illnesses, including cancer. In fact, current research shows that 40 percent of all cancers are attributable to diet. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans die of diet-related illnesses each year. People in America today simply do not know how to eat properly, and they don’t seem to have time to figure out how—so fast food, home meal replacements, and processed foods take the place of good, healthy cooking. There couldn’t be a worse alternative.

Parents, pediatricians, and school administrators are increasingly concerned about children’s health as it relates to diet. Most parents don’t even know what constitutes good childhood nutrition and many feel they lack the time they would need to spend researching it. They rely, instead, on the USDA-approved National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to provide their children with nutritionally balanced, healthful meals. Trouble is, they’re not. While most schools continue to try to meet better nutritional guidelines, they’re still not measuring up, and many actually contribute to the crisis we’ve seen emerging over the last decade. Food is not respected; rather, it is something that must be made and consumed with increasing speed. In part, this is the result of the fact that there are more kids than ever in schools with smaller facilities, forcing several short lunch shifts. In many cases, decreasing budgets have also caused a decline in the quality of school meals.

For the most part, school lunch has deteriorated to institutional-style mayhem. Walk through the kitchen or lunchroom of almost any public or private school and fast-food nation will ring with striking clarity. USDA-approved portions of processed foods are haphazardly dished out by harried cafeteria workers to frenzied students hurrying to finish their food in time for ten minutes of recess. Nothing about the experience of being in a school cafeteria is calm—the din is deafening. Lunchrooms are vast open spaces filled with long tables flanked by dozens of chairs. There is no intimacy. No sense of calm. No respite from a morning of hard learning. Virtually all teachers hate lunchroom duty and view it as the most chaotic moment of their day—in fact, the New York City teachers’ union recently won the right to stay outside the lunchroom. They now drop their students off at the cafeteria door on their way to find more restful lunchtime locations for themselves.

The noise and activity levels are not the only unpalatable aspects of lunchroom dining. A full 78 percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA’s nutritional guidelines, which is no surprise considering the fact that schools keep the cost of lunch between $1 and $1.50 per child. A parent in Colorado tells us that her child’s school insists that nachos meet the dietary requirements for a main course. Horrified, she exclaimed, It’s not even real cheese! The mother of an elementary student in Marstons Mills, Massachusetts, was appalled to learn that even apple slices aren’t a nutritionally sound choice in her daughter’s school—to her horror, they’re topped with blue sugar sprinkles. Most kids do not even like the foods that are being served. A recent survey of school children in northern Minnesota revealed the food is so abysmal that not even old standby favorites like pizza and macaroni and cheese were given high marks. It’s no wonder that kids are choosing fast foods, which are chemically engineered in many cases to be better tasting, over regular school lunch menu items. Kids today are bombarded with food advertising that is reinforced by the careful placement of fast-food chains in strip malls near schools and even on public school campuses. The big chains like McDonald’s have been aggressively and specifically targeting children for decades. When Ray Kroc first started expanding the McDonald’s chain, he would hop in a Cessna and fly around looking for prime real estate as close to schools as possible. Today they use satellite technology to locate the same type of properties. These companies are literally stalking our children. They’ve even found ways to get inside schools and be part of the public school lunch menus. A mother from Aurora, Colorado, told us that there is one Taco Bell and one Pizza Hut option available on every menu in her six-year-old son’s lunchroom. She was told that the fast-food program originally started as a safety measure to keep the high school and middle school students on school grounds because in spite of the fact that they had a closed campus, kids were crossing busy streets to get to fast-food restaurants near their schools. She thought that the fast-food thing just trickled down to the elementary program. Of course, the reality is that those schools were, and are, making money off million-dollar multiyear contracts with fast-food companies.

