Are Schools Food Deserts?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

"Food desert" has become a popular term to describe urban and rural areas where people don't have access to fresh, nutritious food, rely heavily on fast food restaurants and convenience foods to feed themselves, and learn only bad eating habits.

Isn't that the very definition of a moden public school cafeteria in the United States today? From what I've seen, kids in most public schools have little access to fresh, nutritious foods and rely almost entirely on industrially processed convenience foods for meals. What vegetables there are in school meals typically are cooked to death and unpalatable. They're served anyway because the federal government requires them.

At breakfast, kids are doused with sugar in the form of processed packaged foods such as Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and sugary cereals such as Apple Jacks. Even the milk is tarted up with high-fructose corn syrup and colorings to make it more like strawberry. These are exactly the same kinds of foods kids buy at corner convenience stores in food deserts, the kinds of foods Michelle Obama says are contributing to an epidemic of childhood obesity.

In short, kids at school are taught bad eating habits.

The more I think about it, the more schools strike me as a perfect example of a food desert. Maybe if more people looked at it that way, and looked at children as victims of an industrially processed convenience food culture, they'd get behind efforts to revolutionize the way we feed kids at school.

Happy Memorial Day.

Potpourri: School Food News Roundup

With one of the worst childhood obesity problems in the world, Mexico is clamping down by eliminating many popular foods from its schools.

Schools in Mexico don't have cafeterias. Instead, kids purchase food from vendors and food stalls who set up shop on school grounds. Under new rules, vendors will no longer be able to sell soft drinks, sweets such as salted tamarind candy, pork rinds and atole, the thick and sweet cornstarch-based beverage served piping hot in the morning.

Also getting the axe: tortas, the often overstuffed, greasy, meat-packed sandwiches popular in Mexico, unless they are "light" versions, meaning made with beans, avocado and cheese, or chicken-and-vegetables. Only low-fat tacos, burritos and salads will be allowed.

President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide anti-obesity campaign in January, saying the incidence of obesity among youngsters has tripled in Mexico over the last three decades. About 26 percent of all Mexican children are overweight.

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Move over school breakfast and school lunch, here comes school dinner.

To keep hunger away, more and more schools are starting to serve early supper during after school under a new U.S. Department of Agriculture program.

The program currently reaches kids in 13 states and the District of Columbia, providing reimbursements for meals served to at-risk kids in communities where at least 50 percent of households fall below the poverty level.

"What it allows us to do is provide those kids with an extra nutritious meal before they go home because some kids go home to nothing," said Susan Eckes, director of child nutrition programs for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada in McCarran, Nev.

In Baltimore, about 2,000 suppers are made by students in a vocational high school to further their culinary degrees.

Around the country, about 49,000 children benefit from the after-school meals each day. The program is expected to cost a total of $8 million from 2009 to 2013, the USDA said.

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Still, nothing beats having dinner with family. Research shows that kids who eat dinner with their families regularly are more emotionally stable and are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They get better grades. They have fewer depressive symptoms, particularly among adolescent girls. And they are less likely to become obese or have an eating disorder.

Parents can help model healthy eating when families share dinner together. Here's an excellent article detailing why families should dine as a unit as often as possible.

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Tired of your child being exposed to sugary flavored milk at school? Here's a school in Vail, CO, where parents succeeded in getting chocolate milk removed from the cafeteria.

“I've never talked to a doctor that recommends my child drink chocolate milk,” said the mother of one fourth-grader. “At home, we offer milk, 1 or 2 percent. Of course, when she comes to school, my daughter is going to choose chocolate milk.”

Meanwhile, at a high school in Roseville, CA, high schoolers got so fed up with the woeful food in the cafeteria they've planted a garden to grow some of their own food.

“Our generation has grown up completely disconnected from agriculture,” said one sophomore. “There’s no such thing as a Cheetos tree. I don’t want to eat something that’s been mistreated or is not in its natural form. If I can’t pronounce it, I shouldn’t be putting it in my body.”

And in Beaufort County, NC, a new nutrition director has schools cooking from scratch using 1960s and '70s recipes culled from a USDA library.

“We’re getting back to the grassroots of child nutrition,” said nutrition director Gwyn Roberson McBride.

The move comes at a time when school systems statewide are facing unprecedented challenges in providing nutritious meals for their students. About 60 percent of the school food programs in North Carolina are operating in the red, and many school systems have chosen to cut back on the number of school cafeteria workers and focus solely on pre-made foods.

