Today's Lunch: Glycemic Bomb

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Cheap carbohydrates are the favorite foods of school districts across the country. What's wrong with carbs? Unlike protein and fat, carbohydrates turn into sugar (glucose) when you eat them, which signals the body to produce insulin. A powerful hormone, insulin is responsible for storing fat in the body and has also been implicated in an all-too-familiar complex of modern diseases: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis.

Teachers complain that kids are out of control after school meals. The high doses of sugar and other carbs could be an explanation. Kids get an initial jolt of energy from this type of meal, but typically the body overcompensates with insulin: After eating so many carbs, you will soon be feeling lethargic and hungry again.

Consider this meal served last week at my daughter's school. The entree is a highly-processed version of chicken nuggets, but you can't see the chicken under all the breading (carbs). Next to the chicken nuggets is a big blob of sugary barbecue sauce for dipping (pure carbs). The baked beans are all starch (carbs) swimming in a sugary sauce (more carbs). The macaroni and cheese is mostly refined pasta (carbs).

So far this meal is perfectly acceptable under the rules that govern the federally subsidized meal program. You've got protein in the chicken and a little bit of fat in the cheese, plenty of grain (no kidding) and the beans. Instead of a vegetable, we have fruit: a cup of diced peaches. Healthy, right? Well, maybe, if you don't count all the sugar in those peaches.

And as a beverage with this meal the kids were served orange juice rather than milk. I checked the ingredients on the carton. A 4-ounce serving contained 12 grams of sugar, about the equivalent of three teaspoons.

Truly, this meal is enough to send anyone's blood sugar through the roof.

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.

But what WILL the kids eat??

By Nancy Tringali Piho

Several years ago, when my now-kindergartener was two years old, my family took a vacation to Miami. We stumbled upon a charming little beach-front Peruvian restaurant and decided to give it a try. It wasn't exactly a "kid-friendly" spot, but they did have high chairs available, so we reasoned that our toddler was not the first to darken the doorway. I was a little nervous about going in with a child in tow, but we ended up seated on the patio... perfect for a quick pack-up and get-away, if things started deteriorate.

My husband immediately ordered a large ceviche appetizer platter for us to share. It was laden with all kinds of seafood, including octopus, along with slices of cooked onions, peppers and plantains. It looked and tasted absolutely delicious. We must have been living right, because our little boy attacked the dish with gusto. He simply could not get enough of it, squealing "MORE OCTOPUS!" as we continued to feed it to him. Other diners could not help but notice, and one made an off-hand comment that she had never seen a child so young enjoy a meal so much. That one remark stuck with me for several days and eventually, it changed my thinking about "kids and food," and even the course of my entire career. Why, I kept asking myself, are people so surprised when kids actually eat and like "real" food? Why shouldn't my son have loved that ceviche, every bit as much as my husband and I did?

I have been in the food marketing industry -- public relations and nutrition communications -- here in Washington for almost 20 years. I have worked for and promoted numerous food products and associations, as well as chefs, restaurants and grocery stores. But when I had children, I became aware that what we typically feed our youngsters -- from their earliest days of eating, throughout much of their childhoods -- is so, so different than what we, as adults, choose to eat everyday. I was fascinated by this, and embarked on a 1.5 year "research project" that culiminated in the publication of my new book, "My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus: Raising Children Who Love to Eat Everything."

I interviewed numerous RDs, pediatricians, scientific researchers and others who study food-eating-taste issues, as well as about 60 chefs from around the country who have young kids themselves. I became more convinced than ever that we have to teach kids about good foods and flavors and textures, and how to appreciate them all. And yet, what we're actually feeding them is a steady diet of "kiddie foods," virtually all of which are comprised of one of three base "flavors": fat, salt or sugar. And then we wonder why kids grow up to be Picky Eaters! They have so little opportunity to ever experience anything else.

School food is a perfect example of this. I was speaking to a group of first-graders at an independent school in another city recently, and before my presentation started, the teacher polled them on their choice for lunch. The options? Chicken nuggets with french fries, or pasta with butter sauce. Applesauce for dessert. Bland. Fat/ Salt/ Sweet. No real flavor. I confess that at this point, I am not up to date on the typical lunch choices in DC public schools, but I would bet anything that this menu sounds familiar.

