Oh, No! They're Back!

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

I thought the D.C. Public Schools were done with branded processed convenience foods but apparently not. This is what they were giving the kids for breakfast the other morning: a Tyson chicken sandwich served heated while still inside its plastic wrapper.

Tyson calls it "Power UPZ," which I guess is supposed to help with spelling. Or maybe its supposed to send children the message that Popeye and his spinach are altogether passe. The way to grow big and strong is to eat processed, re-heated chicken patties out of a plastic pouch.

Here are the ingredients:

SAUSAGE: Boneless dark chicken meat with skin, seasoning (salt, dextrose, spices, beef extract, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast, natural flavor, modified food starch, onion powder, tocopherols, garlic powder, gelatin), modified food starch, water, sodium phosphates, caramel color, natural flavors.

BISCUIT: White wheat 100% whole wheat flour, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, shortening (interesterified soybean, with distilled monoglycerides added), sugar, honey, baking powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, cornstarch, calcium sulfate, monocalcium phosphate), buttermilk solids, salt, xanthan gum, mono and diglycerides.

According to information Tyson provides via its website, this sandwich has a shelf life of 270 days. I wonder if that's frozen, or in its defrosted state.

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Nutrition Facts

• Serving Size: 1 PATTIE W/ BIS (94g)
• Servings Per Container: About 100

• Amount Per Serving
• Calories from Fat 90 Calories 260

% Daily Value*

• 17% Total Fat 11g
  • 20% Saturated Fat 4g
  • Trans Fat 0g
  • Polyunsaturated Fat 3g
  • Monounsaturated Fat 3g
• 12% Cholesterol 35mg
• 22%Sodium 520mg
• 9%Total Carbohydrate 27g
  • 8%Dietary Fiber 2g
  • Sugars 5g
• 28%Protein 14g

• Vitamin C 4%Vitamin A 2%
• Iron 10%Calcium 10%

Note the salt content: 520 milligrams. That's 22 percent of an adult daily requirement.

Researching this little piece, I also discovered that Tyson has a K-12 homepage with lots of fun graphics and tips for food service directors on how to use frozen foods from the chicken giant to get kids' attention.

"Kids ages 5-8 love to play, so fun foods are what they want. Click here to stay in the game with entertaining foods that are yummy too," is one of the come-ons.

According to Tyson, there are plenty of fun ways to turn those USDA commodities into foods kids love. Take a look.

What's for Lunch: Chicken on a Bun

Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

This meal illustrates the limits of trying to reform school meals around a meal service provider like Chartwells. Although there have been lots of encouraging changes around the edges of the cafeteria tray--fresh fruits and vegetables, cheeses, even some items cooked from scratch--it's hard to lose the processed entree in the center.

Our new food services director here in D.C. says he and his crew recently tested dozens of different "chicken products." This appears to be one: a chicken patty on a whole wheat bun.



As you can see from the photo, it comes with these phony grill marks (are the kids supposed to think the kitchen ladies are grilling them out in the parking lot?). They arrive frozen in boxes, then are reheated typically in the convection oven. If I could get my hands on the shipping container, I could tell you what's in them. Under "Healthy Schools" legislation passed by the D.C. Council, the schools this year are required to post the ingredients for all meal items. They're projecting an interactive website to be up and running sometime in November.

In case you were wonder about the salad in the paper boat, that's actually the toppings that are supposed to go on the chicken. Kids at the elementary school level are typically mystified by this sort of food service. I did not see any of them putting the lettuce, tomato and "ancho sauce" on their sandwich, nor did I see anyone coaching them in how to do it. Mostly it ends up in the trash.

Chartwells' menu description for the canned beans is over the top: "campfire baked vegetarian baked beans."

But don't you love the kid-size apple?

How We Are Changing Food at Our School

Guest Post
By Sara Jones

This past September, a half-dozen parents signed a sheet on a table run by our PTA at “Back to School Night” at our local elementary school to say we were interested in being on a nutrition committee. As it turns out, we all believed the school lunch needed major changes. A couple of parents working on their own had tried over the years to persuade the food services director to make various changes with varying degrees of success. This year we had enough angry parents to make a difference.

