More on Congress' Excruciating School Lunch Reauthorization Process

Does childhood obesity pose a national security threat?

Former top military brass say we need to address school meals because too many young people are too fat to qualify for service.

You can read the second half of Jill Richardson's coverage of House hearings on reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act at the La Vida Locavore blog.

You can watch videos of the hearings here.

Boston and the Impossible Math of Outsourcing School Food Services

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Boston has found itself in almost exactly the same place the District of Columbia was in two years ago: running big deficits in school food services and trying to erase them by privatizing school meals.

According to a report published by Boston's public radio station, WBUR, most Boston schools have been using the same company D.C. used--Preferred Meal Systems--to supply kids with re-heated factory meals much like airline food. Officials want to upgrade the food, but are saddled with $3.6 million in annual deficits, meaning school lunch--bad as it may be--is draining money from the general budget.

Thinking a large professional food service company was the only solution to the deficit issue, Boston schools put out a request for proposals (RFP) to take over the catered meal service. But closing the $3.6 million budget gap proved to be an insurmountable hurdle. Only one company replied to the RFP--Sodexo. Parents and a number of Boston's elected officials howled at the idea of processed Sodexo food in Boston cafeterias. So the schools pulled the plug on the bidding process.

Said schools Chief Operating Officer Michael Goar: “When we say that we want someone to take all the risk of $3.6 million, and also say to them, ‘By the way, you cannot touch any of our employees, oh, oh, by the way, we want you to provide more fruits and vegetables, and the last thing, we want you to partner with our local small firms in the city of Boston,’ it became a challenge in terms of finding the degree of competition that we wanted.”

Goar says he has whittled the deficit projection for the coming year down to $2.5 million and would re-open the bidding. But others, such as Boston City Council President Mike Ross, believe the schools should simply replace Preferred Meal Systems, which ships its factory meals from Philadelphia, with a local company, City Fresh Food. "They [City Fresh] don’t freeze their food, they flash freeze, so it’s just long enough to get to the school," Ross says.

Except that 40 percent of Boston schools prepare food in their own kitchen's. What would happen to them?

D.C. was in very much the same position when Michelle Rhee took over as public schools chancellor and announced she was privatizing school meals here by hiring Chartwells, a huge food service company like Sodexo. Until that time, D.C. schools had been purchasing meals from Preferred Meal Systems, made in a factory in suburban Maryland and trucked to individual schools to be reheated.

At the time, D.C. schools were running a $10 million annual deficit in food services, a number that has never been adequately explained and makes Boston's troubles seem downright trivial. The D.C. school system's contract with Charwells called for it to take over meal service in 122 schools and reduce the deficit to something closer to $5 million over time in exchange for a $1 million administrative fee plus fees on every meal served totaling an additional $1 million or more.

Last fall, Chartwells switched from Preferred Meals to something it calls "fresh cooked," meaning meals made predominantly from frozen, industrially processed convenience foods requiring minimal skill and time to prepare. Note to Boston: this is what you get from a big food service company when you spend pennies per meal.

Rhee and her designated chief operating officer, Anthony Tata, used the same deficit rationale as Boston to justify hiring a for-profit company to run school food services, but threw in a philosophical sop for good measure: making food, they said, was not a "core competency" of schools. (Meaning schools can drive and maintain a fleet of buses, fix plumbing, heating, and air conditioning systems, landscape acres of property, manage hundreds of employees, write contracts and deal with labor unions, and teach children, but can't cook.)

Now D.C. has a new food services director who finds himself in the same awkward spot as Boston City Council President Ross: looking for alternative contractors who can make first-rate food on a beggar's budget.

Anyone have a magic wand they want to loan?

Congress' Excrutiating School Lunch Reauthorization Process

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Our federal government has unlimited billions of dollars to wage wars in foreign countries, but when it comes to feeding our kids decent food members of Congress suddenly become all about saving money. Every five years we get to watch this spectacle play out again when law makers take up re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which funds school meals, among other things.

This year President Barack Obama has requested an increase in spending of $10 billion over 10 years on child nutrition programs. It sounds like a lot, but when you do the math it works out to something like 10 cents more for school lunch, which barely covers the cost of an apple. The best the Senate has been able to come up with is a 6-cent increase. And in the House, much lip service is being paid to improving school food, but congressmen say they just can't find the money to do it.

But the best part of this year's re-authorization proposal wouldn't cost any money at all. It would simply give the country's agriculture secretary authority to remove unhealthy foods from schools that currently go unregulated.