School lunch menus have undergone some changes in recent years and are marginally improved, but nearly all our schools continue to operate under the misguided notion that kids actually prefer to eat frozen, processed, fried, and sugary foods. Because most parents don’t have time to spend in the kitchen the way the parents of generations past once did, the lunch lessons children are getting in school are the primary guideposts available to them. Poor in-school health and nutrition education is causing children, and by extension their families, to make bad food choices that are translating directly into big health problems. It is up to us, the consuming public, to not only get fast food out of our public schools, but to improve the quality of school lunches, from the nutritional content all the way to the atmosphere in our cafeterias. The money to fund school lunches comes directly out of our pockets and we need to set an example for our children that will keep them healthy now and help them to make better food choices in their adult lives. Everything we consume becomes part of us. Our food provides us with nourishment. It sustains us. It may also be our ultimate undoing. We literally are what we eat—good and bad. Changing the way we feed our children is not a luxury: It’s an imperative. Concerned, informed, and involved parents and caregivers are the first line of defense.

The Path to Change

In spite of the ever increasing encroachment of fast food in the public school system, some schools and school districts have tried to change the way school meals are prepared, served, and eaten, but many have found the path toward change overwhelming. California’s Berkeley High School made some recent strides toward creating an organic food court after the cafeteria there had been made unusable by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2001 the school reached out to local restaurateurs, such as the famed Alice Waters, who agreed to bring organic lunches to the school every day. Unfortunately, the program was poorly planned and inadequately executed. Only about 250 of the 3,000 students on campus ever ate in the food court. The vast majority of students did not even know the food court existed and those who did know about it quickly discovered that they could get the exact same lunches off-campus in bigger portions for less money. For several years the school abandoned its efforts, but in 2005 the Berkeley school district hired Ann Cooper. By the end of the 2006 school year, 90 percent of all the food served in the district was made from scratch. Fresh fruits and vegetables were served daily, and salad bars were installed in all the schools. Only a small percentage of the food is organic or local, but fresh, healthy foods are finally making their way onto children’s plates.

The Ross School in East Hampton, New York, an alternative middle and high school with a curriculum based on cultural history, an emphasis on lifelong wellness, and a diverse community that ensures ever-expanding consciousness, did clean the slate, and now kids are clearing their plates—in more ways than one. Ann Cooper interviewed for the position of executive chef in 1999, at which point she met the founder, Courtney Ross-Holst, who shared her belief in the importance of eating healthful, nutritious, organic food. Holst wanted to implement a new lunch program at the Ross School that reflected her ideals. That simple exchange grew to eventually become R.O.S.S. (Regional Organic Seasonal Sustainable) food.

Over the many months the school’s chefs collaborated in the kitchen before the new school café opened, Cooper watched the Ross School’s food program change every person who worked there. Chad, the pastry chef, changed the way he fed his own children—every day. Deena, the school’s executive sous-chef, stopped eating meat. People who had worked in professional kitchens all their adult lives gained a whole new respect for their profession and the food that they produced. From cooks to dishwashers and servers, not one person was left untouched, and that was only the beginning. As the program was put in place, teachers, students, farmers, the school’s Executive Team, and even the laundry team, was changed. At Ross, food and nutrition are now a critical part of the school’s underlying wellness program, and in the curriculum they are explicitly linked with exercise, health, and general well-being, both physical and mental. Ross has developed a successful, fiscally responsible, and utterly unique approach to mealtime that combines education, cooking lessons, and organic foods cooked to order by highly trained chefs. Now others are looking at R.O.S.S. food as a model for the future of school lunch programs around the country—even public schools.

Of course, it would be great if all schools would take the path Ross and other schools like Martin Luther King Junior Middle School (Edible Schoolyard) in Berkeley, California, have taken—then we’d all be able to rest easy knowing that our children were being served high quality, nutritious meals every day, but that day remains a long way off. Because we know how hard it can be to find something interesting and healthful to put in those lunch boxes every day, we’ve gathered together about 70 recipes from the Ross School (identified by R), Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Foundation (CPF), FullBloom Baking Company (FB), and the Community Food Resource Center (CFRC) that will help guide you in making better selections for your children. We’ve even included breakfast and snack recipes. First and foremost, however, it’s important to have a clear understanding of basic childhood nutrition.