We live in Sea Cliff, NY, a quite small village in the suburbs of Long Island. It’s part of the North Shore School District, which has, by no means, the worst lunches I’ve seen. At the elementary level, no french fries, no tater tots. Entrees are not served while still in their plastic re-heatable bags. We are one of the handful of schools to always meet government standards for salt and fat in our meals when inspected. And yet – we are completely dependent on highly processed commodity foods like chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas stuffed full of additives and canned fruits and vegetables loaded with extra salt and sugar. The standards for salt and fat are a joke. Moreover – the pile of lunch bags from home is growing every year.

We were lucky that the district had a district-wide nutrition committee and monthly meeting structure in place, and we started there. We were also fortunate that our district is small and our administration accessible. The first thing we wanted was to see the labels for the food our kids were (or weren’t) eating. Essentially, we insisted we had a right to know what was in the food and had to volunteer to assemble and scan them ourselves before finally getting the labels.

If you want to change your school’s lunch – get the labels.

The information on the cans and boxes is in many cases simply stunning. The USDA commodity corn has not only added salt but sugar. The “Harvest Pizza” that Schwan processed from commodity cheese has 830 mg of sodium but no vegetables (why “Harvest”?). We went further and started calling manufacturers to confirm the chicken nuggets were fried and the green beans boiled already in the can. This information was certainly persuasive to parents and ultimately to administrators as well. We were able to get some of the worst items off the menu quickly (pancakes for lunch, fruit punch without much fruit.) but the rest will take longer.

We started a blog. We added pages to the PTA’s website. We emailed class parents, and they passed the information on to other parents. We surveyed families about the lunch. We packed the district’s nutrition meetings until the administration started showing up in force, and we knew we were getting somewhere. We spoke at board meetings or any place we knew the superintendent would hear us. We asked a lot of questions – about the school lunch program, our school’s lunch budget and what commodity foods were available. We asked to see everything.

We worked to be supportive of nutrition education and our school in general. The nutritionist on our committee visited kindergarten classes to teach about nutrition. We worked with our school’s enrichment teacher and a 5th grader launched her own letter-writing campaign to get the Child Nutrition Act re-authorized. We took a brief break to get our district’s budget passed.

Some of the changes we were talking about would not be popular with all parents, so we came up with more plans. At the school talent show, we commandeered the bake sale and sold whole grain treats without processed sugar. It was a hit – and we made some money we’d need later. We showed the film Two Angry Moms at a PTA meeting and luckily had an administrator and future ally in attendance. We held a healthy chili cook-off with students as judges and put the winning recipe on the menu. We invited a local chef to do a hands-on healthy snack demonstration with the children to show kids will eat things that are good for them. We talked about healthy eating and shopping ideas on our blog.

Someone on our nutrition committee does some work to improve our school’s lunch every day – at least one person, at least once a day. It’s a huge amount of effort and having a group of supporters behind you is critical. Meeting after meeting – and now they are constant -- district meetings, snack committee meetings, menu meetings, meetings with teachers. We stick to our core list of demands: more whole grains, more fresh fruits and vegetables, less added salt and sugar, less processing in general and more education.

We still have a long way to go. But so far, with the support of the administration, here’s where we believe we’ll be in September:

- Cancelled contracts for processing commodities into chicken nuggets, frozen pizza and mozzarella sticks. Our district will make its own chicken and get a healthier pizza locally
- No more flavored milk
- A salad bar once a week
- More whole grains – we’ve already switched the pasta and will look at rolls, etc.
- A more expensive lunch – the survey we did indicated parents would pay more than the current $2.25 if the food was better. We also felt that students paying full price should not in effect be subsidized by students entitled to a free lunch by paying less than the federal reimbursement rate for the free lunch.
- An overhaul in the desserts sold at lunch to limit salt, sugar and additives and make sure all foods have some nutritional value
- Organic fruit trees! Once our superintendent became involved he found a grant that will bring 40 organic fruit trees to the district.
- Small greenhouses (“hoop houses”) at each school funded by the PTAs

We need to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into our lunch. Our school needs to start serving breakfast. We’d love to see organic or locally grown food, and we’ll keep working. We’re trying to envision a welcoming, warm and bright lunch room where kids truly look forward to a meal that’s good for them in every sense. We want the kids to know what they’re eating, why and where it came from – and to be involved in that process. Like many of you, we don’t doubt we’ll be working on this for years.

