"Top Chef" Flunks School Food Math

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Bravo's new season of "Top Chef," set in D.C., debuts tomorrow with a big wet kiss for Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity. Even Obama's chef, Sam Kass, who has become more and more of a TV presence, gets into the act as a judge for episode No. 2 of the contest June 23, wherein the 17 contestants--all competing for the "Top Chef" designation, plus prize money--are supposed to make a meal with only $2.68, the same amount the federal government gives schools for reimbursable lunches.

The Obama Foodorama blog gushes that this episode "is guaranteed to be loaded with drama, thanks to the astonishingly low budget the chefs, all pros from top-level restaurants, have to work with." Except that $2.68 would be astonishingly high, if that were in fact the amount schools spend on the food they serve to kids in the nation's woefully underfunded cafeteria meals program.

Apparently, the writers at "Top Chef" failed to do their homework where school meal finances are concerned. Only a fraction of that $2.68 federal subsidy actually goes toward purchasing food. The majority is eaten up by labor and overhead. What schools actually spend on the food component of the average lunch is more like $1 or less. And the average school loses 35 cents on every meal it serves.

Makes you wonder what Kass, whose White House title is "Food Initiative Coordinator," was thinking when he agreed to his part in a show the Bravo network is billing as "from the White House to your house." Or doesn't Kass know how school lunch works either?

"The National School Lunch program's funding leaves less than $1 for the cost of food on our kids' plates, and yet it's policies demand that we serve milk, fruit and 650 to 750 calories," said "renegade lunch lady" Ann Cooper. "Feeding children delicious and nutritious food, never mind regional or organic, is tremendously hard on that budget, yet school food professionals all across the country strive hard to do that every day."

Cooper has a suggestion for the "Top Chef" producers: "Perhaps instead of restaurant chefs trying to cook a meal for $2.68, we should have 'Lunch Ladies' competing to showcase what's actually possible when we cook fresh food from scratch for our kids. After that, let's give the professional chefs the USDA commodity food to deal with."

Potpourri: School Food News Roundup

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

As a preamble to the upcoming D.C. Environmental Film festival, the Warner Theater on Tuesday, March 9, will be screening What's on Your Plate?, a documentary that follows two 11-year-olds in New York City over the course of a year as they talk to farmers, storekeepers, food activists and friends to discover where their food comes from.

Sadie and Safiya examine the struggles of modern farmers, sustainable agriculture practices and how many miles food travels before it ends up on their plates. A discussion with the two stars of the film, as well as a representative of Food and Water Watch, follows the screening. Check here for ticket information.

Then on March 22, the short documentary Lunch will make its D.C. debut. This film focuses on the national school lunch program as served in the Baltimore City schools. It will be shown jointly with the documentary Potato Heads, about the cultivation of potatoes in the place of the tuber's origin--the Andes mountains--as well as the U.S. , to be followed by a discussion with the maker of both films, Larry Engel.

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If you're still in the mood for cinema, here's a 1966 film from the USDA--It Happens Every Noon--about the national school lunch program. It certainly looks a little dated at first, with it's overly "hip" soundtrack to go with footage of a suburban U.S. middle school. But stay with it, because there are some truly poignant scenes of school lunch in rural American, for instance, where teacher stops at a country store for groceries, then kids help put the meal together using a hot plate in the rear of their tiny, wooden schoolhouse.

Although we are often disturbed by the woeful quality of school food, this film makes the a valid point: some children would be hungry were it not for the government-sponsored meals they receive at school. The film looks at urban schools where the lunch ladies pack cheese and bologna sandwiches into paper bags at a central kitchen, and shows kids eating at their desks because the schools have neither kitchen nor dining facilities.

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Marion Nestle reports that the issue of childhood obesity is being covered in a number of journals and media outlets, including an entire issue of Health Affairs. Check out her blog here for details.

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Helene York of Bon Appetit food management company in Palo Alto, California, this week posted a column about the many ways of incorporating local farm goods into school meals. Check it out here at the Atlantic online food forum.

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A reporter for the Chicago Tribune paid a visit to a local school cafeteria and was shocked to see how much food was being thrown away. Here's her account.

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Finally, a high school in Lawrenceville, Georgia, gets vending machines that dispense "healthy" meals that qualify for federal subsidies. Previously the school was unable to participate in the national school lunch program because the school had neither a kitchen nor a cafeteria. The students were forced to eat off-campus or bring food from home. Now they can buy a complete lunch for $2.

How Do We Fix School Food?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

President Barack Obama has proposed splitting $1 billion annually between school meals and other federally-funded food programs, an amount school food advocates calculate as something less than 20 cents per meal, or not even enough to add an apple to kids' cafeteria trays.

Last week in hearings on re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act, the head of the School Nutrition Association, representing thousands of food service directors nationwide, asked Congress for a 35 cent hike in the federal subsidy, which currently stands at $2.68 for a fully-subsidized meal.

Now comes Ann Cooper, the "renegade lunch lady" and director of school nutrition services in Boulder, Colorado, saying what schools really need is nothing less than an extra $1 per day for all 31 million children participating in the school meal program. In an op-ed published yesterday in The Washington Post, Cooper says that $1 raise would translate into about $5.4 billion per year, but is necessary to avert a children's health crisis already in progress.

"As a nation we spend more than $260 billion annually on just two health issues: diabetes and obesity," Cooper writes. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has indicated that of the children born in 2000, one out of every three Caucasians and two out of every three African Americans and Hispanics will develop diabetes. Research shows that this may be the first generation in our nation's history to die at a younger age than their parents. Diabetes and obesity are the health-care crises of our era and, in most cases, can be prevented with healthy diet and exercise."

Cooper says the additional funds are needed to impliment new nutritional guidelines proposed by the Institute of Medicine that call for more fruits and vegetables, and more whole grains and less starchy foods, in school menus. Meanwhile, at her blog, Cooper has started a letter writing campaignto lobby Congress for the extra $1 per day. You can go there for a samply letter. She suggests you include something about your personal experiences with school meals. Boy, I'd love to see those letters.

Imagine School Lunch in Paris

What do other countries do about school food?

TIME magazine recently published the account of an American living in Paris who discovered that even where her pre-schooler is concerned, the French take their school meals quite seriously.

"In a country where con artists and adulterers are tolerated, the laws governing meals are sacrosanct and are drummed into children before they can even hold a knife," she writes. "The French don't need their First Lady to plant a vegetable garden at the Élysée Palace to encourage good eating habits. They already know the rules: sit down and take your time, because food is serious business."

Every meal includes an hors d'oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate and dessert. The schools even give suggestions for what to serve for dinner at home to compliment school lunch.

Meanwhile, at School Lunch Talk, writer Deborah Lehmann describes lunch in one Paris school district: cucumbers with garlic and fine herbs; Basque chicken thigh with herbs, red and green bell peppers and olive oil; couscous; organic yogurt and an apple. For snack, they had organic bread, butter, hot chocolate and fruit.

In elementary school, the lunches are served in a restaurant scolaire "where furniture, silverware and sound level are just as important as the food itself." In that Parisian district, the schools spend $8.23 to produce lunch. Compare that to the $2.68 per meal subsidy our federal meal program allots.