* Ann Cooper with harvest basket on the Washington Mall for the Smithsonian American Folk Life Festival The Chez Panisse Foundation

EATING…

is more than deciding

what and when to eat.

FEEDING…

is more than choosing food

and getting it into a child.

EATING AND FEEDING…

reflect people’s histories,

their relationships with

themselves and with others…

—ELLYN SATTER

CHAPTER 1

Basic Childhood Nutrition

in collaboration with Registered Dietician Hailey London

When it comes to nutrition, children are not just miniature adults. Because they’re growing, they have different dietary needs. When they start school, even preschool, it becomes more difficult to keep an eye on what they’re eating. Since it’s impossible for most parents to be with their school-age children at lunchtime during the week, the best you can do is send them to school with a healthy, well-balanced lunch. Start educating them early about what constitutes good nutrition so that when they’re given the opportunity to make their own lunch choices they’ll choose the best foods available to them.*

Tips for Healthy Children

Eating habits are learned behaviors; they’re not intuitive, so what your children learn to eat at home early in life sticks with them well into adulthood. Today we are disconnected from our food sources in a way that is unprecedented in human history. Fewer and fewer Americans cook meals from scratch because it’s easier and faster to throw a frozen dinner in the oven or grab something from a fast-food restaurant on the way home from work. And the guerilla marketing foisted upon us by fast- and processed-food companies isn’t helping. Most parents know that their kids are under continuous assault by corporate food advertising but feel frustrated by and even powerless against it. In reality, a few simple tools combined with a mantra of variety, moderation, and balance will provide you with all you need to ensure the long-term nutritional health of your child.

1. Be a good role model.

Most of the parents we know complain that their children refuse to eat healthfully and come to us in search of magic recipes that will put an end to mealtime madness. The real problem most often lies with the parents, not the kids. Most of us are so accustomed to eating out and buying prepared foods in the grocery store that we don’t even know what good food is anymore. We can’t line our cabinets with packaged cereals and sodas and expect our kids to eat like they were raised on a commune in rural Vermont. In order to be good role models we must educate ourselves first and then practice what we preach.

Doctors learn almost nothing about nutrition during their many years of education: In 2003 a nutrition course was required at only 40 percent of medical schools.

Breaking News: Pediatricians Suggest

Changing the Way We Feed Babies

Years and years of early childhood feeding advice has just been turned on its head. Instead of rice cereal as baby’s first food, doctors are now saying that, scientifically speaking, it may be better to offer babies 6 months and older just about everything the rest of the family eats (with a few exceptions, like honey, which is still recommended after the age of one). Even peanut butter before the first birthday isn’t taboo. The reason for this sudden medical shift? For one thing, it’s increasingly clear that eating habits are formed very early in life—perhaps even earlier than previously recognized, and keeping children on a diet of bland, simple foods may cause them to seek less variety in their diets as they get older, which can ultimately lead to problems with obesity.

Despite decades of consistent urgings by pediatricians across the country to keep things bland and simple, there’s no hard scientific evidence to suggest that way is better than any other. In fact, science is actually suggesting that giving children heavily processed rice cereal as a first food may also be contributing to the obesity crisis because it is easily digested and raises blood sugar and insulin levels much more quickly than less processed foods would.

First-time parents are often afraid to stray from pediatricians’ suggestions that early foods should be bland because they fear allergic reactions. The fact is that once a child reaches 6 months she can eat just about anything as long as foods are introduced one at a time to rule out potential allergies. A bit more caution is necessary if there is a family history of food allergies, but it’s still largely safe to forge ahead with new foods earlier than most pediatricians have recommended in the past. It is well-documented that parents around the world have far less hesitation about giving their babies more zesty fare and not only does it work for them, obesity rates around the world are far lower than they are in the United States.

