What's for Lunch: Gooey BBQ Chicken

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

My daughter says she doesn't like the chicken at school because it's "never cooked right." She says it's either overcooked, or it's covered in sticky barbecue sauce.

Well, in the case of the barbecue chicken, I'd say she's way off the mark. There's no lack of sauce. But I thought the meat was done about as well as you might expect. It was downright edible, in fact. The only question is, How exactly are you supposed to eat it?

As you can see in the photo, my fingers were quickly covered in the gooey sauce--the kind that comes out of a big plastic jar. Tasty, but pretty sugary.

A stroll around the lunch room revealed that most of the kids also had their hands covered in sauce.

The reason, of course, is that a plastic spork is virtually useless against a bone-in chicken breast, although some kids tried. Mostly they picked at the chicken, and by that I mean chiseled, using the spork to break off pieces of meat.

Before lunch was over, kids were swarming into the nearby bathrooms across the hall to wash their hands. I swear, this is one school lunch that should be served with moist towelettes.

Then there were a couple of girls at my daughter's table who just went for the skin, peeling it off and slurping up all that sugary sauce. When I asked one of them why she was doing that, she replied: "I really don't like chicken."

She just likes the skin slathered in sauce.

As you might guess, the kids didn't do much with the green beans or the rice you see on these trays. That mostly got tossed in the trash. But some of them did poke around the baked beans. Those also were tarted up with sugar.

Lesson: kids love food spiked with sugar.

What's for Lunch: Turkey Barbecue

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

My first thought about this meal was that it seemed a bit odd to serve the turkey equivalent of classic pulled pork barbecue as a big blob on a Styrofoam tray. It wouldn't be served this way in any barbecue joint I know of. The meat would be on a bun, served as a sandwich.

The kids I think were put off by this strange looking brown heap and consequently barely touched it, even though it was quite good. It was prepared from seasoned turkey breasts that arrives at the school kitchen pre-cooked and frozen. One of the cook's then tore it into to shreds and mixed it with barbecue sauce, as you see here. Instead of being a sandwich, a roll was served on the side. The kids didn't eat it either.

In fact, the barbecue was quite good. Otherwise, this meal contains a deceptive amount of sugar--it's in the barbecue sauce, in the baked beans, and in the commercial cole slaw. This was another instance where the kids seemed to be fine with the idea of not eating very much lunch at all.

Just to be sure, I took a walk around the lunchroom and saw that while a few of the kids dug into the barbecue, or picked at the beans, this food went mostly uneaten. It just got dumped in the trash.

Could it be that the national lunch program's one-size-fits-all approach to loading kids up with every food group every day is just wrong? Is it possible that kids could get by with lots less food, saving tons of money?

Oh, and that price lookup sticker on the pear is hard to miss. It says the pear came from Argentina.

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