Cooper notes that the USDA recently pledged $11 million for school kitchen upgrades, but she believes you’d need about a 100 times that much to do what’s really necessary.
This lack of funding frustrates many food advocates who say that an investment up front can lay an early, healthy food foundation for the nation’s most vulnerable children. They lament that in the last round of school lunch funding, Congress allocated just 6 cents more per meal to the program.
Waters worries this will have disastrous effects on many levels.
“There is hardly a country on this planet that doesn’t think of food as something important and people are willing to pay for it,” Waters says. “But in this country we are unwilling to pay for it. But when you have cheap food somebody pays for it. We pay for it with our health, but we really pay for it in the destruction of our environment and the wages of the people who grow that food.”
Lack of money is a common complaint for school food caterers. They say that, when all is said and done, they’re left with only about $1 to spend on food per meal. Many cite that as the main reason they turn to processed patties and nuggets. But Paul Boundas, whose Country House catering serves lunch to thousands of Chicago Catholic school students each day (even in majority low income schools), says a caterer can actually save on food costs by cooking whole foods from scratch each day. Boundas adds, however, that the caterer must be ready to invest in local jobs and a skilled work force rather than processed foods.
One last obstacle for change is the fact that districts lose federal money when kids don’t take the meals. This presents a strong financial incentive to keep the nuggets and shun fresh food experimentation. For this reason, Cooper says it’s essential to make healthy delicious, and then educate the kids about why they should eat them.
“In Boulder right now we are doing 200 to 300 events a year,” she says. “We go into the cafeteria and work with the kids. We do Rainbow Days, we do tastings, we do chef demos, we do Iron Chef competitions. We work with kids on a daily basis to try new things. And that’s how we’re going to make the change. We’re not just going to give them high fat, high sugar, high salt unhealthy food because that’s what they think they want. Because that would not be an educational situation.”
But the question remains: If Chicago Public Schools ditched their processed food for something healthier, would they meet weeping and wailing, or would the children get on board?
There’s only way way to find out.
(Full disclosure: One of Monica Eng’s nine siblings works for a food company subcontracted by CPS to cater pre-prepared meals to many CPS schools without full kitchens.)
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Article Appeared @http://www.wbez.org/news/culture/has-decade-school-food-reform-resulted-healthier-lunches-110018