Source: Associated Press, October 9, 2005. Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

2. Take your kids shopping with you.

Unfortunately we don’t all live near farms or farmers’ markets, so it’s not easy for us or our children to feel a connection with good, whole (unprocessed) foods. One way to help them learn is to make a point to take them grocery shopping with you. Of course it’s probably easier to go alone when there’s someone at home to watch them or they’re at school, but it’s important for them to see foods in their raw states so they can explore and ask questions. Take them when you’re not in a hurry and spend a lot of time in the aisles that contain unprocessed foods—the produce, meat, and fish departments, for example. If your child appears to be interested in a certain type of fruit or vegetable, encourage him or her to explore that item; don’t just assume that your child won’t like it. Take it home and let him try it so he can make his own decisions. When Ben, Lisa’s son, was a baby he liked to ride in the cart holding an avocado. Every time they went shopping he’d point at the avocados until Lisa gave him one. When he was three he asked if he could bring some mangos home. He was also intrigued by the spiky orange exterior of the unusual kiwano fruit (also known as the African Horned Melon). He carried it for the duration of their shopping trip and insisted it be cut the minute he got it home. Its green, seedy interior was a bit off-putting to him, but he tried it anyway. Exploring food this way gives Ben and his mom a chance to talk about how something is cooked and where it comes from. It also allows Ben to feel like he’s making choices about what he eats.

3. Be flexible!

Remember, anything in moderation is okay. Of course, if you eat doughnuts in moderation, followed by potato chips in moderation and soda in moderation, it is no longer healthy. Having a cookie every day and balancing it with healthy foods is a better practice of moderation. While we always want to make the healthiest choices for our children’s bodies, a special treat once a week or even once a day won’t do any damage. On the contrary, it will help make eating a more enjoyable experience and will help your child build a good relationship with food.

In 2002, a University of Michigan survey found that six of the sixteen hospitals ranked best in the country had fast-food franchises in them.

4. Make mealtime special.

There are all sorts of fun things we can do to make mealtime special. First and foremost, sit down and enjoy your food. Take time to savor flavors. Children should never eat while walking around. We understand that some young children have difficulty sitting for the entire meal. In those cases we recommend allowing the child to get up once or twice, while encouraging the child to sit—not stand—at the table when he or she comes back to eat. For children who are able to understand, explain to them that mealtimes are special family times and it is important to the family that everyone sit down to eat and talk together. Make a ritual out of dinner and give everyone a special task—maybe even let each child have one night a week to plan and help make dinner. Have the kids set the table. Cloth napkins and real glasses set a more formal tone and are better for the environment. Candles aren’t just for adult dining—they can set a calming tone for the meal and will show kids that mealtime is special. Make a point not to allow mealtimes to degenerate into family argument time.

5. Don’t be a short-order cook.

Ever find yourself making one meal for the adults in the house and another for the kids—or even one for each kid? Children take their time warming up to new things and if you keep giving them the old standbys they’re not going to branch out and explore new foods. Be patient. Most research says that it takes an average of ten to twelve attempts before a child will try a new food, unless they are involved in cooking and gardening projects like Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard or after school summer programs like The Magic Garden Club. Learning about food and cooking in an active way helps breed a sense of culinary adventure. Make the same dinner for everyone in the family while making sure to put some foods on the plate that your children like—then add something new. If they don’t touch it, don’t worry about it, and definitely don’t make an argument out of it. Try again the next week and again the following week. Eventually they’ll surprise you by at least tasting that new food.

Most of our food travels 1,500 miles before we eat it.

6. Don’t buy into marketing for kids.

Kids don’t need frozen chicken nuggets, French fries, macaroni and cheese, and pizza to keep them happy. And those kinds of foods certainly don’t make for healthy children. Avoid processed foods at all costs and start talking to your children early in their lives about what constitutes a good diet and why it’s important for them to avoid foods like the ones mentioned above. Even a three-year-old can grasp why sodas aren’t good for you and why we don’t eat foods with lots of fat every day at every meal. Highly processed foods are loaded with chemicals, synthetic fats, additives, artificial sweeteners, and food colorings. Ben bought an ice pop from the ice-cream man one summer afternoon at the beach with friends and when he got home his hand, leg, and face were blue—dark blue.