What's for Breakfast: Turkey Cheese Melt & Unbiscuit

Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Some things sound a lot better on a menu than they actually turn out to be on the plate. This "turkey ham and cheddar cheese melt" advertised on Chartwell's menu site is a perfect case in point. This is what it looked like on the kids' trays for breakfast yesterday.


As you can see, the "turkey ham," meaning turkey processed with chemicals to taste like ham, is sprinkled with grated cheese, then placed in the oven to melt the cheese. Mostly what I saw the kids doing was picking off the bits of cheese to get to the turkey. They ate the meat with their fingers.

The thing on the left that looks a little too much like it was found out in the woods is supposed to be a "whole wheat biscuit." I suppose you could conjure up a lovely mental pickture of ham and melted cheese sandwiched inside a fluffy biscuit. But I think we can conclude from this that the push for whole grains is definitely in conflict with our biscuit tradition.

I happen to love traditional southern food, and back when I was eating starchy carbs I loved nothing better than a good, homemade buttermilk biscuit. A biscuit made with whole wheat, as you can plainly see, comes nowhere close. In fact, I would call this inedible--and I think the kids agree. I didn't see any of them eating it.

We should just serve whole grains as whole grains and leave the biscuit tradition alone. But you know what? The USDA's proposed nutrition guidelines would eventually have all of the baked goods in schools made as "whole grain."

In my book, that spells the end of biscuits.

What's for Breakfast: Turkey & Cheese Muffin

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells calls this "toasty turkeyham and cheddar on a whole wheat muffin."

Our kitchen ladies did a good job of keeping the sandwich warm and I like the turkey ham. Not only was it toasty, but it really tasted like ham.

There's not much you can do with the cheddar. It's grated cheesed that gets piled onto the bread, then melts into a pretty nasty looking coating. I tried to eat it, but I couldn't pull it away from the muffin, which I wouldn't eat on account of the carbs, which I avoid at all costs.

A plan to close a $188 million budget gap here in the District of Columbia would eliminate the extra funding for school meals that had gone into effect this year by way of our Healthy Schools Act. That could spell the end of local fruits and vegetables on kids' trays. The law had provided an extra 5 cents for every lunch meal that contained a locally grown component.

What's for Lunch: Turkey & Fingers

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

How do you like your turkey?

Lunch on Tuesday was this processed turkey luncheon meat, folded into a log, drizzled with a canned "gravy" that looked strangely like olive oil with pools of brown running through it. Like most of the food in D.C. schools, the turkey typically arrives frozen, usually from the Jennie-O Turkey Store in Willmar, MN, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods that bills itself as "one of the largest turkey processors and marketers in the world."

There's also a biscuit, serving as the grain in this meal, and the dark stuff in the upper right in the vegetable--spinach. You can pretty much count on the kids not eating that. "Nasty," as my daughter would say.

The turkey looks easy, but it does pose a problem. The only utensil the kids have to eat with is a plastic "spork," or combination spoon and fork. It doesn't cut meat.


One solution is the shovel method. Here you get the spork underneath a slice of the turkey meat, and quickly raise it up to your mouth and grab it with your teeth, as this 10-year-old girl is demonstrating. This takes good hand-eye-mouth coordination.

Another, more relaxed method is simply to tear with fingers and eat by hand. Another 10-year-old girl, seen here, was daintily pulling the turkey into pieces and raising it to her lips. I think I like this method better. She almost makes it look like the turkey is supposed to be eaten this way. The gravy does make a bit of a mess, though.

What for Lunch: Turkey Sandwich, Chips from Home

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

This looks a lot like the lunches I ate when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure I always brought a brown bag lunch from home with some kind of sandwich. Except I don't think we had "turkey ham" in those days, made out of turkey thighs "chunked and formed." And a plastic cup with mayo?

The kids are probably more likely to eat the carrots in this plastic bag than the steamed carrots they are often served. (Did you know that these are not actually "baby" carrots, but regular carrots that are industrially "sanded" to make them look junior-size?)

This was the alternative: spaghetti with meat sauce. I believe these are the famous "beef crumbles," made with government commodity beef and soy protein by a company in Cincinnati. They arrive frozen and are poured into a steamer to reheat, then sauced. The spaghetti also is cooked in a pan in the steamer, proving that you don't actually need a stove to make school food.

And this is what one fourth-grade girl brought from home to eat with her lunch. In some public schools, this would not be allowed. Junk food is confiscated.

What's for Lunch: "Turkey Ham" Burrito

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here's something I'd never seen before: A burrito made out of a giant flour tortilla, "turkey ham," and processed cheese slices. Apparently there wasn't enough starch in the burrito, so one of the sides is pasta noodles. The green stuff is overcooked broccoli. This would be Exhibit A to explain why kids in D.C. schools don't eat vegetables: they are always cooked to death.

This is what the burrito looks like when it's unfolded. Now, this took some imagination.

The "turkey ham," from Jennie-O Turkey Store Sales in Willmar, MN, consists of "cured turkey thigh meat chunked and formed." The label lists ingredients as "turkey thigh meat, water, contains 2% less lite salt (potassium chloride, sodium chloride), sugar, salt, sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, natural smoke flavoring, sodium nitrite."

In other words, it's highly processed and doused with chemicals that make turkey meat look like ham.

The girl sitting next to this little boy didn't want her burrito, so she unfolded it, removed the meat and cheese, and gave it to him. He then stuffed the extra meat and cheese into his burrito, making it truly gigantic.

Kids are devilishly clever around food--especially when it means finding ways to get more.