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: Chicken & Rice

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells, the company that provides food service under contract to D.C. Public Schools, calls this "cheesy chicken with rice casserole." I'd never seen it before, but I can assure you there's no casserole involved. Notice how they try to make industrially processed convenience food sound like something off a restaurant menu, or maybe a Sunday church supper?

My guess is the rice was cooked in the kitchen's commercial steamer. The chicken, most likely from the government's commodity surplus program, probably arrived frozen, then was stirred into the rice with pre-shredded cheese. Most recipes out of the Chartwells book involve a minimum number of ingredients and just three or four steps to prepare. It would not be unkind to call them idiot proof. They are designed for kitchen workers with minimal skill and only basic cooking apparatus.

The kids seemed to like the chicken and rice well enough. At the Chartwells website, the menu also called for "glazed carrots." That's a fancy description for carrots cut into rounds that arrive frozen in bags, then are heated in the steamer. I did not observe any "glaze." They just looked dull and listless, like most vegetable side dishes that come out of the school kitchen. It's typically hit or miss whether the kids even opt to have them placed on their tray in the food line. Most of the trays I observed did not have carrots on them.

Adults seem to think that if we only put more vegetables in school cafeterias, meals will get healthier. Frankly, I think adults are a bit delusional on this point. If you spend any time at all around school lunch, you quickly realize that most school kitchens are incapable of preparing vegetable side dishes that kids will actually eat. In addition, federal rules provide that the kids only have to choose three of the five items offered, so they can usually make a complete "meal" without at vegetable side dish at all. From what I've seen, the vegetables that do make their way onto kids' trays typically end up uneaten and thrown in the trash.

One girl who did take the carrots was seated directly across from me. She speared one of the rounds with her "spork" and placed a carrot in her mouth, then quickly spit it out. "You didn't like it?" I asked. She just shook her head.

That's a fresh pear you see in the photo, plus an open container of strawberry milk. How would you rate this lunch?

What's for Lunch: Popcorn Chicken Scenes

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chicken, along with pizza and potatoes, is one of kids' favorite things to eat at school. You see it in many different forms. When shaped into these little balls and breaded at the factory, they're called "popcorn" chicken. They arrive pre-cooked and frozen in bags, and are quickly reheated in a convection oven.

The other components for this meal are seasoned rice, iceberg lettuce salad and milk. Some of the kids also chose a piece of fruit. I saw pears and bananas on some of the trays.

Kids have fun with the popcorn chicken. Proper etiquette, I think, demands that you dab each one with a little ketchup, then eat it with your fingers.

More disturbing was seeing a very overweight fourth-grader convincing one of the girls at his table to give him her rice. She shoveled it onto his tray with her "spork" and he walked back to his seat with this huge portion. This is a load of starch he probably doesn't need. But there's no supervision for this sort of thing.

Later, I noticed that one of the girls had torn her popcorn chicken into little pieces. As if that weren't strange enough, she started stuffing the pieces in her pants pocket. When I asked her why, she said she was saving it for gym class, "when I get hungry."