What's for Breakfast: Egg Pita Pocket

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook



The scrambled eggs served at school used to arrive pre-cooked and frozen from a factory. This year, the cooks are making them from scratch. This seems like a genius idea, serving them inside a whole-wheat pita pocket.



This was the alternative: warm muffin (heated inside the plastic) and cottage cheese. Some days the cooks remove the muffin from the plastic, other days not. Cottage cheese is one of my personal favorites, but I'm not sure how much the kids like it. Maybe they need to learn. This is a much better source of the calcium everyone is so worried about than strawberry milk, no?

What's for Breakfast: Vegetable Omelette

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells was calling this egg dish a "skillet." It contains fresh zucchini, tomato and red bell pepper. It was made with eggs and vegetables poured into a stainless pan greased with Pam, then baked in the oven and cut into squares. I seemed to be the only one eating it in the cafeteria. The kids all went for the alternate, which was the muffin, cottage cheese and orange wedges.

Don't wedges seem like a better idea than serving a whole orange, much of which often ends up in the trash? It would be great if all fruit servings could be geared to elementary school appetites to avoid waste.

I liked the eggs, even though they could have used a little more salt. Cottage cheese seems like a much better way to work calcium into the menu compared to flavored milk, which D.C. schools have stopped serving this year. I just wish I knew where the muffin can from. It definitely is not Otis Spunkmeyer.

Serving Cheap Calories from Sugar

Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I had originally intended to focus in this post on the cottage cheese you see in the photo. Serving cheese products seems like a great way to address the concerns of parents that kids aren't getting enough calcium. But then the apple juice on this tray caught my eye and I wondered what would happen if you removed it, since it contains so much sugar (2.5 teaspoons in a 4-ounce serving, or about the same as Coca-Cola).

But then I started to add up the calories in this meal, which Chartwells offers at my daughter's elementary school as the cold alternate breakfast on Thursdays. Under D.C.'s "Healthy Schools Act," schools must serve children in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade a minimum 350 calories for breakfast. The Kix, with four grams of sugar, contain just 70 calories, the low-fat milk 110 calories, the apple juice 55 calories and the cottage cheese I'm guessing around 45 calories. (It looks to be about one-quarter cup).

With a total of 280 calories, this meal, by my reckoning, already falls short of the minimum prescribed by law. Take away the apple juice, with its dose of calories from fructose, and this breakfast would be 36 percent shy of the calories prevailing law says the schools should be serving every day.

That helps explain why school food service operations have become so addicted to sugar. Sugar adds a cheap boost of calories to meat meal program standards. But more than any other ingredient, sugar is linked to the current epidemic of childhood obesity, as well as health consequences such as elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, and even non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children.

Maybe that's why some schools are so desperate to hang onto flavored milk: not for the calcium and other nutrients, but for the calories that come with the added sugar.

What could you put on this tray that would satisfy the requirements for calories, would not add sugar, and wouldn't bust the food services budget?