So I am excited that this group--Parents for Better D.C. School Food--has come forward and is interested in working with the schools to do what we can to improve the school lunch menus in our city. I'm hoping that Washington can be a leader in this movement, one that is gaining steam around the country, I'm happy to say! I would only add that while of course I recognize the nutritional and health implications of these standard kiddie diets, my personal interest is in seeing an improvement in the TASTE of the food, and in teaching our kids what pleasure can be found in learning to appreciate a broad and varied diet.

Two Girls, Multiple Food Issues

By Caryn Ernst

I hate making lunches for my kids to take to school. I get too hung up on trying to find something that’s moderately healthy, balanced, easy to pack AND likely to be eaten. Instead, my husband makes the lunches, as he’s happy to use any variety of items that are likely to be consumed and he’s not overly concerned with the rest of it.

We have the added challenge that Leah (7) and Ada (5) are both lactose intolerant and Ada is also gluten sensitive (and a picky eater). Every week we read the menu for the school lunches, cross off the ones they can’t eat and let them choose which of the remaining they’re willing to eat. That usually leaves Ada with one school lunch per week, and Leah two or three.

I know the school lunches are highly processed. I assume they have lots of preservatives. And I doubt they’d be my personal top choice for lunch. But I really appreciate having a hot lunch program at school. I know how challenging it is to come up with healthy, satisfying meals for just my two kids with their preferences and food limitations. I can only imagine how challenging it is to come up with a menu for an entire school district that also meets those requirements, at a cost that most families can afford.

I grew up in a family with six kids. We ate hot lunches at school every day, out of necessity. I remember our school cafeteria with an actual kitchen and a staff of people who cooked the foods that day. I’m sure there are tremendous cost savings in having centralized purchasing and food preparation. And in a school district with such a large percentage of free and reduced lunches, this savings is critical.

But the high level of centralization and the inability to do any food preparation at the schools leaves us with few options to make school food healthier and fresher, and no options for linking food and nutrition with school gardens and other school-based initiatives. It also means that the school lunch staff are disconnected from the food and can’t answer basic questions about what’s in the food.

Last week, Ada went to school planning on having the beef and bean chili, which meets her dietary requirements. When she saw that grilled cheese sandwiches were being served, she asked the staff if there was gluten in the sandwich, explaining that she can’t eat anything with gluten. The staff assured her that the sandwich was safe for her to eat. Of course, a white bread sandwich is loaded with gluten. I had to explain to Ada that she can’t count on the lunch staff to know what’s in the food they’re serving and to help her pick foods that are safe for her. She needs to do that based on her own knowledge – a tough requirement for a 5 year old.

Preparing and serving food to 30,000 to 40,000 kids with widely disparate food requirements and preferences, while keeping the costs affordable, is no small task. But I think we have to find ways to have more of that food prepared at the school to make it fresher, healthier and more connected to the school, its staff and its students.

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.

Today's Lunch

Have you ever seen a cheese sandwich served in a plastic pouch?

That was one of the main entrees when I visited my daughter's school, H.D. Cooke Elementary, for lunch the other day. The sandwich, identified on the packaging as "Hot from the Grill," was heated while still in the plastic, then displayed for the kids on the steam table.

Unfortunately, there was nothing on the package to indicate ingredients. A second entree choice was chili over rice. I'm just guessing, but since I spent a week in the H.D. Cooke kitchen, I have a pretty good idea how things work. The chili was probably made with USDA commodity beef mixed with soy protein and prepared by a distant processor, then shipped to the school frozen. Beef like this typically is reheated in a steamer, then it could be mixed with kidney beans out of a can and some form of dried chili seasoning.

Most of the kids also had on their Styrofoam trays an 8-ounce (1 cup) container of milk--usually chocolate or strawberry--and a Granny Smith apple. One thing conspicuously missing from the trays was any form of vegetable. Turns out steamed carrots were being offered, but none of the kids were taking.

"We don't like the carrots," my daughter explained. "They taste yucky."

Under USDA "offered versus served" rules, kids need only take three items from what's being offered to qualify as a federally-subsidized meal. Most likely, those unserved, uneaten carrots will simply go down the kitchen's commercial garbage disposal.

I also wonder about little kids being served great, big Granny Smith apples. Most of them won't finish the apple. It just goes into the trash. What about cutting the apples into wedges, mixing them with a little lemon juice to prevent browning, and serving them in smaller portions? There is a kitchen tool that makes quick work of this and would save a lot on apples.