What's for Lunch: Starch, starch, starch

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

In the federally-subsidized school lunch program, potatoes qualify as vegetables. That's how you end up with a tray like this, jammed with starches in the form of baked potato, bread roll and beans. Add the sugar in the apple sauce and you have quite a glycemic load. (Thankfully, the apple sauce has no added sugar, just what occurs naturally in the apples.)

Actually, what Chartwells called this on its menu website was "baked potato with vegetable chili and low-fat cheddar cheese." That explains what those beans are in the upper left, because the kids weren't sure what they were (baked beans?) or whether they wanted to eat them (strangely sweet).

I did not see the cheddar cheese, but maybe it was already stirred into the beans.

Also on the menu were "seasoned green beans," which translates as green beans out of a can. Thus, here's another version of this lunch, with the green beans but without the salad of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes.

And here's yet a third version, without the applesauce. Schools that follow the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food-based menu plan must offer five items at lunch. To reduce plate waste, school district must allow high schools an "offers versus served" option, meaning kids only need select three of the offered items to qualify as a federally-subsidized "meal." But they can take all five if they want, as this particular fifth-grade girl did. Here in the District of Columbia, kids in all grades get the "offered versus served" option.

The kids really liked the baked potato, even though there was no dressing for it. (Where's the sour cream? my daughter wanted to know.) What they didn't eat so much were the "chili" or the other vegetables. The best thing on this tray by far was the "locally grown" cucumber and tomato salad. The cucumbers were crisp and cool, the salad perfectly dressed. I could have eaten it all day. But not many kids had it on their trays, and those that did didn't really touch it before it went into the trash.

Today's Lunch

Have you ever seen a cheese sandwich served in a plastic pouch?

That was one of the main entrees when I visited my daughter's school, H.D. Cooke Elementary, for lunch the other day. The sandwich, identified on the packaging as "Hot from the Grill," was heated while still in the plastic, then displayed for the kids on the steam table.

Unfortunately, there was nothing on the package to indicate ingredients. A second entree choice was chili over rice. I'm just guessing, but since I spent a week in the H.D. Cooke kitchen, I have a pretty good idea how things work. The chili was probably made with USDA commodity beef mixed with soy protein and prepared by a distant processor, then shipped to the school frozen. Beef like this typically is reheated in a steamer, then it could be mixed with kidney beans out of a can and some form of dried chili seasoning.

Most of the kids also had on their Styrofoam trays an 8-ounce (1 cup) container of milk--usually chocolate or strawberry--and a Granny Smith apple. One thing conspicuously missing from the trays was any form of vegetable. Turns out steamed carrots were being offered, but none of the kids were taking.

"We don't like the carrots," my daughter explained. "They taste yucky."

Under USDA "offered versus served" rules, kids need only take three items from what's being offered to qualify as a federally-subsidized meal. Most likely, those unserved, uneaten carrots will simply go down the kitchen's commercial garbage disposal.

I also wonder about little kids being served great, big Granny Smith apples. Most of them won't finish the apple. It just goes into the trash. What about cutting the apples into wedges, mixing them with a little lemon juice to prevent browning, and serving them in smaller portions? There is a kitchen tool that makes quick work of this and would save a lot on apples.