The House held a hearing on the bill yesterday with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack the feature speaker. Jill Richardson has a detailed recap at her blog, La Vida Locavore. And you can go here to see videos.

Are Pilot Projects the Way Forward?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

If improving school food were simply a matter of writing better contracts for meal purveyors, everybody would be doing it, no?

D.C. Public Schools got some rosy press recently when they announced two pilot programs that would be serving meals vastly upgraded from the industrially processed convenience foods kids are eating now. Each program would feed seven of the city's public schools, one with "portable" or catered meals, the other with food made from scratch.

The food requirements are state of the art: hormone- and antibiotic-free milk, no high-fructose corn syrup or artificial preservatives, colors or flavors, no canned fruit in syrup, no trans fats, beef no more than four times per month. The meals must meet proposed Institute of Medicine standards, meaning minimum and maximum calorie limits along with increased portions of orange and leafy green vegetables. And 20 percent of all produce must come from local sources.

And all of this is supposed to be provided at or near the current levels of federal reimbursement for school meals, meaning around $1.70 for breakfast and $2.70 for lunch. (Recently enacted "Healthy Schools" legislation provides a bit more: an extra 10 cents for breakfast and for lunch, and a five-cent bonus for meals that contain local produce.)

Sounds like a tall order. The deadline for food service companies to submit their proposals was June 1. And that's to begin meal service when school resumes later in August. As far as we know, the proposals are still under review, so the process is wrapped in secrecy. But we'll be looking at these two pilot programs in more detail in the coming days, and hopefully have even more to share when the winning bids are announced.

A Great Clamor for Sugar-Free Schools

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Jamie Oliver at his widely followed website this week linked to this blog, Better D.C. School Food, and news that D.C. Public Schools will no longer serve flavored milk and sugary cereals. The result was more than 100 times the usual number of visitors yesterday and more than 100 comments, almost unanimously supporting the effort to reduce the amount of sugar served to kids in school.

Many of those comments, from readers around the country, constitute pleas to school officials to take similar steps to make food healthier in their school districts. It appears there is a huge demand to restrict flavored milk in particular. But the powerful dairy industry has managed to scare many parents and food service directors into believing that children will suffer horrible health consequences if they do not have access to milk laced with high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavorings, colorings and other additives.

Most of the industry's flavored milk is served in schools and schools pay more for it. But an eight-ounce serving of low-fat milk already contains 12 grams of sugar--or three teaspoons--in the form of naturally occurring lactose. Chocolate milk typically has another 12 to 14 grams of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup added, making it nearly the equivalent of Classic Coke. Strawberry milk has even more sugar, almost as much as Mountain Dew.

Parents for Better D.C. School Food have argued that school meals could be made healthier overnight simply by eliminating the sugary "treats" served to children on a daily basis, especially at breakfast. In D.C. schools, breakfast options typically include flavored milk, sugary cereals, Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams, Otis Spunkmeyer muffins and fruit juice, meaning elementary school children often are consuming 50 or 60 grams of sugar--the equivalent of 15 teaspoons--before classes even start.

Ironically, despite all the regulations and standards governing the nutritional content of food served under the federally subsidized meals programs, there is no limit on the amount of sugar that can be served. Like the dairy industry, the sugar lobby in this country is a powerful force. Even the recently approved "Healthy Schools Act" here in the District of Columbia, while increasing funding for school meals and raising nutrition standards, failed to take on the sugar issue, ostensibly because there are no existing standards on which to base local regulations.

It was up to school officials to take the first, bold step.

D.C. school officials have said that in addition to eliminating flavored milk, they will also be choosing cereals with six grams of sugar or less. That would rule out virtually all of the cereals served until now by the D.C. Public Schools' current food service provider, Chartwell's. So far, however, school officials have not responded to our inquiries about possible new protocols for serving other sugary processed foods and fruit juices.

As recently as a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and her classmates at H.D. Cooke Elementary School were being served Pop-Tarts for breakfast in their classroom. A single serving of "whole grain frosted strawberry" Pop-Tart contains 13 grams of sugar, or a bit more than three teaspoons. Here are the ingredients listed on the packaging:

"Whole wheat lfour, high fructose corn syrup, enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, Thiamin mononitrate (Vitamin B1), riboflavin (Vitamin B2), folic acid), soybean and palm oil (with TBHQ for freshness), polydextrose, sugar, dextrose, corn syrup solids, corn syrup, whole grain barley flour, glycerin, contains two percent or less of inulin from chicory root, wheat starch, salt, dried strawberries, dried pears, dried apples, cornstarch, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, moncalcium phosphate), natural and artificial strawbery flavor, citric acid, gelatin, caramel color, soy lecithin, xanthan gum, modified wheat starch, Vitamin A palmitate, niacinimide, red #40, reduced iron, pyridoxine hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), yellow #6, riboflavin (Vitamin B2), thiamin hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), folic acid.

