What's for Breakfast: Egg & Sausage Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

How does this breakfast look to you?

Scrambled eggs and a sausage patty on an English muffin, along with a carton of orange juice and some canned pears.

Schools constantly complain they don't have enough money to make better food. So why do they scoop the canned pears into a plastic cup they have to purchase, then pay to have hauled away when it's thrown in the trash?

Guidelines proposed by the USDA would restrict the amount of juice schools can serve as a replacement for whole fruit. What's wrong with juice? For one, it's missing all the fiber you get eating whole fruit. Also, juice is just the concentrated sugar--or fructose--from whole fruit. Kids don't need to be consuming all that sugar.

The eggs are scrambled from large cartons of liquid eggs delivered to the school kitchen. That's a big improvement over the eggs that were pre-scrambled in a factory and shipped to the schools frozen.

Unfortunately, the sausage patty doesn't have a lot of flavor. But that may be a permanent feature of school food. Those same proposed USDA guidelines call for schools to cut back on salt content by half.

Also, notice the kids in D.C. are still getting their food on disposable Styrofoam trays. Even at my daughter's school, where they have a commercial dishwasher, they're still using disposable Styrofoam trays.

The "Healthy Schools Act" approved by the D.C. Council last year calls on schools to replace Styrofoam with a more sustainable alternative, but only over a period of years.

This breakfast looks simple enough. But there's actually a lot going on here.