What's for Lunch: Uneaten Rice & Beans

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Believe it or not, many kids go through the lunch line at school and then barely touch the food. It just gets tossed in the trash. I'm not sure how the children make it through the day, but so many of them just nibble.

This is what one boy's tray looked like near the end of lunch hour. He didn't even take a bite out of the cheese quesadilla--nor the beans and rice, nor the salad. The only thing he ate was a little cup of apple sauce. But look! He drank his milk! Who says kids won't drink plain milk?

This tells me that kids are served way more food than they actually need. They typically ignore vegetables and anything else that looks suspicious--like brown rice mixed with beans and tomato sauce.

To make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me, I took a slow walk around the lunchroom and observed closely what the kids were doing with their rice and their salad. I counted exactly six kids eating the rice. Two of them were Hispanic, one Asian. My daughter, the carbohydrate hound, wolfed hers down and went back for seconds (she was denied).

Fewer still ate the salad. I don't understand that. It's Romaine lettuce with croutons, not that stale, commercial mix of iceberg and shredded carrots and cabbage the schools used to serve. All that salad, along with the rice and beans, simply gets dumped in the garbage.

The kids were a bit more enthusiastic about the cheese quesadillas. In fact, I'd say Mexican food is a pretty safe bet in school cafeterias.

What's for Lunch: Cheese Quesadilla

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Kids like Mexican food at school. Even my daughter, who normally turns up her nose at the food served at school, will eagerly get in line for a cheese quesadilla. You could probably serve a version of quesadilla every day and get no complaints from the kids.

The side dishes, however, are another matter. This is what most of the trays looked like at the end of the lunch period. The "Santa Fe brown rice with black beans," as Chartwells called it on its menu website, went entirely untouched. Ditto for the salad of romaine lettuce.

That pool of red stuff you see there is what Chartwells calls a "salsa cup." Some of the kids did dip into that with their quesadilla, but not so much. In other words, except for the quessadilla, most of the food on this menu was wasted.

What's for Breakfast: Quesadilla Inc.

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I'll bet you hadn't guessed that this "breakfast quesadilla" is made by the same company that makes the infamous "scrambled eggs" that travel 1,100 miles pre-cooked and frozen from a factory in Minnesota to schools in the District of Columbia.

That's right, Michael Foods, Inc., of Minnetonka, MN, bills itself as "the world's largest egg processing company." Besides frozen scrambled eggs and frozen "breakfast quesadillas," the company sells an array of egg products you probably never heard of--and others you have no doubt seen on your grocer's shelves.

"From our plants in the U.S. and Canada, we offer a complete line of Easy Eggs® Extended Shelf Life refrigerated liquid, frozen liquids, dried powders, pre-cooked, and other value-added specialty egg products," reads the company website. "Our brands of Papetti's®, M.G. Waldbaum and Inovatech Egg Products have a long history throughout the foodservice/catering, commercial baking, retail and food processing industries as providing leadership roles in the development of egg-based products to meet the needs of the modern operator."

Apparently, one of those "modern operators" would be D.C. Public Schools, or its hired food contractor, Chartwells-Thompson.

From Michael Foods, "modern operators" can purchase a whole line of liquid eggs, frozen eggs, dried eggs and something called "extended shelf life eggs." The "breakfast quesadillas," shipped frozen, then re-heated in a steamer while still in their plastic wrappers, are sold under the Pappetti's "Table Ready" brand. (Sorry, no clue who or what "Pappetti" is.)


This is what the quesadilla looks like fresh out of its plastic wrapper. In the background you can see one with wrapper.

Last year Michael Foods posted gross earnings of more than $1 billion. It's being sold by current owners Thomas H. Lee Partners, an investment group, to a division of Goldman Sachs--GS Capital Partners--for $1.7 billion.

That's a lot of eggs.

In case you were wondering what's in those quesadillas, here's the ingredient list from the box they came in. Each 3.24-ounce portion contains:

"Tortilla, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, vegetable shortening (partially hydrogenated soybean and or cottonseed oils), contains 2% or less of the following: baking powder *sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, corn starch and monocalcium phosphate), salt, calcium propionate (organic acid and calcium salt), distilled mono and diglycerides, sorbic acid and baking soda. Filling: whole eggs, cooked turkey sausage (mechanically separated turkey, water, textured vegetable protein concentrate, caramel color), salt, spices, paprika, flavoring), pasteurized process low fat mozzarella cheese (culture milk, water, skim milk, sodium phosphates, salt, sorbic acid (preservative), enzymes, Vitamin A Palmitate), pasteurized process reduced fat cheddar cheese (cultured milk, water, skim milk, sodium phosphates, salt, annatto color, sorbic acid (preservative), enzymes, Vitamin A palmitate). Contains 2% or less of the following: modified corn starch, salt, citric acid, xanthan gum.

What's for Breakfast

By Ed Bruske

Egg and sausage quesadilla with chocolate milk and baked apples.

Often, processed foods arrive at school in individual plastic packaging and are simply reheated as is from the frozen state. The kitchen at my daughter's school has a commercial steamer that heats meal items while still in the plastic, making service a breeze. They are displayed just like this in the food line.

What you see here in the plastic wrapper is an egg and sausage breakfast quesadilla. My daughter complained that she didn't want the quesadilla. What she had really wanted was a yogurt. But she said the kitchen staff would not allow her to make an exchange, so she asked me to intervene.

I took the offending quesadilla back to the food line, but when I tried to trade it in for a container of yogurt I got a real hard time from the woman sitting at the cash register, who wagged her finger at me and said, "No! No! No!" She said there were no exchanges allowed, but when I took the yogurt anyway she made me remove the quesadilla. "We can't take food back," she said.

Shouldn't the kichen crew be making eating more healthful food easier for the kids, not harder?


My daughter's breakfast companion declared the quesadilla "good." This is how she ate it after opening the plastic--like a sandwich.

Ed Bruske writes The Slow Cook blog.