To get an idea we recently took a look at Chicago Public School menus and interviewed some of the leaders in school food reform.
This first look revealed that breakfast offerings in most CPS schools last week featured strawberry flavored pancakes, French toast sticks and pancakes wrapped around a sausage on a stick. And for lunch? The district’s top three entrees include processed chicken patties, processed chicken nuggets and processed chicken crumbles over nachos. Each of those chicken products alone contains dozens of ingredients.
After years of efforts by First Lady Michelle Obama and others to put real food on cafeteria tables, why are meals in one of the most obese districts in the nation still dominated by sugary and processed food?
“The schools have really been hijacked by the companies who are benefitting when children are fed and digest the values of fast food,” says Alice Waters, the mother of American cuisine and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley where kids learn to grow and cook their food. “They are headed out to be consumers and that’s what we are doing in the schools and so it’s not surprising to me.”
Ann Cooper is a culinary school trained chef who was recruited by Waters to launch a fresh local meals program in the Berkeley schools 15 years ago. Today, Cooper has brought that mission to the Boulder Valley School District where she’s working to transform the the entire meal program. But these kinds of programs are still few and far between.
“Considering that the National School Lunch Program has been around for 65 years and a good half of those years it has been serving bad food I think, in the last 10 years, we’ve made positive change in leaps and bounds,” Cooper said. “But it’s in small pockets and almost ethereal when it comes to what’s on children’s plates. It’s really good, but maybe not so much in a lot of places.”