What's for Lunch: Grilled Cheese from Los Angeles

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

The mystery of the grilled cheese sandwich served at my daughter's elementary school--heated in its own plastic wrapper in the school kitchen's steamer--has finally been solved.

We didn't know where this sandwich came from or what was in it because the wrapper gives none of that information. But I was finally able to find the packing box the sandwiches arrive in (72 sandwiches in a box, weighing 22.55 pounds) and all was revealed.




The sandwiches are made by a company called Integrated Food Service located in Gardena, CA, outside Los Angeles. That's right: this grilled cheese sandwich travels 3,000 miles frozen so that it can be re-heated and served on the steam tables in D.C. Public Schools.

"We manufacture products for Schools and their Distributors in approximately 40 States as well as produce a wide variety of items for our private-label, retail customers.," says the company's website. "Our product mix consists of Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, Hot Dogs, Breakfast Items and Mexican Items including Quesadillas, Chalupas and Taco Sticks. We also manufacture pre-wrapped Hamburgers and Cheeseburgers and offer a complete Beef line of precooked Hamburgers, Sausage Patties, Beef Crumbles and Taco Meat."

"Our unbeatable 'Hot Off The Grill' brand offers a variety of delicious, nutritious Grilled Cheese Sandwiches. We bake our bread fresh daily for the freshest, cheesiest sandwiches! They come in colorful ovenable packaging or bulk. Serve daily as a vegetarian option with tomato soup! Our whole grain sandwiches are made with UltraGrain®, by Con Agra Foods."

Integrated Food Service is on a list of 112 manufacturers approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to convert donated commodity products into processed convenience foods. That means schools can choose to use the commodity credits they earn serving federally-reimbursed meals to "buy" cheese and, rather than messing with it themselves, have it "diverted" to Los Angeles and turned into "Hot Off the Grill" sandwiches.

Of course, the schools pay hard currency for the processing and the shipping, an arrangement that's actually encouraged by the USDA. In the District of Columbia, all of these details are managed by the school system's hired food services provider--Chartwell's--which charges additional fees to run the program.

Integrated Food lists these ingredients in the grilled cheese sandwich:

"Whole grain bread: water, whole wheat flour, enriched bread flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, Thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), bread base (sugar, soy oil, dextrose, salt, wheat flour, mono & diglycerides, calcium stearoyl lactylate, wheat gluten, calcium sulfate, diacetyl tartanic acid, esters of mono & diglycerides, ammonium sulfate, ethoxylated mono & diglycerides, guar gum, ascorbic acid, monocalcium phosphate, potassium lodite, enzyme, calcium peroxide), sugar, yeast, wheat gluten, calcium proponate (preservative). Processed American cheese: reduced fat American cheese (milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes), water, nonfat dry milk, whey, cream, sodium citrate, salt, sorbic acid (added as a preservative), soy lecithin (non-sticking agent), APO carotenal (if colored). Soybean oil. THIS PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN COMMODITY CHEESE DONATED BY THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.

Starting a School Food Revolution

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

A revolution needs to eat, right?

I felt bad dragging people out into 98-degree heat for our first meetup of Parents for Better D.C. School Food. The reward was this lovingly prepared, pot-luck buffet: Laura Marks' local fritatta, Constance Newman's current muffins, Tara Flakker's quinoa and veggie salad, and my own rutabaga souffle (we harvested some gorgeous rutabaga from the garden recently).

Add a little bubbly Prosecco and you have one heck of a meeting.

Amidst the gnoshing and getting caught up, we did manage to hone our agenda for the coming months:

* Get involved with the local wellness committee and make sure the D.C. wellness policy reflects our goals of removing sugary foods from schools and replacing processed convenience foods with meals made from whole ingredients.

* Make the job of improving school food a community effort. While we are bird-dogging school food service and exposing bad food, we also need to help formulate and support positive changes. We can't just sit back and wait for school officials to pick up the slack.

* Salad bars may be our best bet to connect kids with fresh local foods they will actually eat. How do we get a salad bar in every school?

Parents are busy and difficult to organize. We can't be pulling them in too many different directions. We need clear goals and a clear plan of action that gets everyone involved.