If you’re just starting to figure out how to change your school’s lunch, get the labels and get organized. All schools are required to have a Wellness Policy that covers nutrition among other things and that requires a wellness committee which should include parents. Ask how you can be involved.

Our commodities are probably your commodities, so please visit our blog to read more about what’s for lunch – and what’s in it. We have more information about our group at our web page. Our district now posts the nutrition labels for the food.

If you’re working to change school food on Long Island in particular – please contact us!

Is There a Plan for D.C. School Food?

Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

D.C. schools currently serve kids some of the worst processed convenience foods the industry has to offer, grotesquely out of step with the enthusiastic rhetoric generated around Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign. And while they claim to be making improvements, school officials under Chancellor Michelle Rhee seem uwilling of incapable or articulating a vision for replacing the daily regime of frozen and packaged junk provided by its paid food serviced contractor--Chartwells--with real food.

This week I saw a very different approach when I spent time in a "culinary boot camp" outside Denver, CO. There, more than 30 cooks and food service directors from schools around the state immersed themselves in an intensive, four-day session to learn how to better manage their finances and operate kitchens that can create wholesome meals from scratch.

The "boot camp" is one step in a process of improving school food that also involves a professional assessment of food service operations to identify ways of freeing up cash, making kitchen operations more efficient, and serving healthier food. A state wellness organization responsible for organizing the boot camps--LiveWell Colorado--hopes that these initial training sessions are just the beginning of a process that could eventually transform food service in schools across the state, eliminating processed convenience foods from school cafeterias.

D.C. Schools have a new food service director, Jeffrey Mills, who previously had no experience at all in school food. His entire career has focused on developing restaurant concepts, most notably in New York City. Wouldn't it make sense for the District of Columbia, rather than asking Mr. Mills to re-invent the wheel, to emulate a progressive state such as Colorado and order a professional assessment of its food service operations?

Michelle Rhee said it was necessary to hire a professional food service company like Chartwells to get a grip on the $10 million deficits D.C. schools were running annually in its food services. Now we know that Chartwells is really about collecting millions of dollars in fees, money that could be going to improve the food kids are eating.

The good news is that there are professionals in school food service who are passionate about serving children wholesome meals made with fresh ingredients and who know how to manage finances and operations to make that kind of meal service a reality. Isn't it time for D.C. schools to get real and make like Colorado?

Are Schools Food Deserts?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

"Food desert" has become a popular term to describe urban and rural areas where people don't have access to fresh, nutritious food, rely heavily on fast food restaurants and convenience foods to feed themselves, and learn only bad eating habits.

Isn't that the very definition of a moden public school cafeteria in the United States today? From what I've seen, kids in most public schools have little access to fresh, nutritious foods and rely almost entirely on industrially processed convenience foods for meals. What vegetables there are in school meals typically are cooked to death and unpalatable. They're served anyway because the federal government requires them.

At breakfast, kids are doused with sugar in the form of processed packaged foods such as Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and sugary cereals such as Apple Jacks. Even the milk is tarted up with high-fructose corn syrup and colorings to make it more like strawberry. These are exactly the same kinds of foods kids buy at corner convenience stores in food deserts, the kinds of foods Michelle Obama says are contributing to an epidemic of childhood obesity.

In short, kids at school are taught bad eating habits.

The more I think about it, the more schools strike me as a perfect example of a food desert. Maybe if more people looked at it that way, and looked at children as victims of an industrially processed convenience food culture, they'd get behind efforts to revolutionize the way we feed kids at school.

Happy Memorial Day.