What's for Lunch: Uneaten Tilapia

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

D.C. schools lately have been serving tilapia on Thursdays on a fairly regular basis. You might think that's a great thing. Fish is a clean, lean source of protein and exposes children to something different from the usual routine of chicken nuggets and mac-n'-cheese.

But while fish looks great on the menu, it doesn't go over so well in the cafeteria--at least not at my daughter's elementary school in Northwest Washington. Yesterday I was careful to wait until most of the kids had eaten, then I took a slow walk around the lunch room. I saw only three kids who had actually eaten the tilapia. A couple others had poked at it.

Most of the trays looked like this one. As you can see, the fish hasn't been touched at all. Nor was the featured vegetable side dish, the "crunchy spinach," as Chartwells calls it, a mix of frozen spinach, corn, peas and sunflower seeds. It's a clever combination of vegetables--whoever thought of it deserves a hat tip. But the kids don't eat it.

What did they eat from this meal? From what I saw, this tray was pretty typical. The kids dove into the roasted potatoes and the whole wheat biscuit. In other words, they gobbled up the starch.

Kids love potatoes, of course. It's their second favorite food after pizza. And now there's a controversy around spuds because the new meal guidelines the USDA has proposed would limit servings of potatoes and other starchy vegetables--corn, peas, lima beans--to just one cup per week in favor of more green and orange vegetables that kids are much less fond of.

They also loved the watermelon. And what's not to like about that? I tasted the watermelon and it was delicious. So much of the fruit served in school isn't nearly ripe, but this watermelon was. This was a real treat.

The lesson I draw from all this is that menu changes don't mean nearly as much as what actually takes place in the cafeteria. You can put "healthier" foods in front of kids every day and still they'll only eat what they want and throw the rest in the trash.

I shudder to think how much uneaten tilapia D.C. schools sent to the landfill yesterday.

What's for Breakfast: Glycemic Bomb

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Just when you thought we'd gotten rid of the tater tots, they show up on the breakfast menu. My daughter couldn't wait to dig into hers. In fact, kids wolfed down the potatoes and ran back to the food line for more. After pizza, potatoes are kids' favorite food in the federally-subsidized meal program.

But with all of the other starches and sugars on this tray, were potatoes really necessary? The USDA's proposed new meal guidelines would cut back sharply on "starchy vegetables" such as potatoes, corn and peas. But they would also add 80 percent more grains to breakfast in the form of "whole grain-rich" products.

In other words, kids will be getting tons more starch, as long as it contains 51 percent "whole grain." So don't be looking for actual whole grains, but rather processed foods that have "whole grain" added.

This particular breakfast is full of starch and sugar. Consider what Chartwells advertises as the "all natural whole grain bluenanaberry muffin," next to it the "oven baked hash browns" that are actually re-heated, processed tater tots. Then there's the 4.23-ounce container of "fruitables" juice, containing 12 grams of sugar and the four-ounce container of Stonyfield organic yogurt containing another 13 grams of sugar.

Between the juice and the yogurt alone kids are consuming the equivalent of nearly six teaspoons of sugar, to which is added the starch from the potatoes and the muffin. Most people still fixate on fat in kids' diet, while it's the starch and sugar in foods like this that are intimately linked with rampant illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

That's quite a lot to be trying to disguise with soothing labels such as "all natural" and "organic" and "100 percent juice."

What's for Lunch: No Seconds!

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

For some reason I can't get this photo to publish horizontally. But perhaps you can make out the items on this tray: spaghetti with meat balls, corn with carrots, green bean salad, a dinner roll and canned pears.

Even before the last of the kids had gone through the food line, others were lining up behind them for more food.

"No seconds! No seconds!" I heard the kitchen manager shouting.

Turns out what the kids were mainly after were the meat balls. I took a stroll around the lunch room and saw that most of the children had wolfed down the beef meatballs and sauce, and hardly touched anything else. Even the pasta was left mostly unmolested.

But their eagerness for more meatballs was thwarted. The lunch ladies were having none of that.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing new, "healthier" nutrition guidelines that would cut way back on starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn--two of kids' favorite foods--and replace them with more "whole grains" like this pasta and the dinner roll.

Think that means less starch? Get a load of the pasta sandwich this girl is constructing. In fact, what passes for "whole grain" in school meals is actual "whole grain-rich," meaning manufacturers can label things "whole grain" as long as 51 percent of the ingredients qualify. The rest can be refined grain. And since that's cheaper than serving real grains, that's what kids see at school.

They get a little more fiber, and a lot more starch under the new guidelines--80 percent more "whole grain-rich" products at breakfast, for instance.

But what was most tragic about this particular meal was the wonderful green bean salad that went untouched by the kids. The beans arrive frozen. The cook took care to heat them in a steamer, then "shock" them in cold water to stop the cooking process. They were not cooked to death.

To finish the "salad," she tossed the beans with red onion and chopped tomato and dressed them with oil and vinegar. It truly was a lovely side-dish lovingly prepared. I ate a heap, while the kids threw theirs in the trash.

You can't just redesign school food without talking to the kids about it. When schools present food like this kids aren't used to, there needs to be adults in the cafeteria encouraging them to eat it.

What's for Lunch: Chicken with a Ton of Starch

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

According to the Chartwells menu website, this meal consisted of baked barbecue chicken with a whole wheat roll, a salad of romaine lettuce and local tomatoes, "herb-roasted" potato wedges with shredded carrot, and locally grown watermelon.

Well, the roll has turned into a bun, the tomatoes are missing from the salad and replacing the watermelon appears to be a peach.

This isn't particularly surprising. Sometimes the cafeteria may not have exactly what's posted on the menu on-line and substitutes something else. But here you have a case of bread and potato together, and double-whammy of starch that's sure to get kids' insulin pumping. Insulin is the body's fat storage hormone. But USDA regulations require grain servings, and potatoes qualify as a vegetable.

Adding grated carrots to roasted potatoes (no doubt re-heated from frozen) is an interesting concept. The kids definitely like the chicken.

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."