What's for Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs with Veggies

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

The lunch ladies at my daughter's elementary school turned liquid eggs into this fabulous dish of scrambled eggs with broccoli, carrot, onion and cheddar cheese. It looked so good, I had to try some myself and it was terrific.


Unfortunately, the kids were less enthusiastic. "The eggs are different," said one fifth-grader. Well, of course they were. They were scrambled instead of being served cut into squares, explained the kitchen manager.


Chartwells at its menu website also advertised "whole wheat toast or all natural whole brain banana bread" with this breakfast, but I didn't see it.

Kids are often terribly picky sometimes. My daughter, for instance, would never eat this because of the bits of vegetables in it. She likes her veggies served separately in a recognizable form. But that just proves again that you can't just invent new stuff, re-write the menu and expect kids to eat it.

Most parents would never know. They'd look at the menu and think they're kids are getting an improved version of school food. But there's a step missing in the process: you have to market the new foods to the kids. That means getting staff or volunteers into the cafeterias talking to the kids, conducting tastings, coaching them on better eating habits.

This would be a great role for parents to play--cafeteria coaches. Schools in Boulder, Colorado, have had great success with this approach. But in D.C., the schools don't involve parents. They barely even talk to us.

Why is that?

What's for Breakfast: Bagel and Egg

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

These scrambled eggs are made from liquid eggs--but that's an improvement over the eggs that were prescrambled in a factory and shipped to the schools frozen, right?

Any way you slice them, bagels are loaded with carbs--more than several slices of bread. Now they're billed as "whole wheat," but that only means they contain 51 percent whole wheat flour by law. The rest is starchy plain flour.

The USDA's proposed meal guidelines would increase grains at breakfast by 80 percent--and within two years, all grain products on kids' trays would have to qualify as "whole grain-rich." Meaning at least 51 percent.

Kids do seem to like the "whole grain" bagels better than the whole grain pasta, which typically ends up in the trash.

What's for Breakfast: Egg & Sausage Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

How does this breakfast look to you?

Scrambled eggs and a sausage patty on an English muffin, along with a carton of orange juice and some canned pears.

Schools constantly complain they don't have enough money to make better food. So why do they scoop the canned pears into a plastic cup they have to purchase, then pay to have hauled away when it's thrown in the trash?

Guidelines proposed by the USDA would restrict the amount of juice schools can serve as a replacement for whole fruit. What's wrong with juice? For one, it's missing all the fiber you get eating whole fruit. Also, juice is just the concentrated sugar--or fructose--from whole fruit. Kids don't need to be consuming all that sugar.

The eggs are scrambled from large cartons of liquid eggs delivered to the school kitchen. That's a big improvement over the eggs that were pre-scrambled in a factory and shipped to the schools frozen.

Unfortunately, the sausage patty doesn't have a lot of flavor. But that may be a permanent feature of school food. Those same proposed USDA guidelines call for schools to cut back on salt content by half.

Also, notice the kids in D.C. are still getting their food on disposable Styrofoam trays. Even at my daughter's school, where they have a commercial dishwasher, they're still using disposable Styrofoam trays.

The "Healthy Schools Act" approved by the D.C. Council last year calls on schools to replace Styrofoam with a more sustainable alternative, but only over a period of years.

This breakfast looks simple enough. But there's actually a lot going on here.

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?

Scrambled Eggs From Where?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here are the infamous scrambled eggs served in D.C. schools. Scrambled eggs are supposed to be simple, but in the world of industrially-processed school foods, they are anything but. These scrambled eggs are actually cooked by a company called Michael Foods in Minnetonka, MN. They are made with "whole eggs, skim milk, soybean oil, modified corn starch, xanthan gum, liquid pepper extract, citric acid, natural and artifical butter flavor, lipolized butter oil, medium chain triglycerides, natural and artificial flavors."

After the eggs are cooked, they are frozen and shipped 1,100 miles to the District of Columbia where they are simply dumped in a steamer, heated and served.

"One thing I'm not touching are those eggs!" my daughter declared.

"They don't have any flavor," said one of the other girls at the table. "They don't even use salt."

Most of the kids I saw ate their way around the eggs, starting with the potato patty (they also arrive pre-cooked and frozen), and the Otis Spunkmeyer Appel Cinnamon muffin. The muffin has malted barley flour and brown rice flour in it, which makes it look healthier than the typical muffin, but it also contains 15 grams--nearly four teaspoons--of sugar.

Some kids passed their muffins to friends, who ate two.