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Tight budgets have been a real money maker for big food processors like Tyson. Rather than hire skilled chefs and deal with raw ingredients, school districts use a federal commodity food program to have their school lunch items manufactured by some 112 companies such as Tyson, ConAgra and JR Simplot that specialize in making school food on a huge scale.

Rules laid down by the USDA actually encourage schools to seek out industrially processed convenience foods. Big processors could see their business threatened if schools opt to make food from scratch with fresh ingredients. But the financial realities of school meal programs make that extremely difficult in most cases.

School food consultant Kate Adamick says schools should take the money they fork over to giant processors and use it instead to train their kitchen workers how to cook.

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Finally, with sales growth slowing, Lay's, the country's largest maker of potato chips, has decided it needs to embrace the trend toward healthy, local foods by marketing its chips not as a snack, but as a real food made from potatoes grown by real farmers.

The company's advertising campaign, started last year, addresses the perception among many consumers that its chips came from "not real potatoes." The latest elements of the ad strategy include significantly more ads for local markets, reports the New York Times, with regional farmers as the stars; an online “Happiness Exhibit” photo gallery at the brand’s Web site, lays.com, which reinforces the theme of the campaign, “Happiness is simple”; five new regional flavors like Tangy Carolina BBQ and Southwest Cheese and Chiles; and reformulated versions of the Kettle Cooked varieties of Lay’s.

“We discovered the best way to tell our story was through people,” said a Lay's executive. Enter the farmers, more than 80 of them from 28 states like California, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The campaign includes, in addition to its presence on lays.com, television commercials, magazine ads, signs in stores and a wooden billboard, planned to go up in San Francisco, that is being hand-carved. There are more than 150 elements of the campaign customized for local markets.

Lunch from Home

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

In a film that we recently featured here about the city of Rome switching from re-heated factory meals to school food cooked fresh from scratch, one important element in the system's success was removing choices from school lunch and prohibiting children from bringing food from home. Here in the states, school systems such as the one I recently visited in Berkeley, CA, also prohibit kids from importing snack and junk foods. But that is not the case here in the District of Columbia.

In fact, in recently approved "Healthy Schools" legislation, while schools are expected to remove junk foods and sodas and raise the standards of meals served, a big exception is made for "food" supplied by parents. At my daughter's school, you see kids in the cafeteria reaching inside their backpacks for all kinds of things. Here's an array that one girl brought as part of her lunch: a bag of Oreo cookies, a lollipop, a chocolate cupcake and a can of Sprite.

Still wondering where all the sugar is coming from in kids' diets, or why we're battling an epidemic of obesity?

Most of the icing from that cupcake got left behind in the plastic container it came in. The girl simply passed it to the boy sitting next to her, who was only too glad for this unexpected finger food treat.

On another day, the girl brought "Lunch Makers" chicken nuggets from Armour, and a big, 4.4-ounce Hershey's chocolate bar. She broke the chocolate bar into squares and shared them with the kids at the rest of the table.

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.

The Calories that Count

By Dr. Susan Rubin

Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When it comes to food, we’ve been counting calories for years expecting a weight loss result that hasn’t materialized. While the food industry would like us to believe that ‘’energy balance” is all that really matters, it's time for us to take a good long look at the mythology behind calories in our food.

Morgan Spurlock demonstrated in his movie Super Size Me that most Americans don’t have a clue as to what a calorie is. A calorie is a measure of heat. It’s the amount of energy necessary to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celcius.

Based on the laws of thermodynamics, we are led to believe that the food we eat contains a certain amount of calories and that these calories are “burned” based on a set daily rate that depends on our activity level. In other words, you can “burn” more calories by exercising. Theoretically, if we eat less and exercise more, we will lose weight.

Of course, the food industry loves to make you feel guilty about not exercising enough. It helps to reinforce this false belief that it all comes down to calories. PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi recently stated, “If all consumers exercised, did what they had to do, the problem of obesity wouldn't exist.”

The science behind calorie burning works in a closed system such as a lab in which all factors can be isolated and measured. Our bodies are not simple machines that take calories in and burn them in a straightforward fashion. We are highly complex biological and energetic systems, not closed systems like those found in a science lab. It is virtually impossible to calculate how we burn calories because many variables impact our metabolic rate. This is one of the reasons that more than 80% of all diet strategies fail.

Common sense would tell you that 100 calories of sugar water is not the same as 100 calories of sautéed kale. Our bodies are way smarter than what the food industry would like us to believe. Changing portion sizes and creating “better for you” packaged processed foods is simply a Ponzi scheme that keeps everyone from realizing the big picture. Calorie cuts won’t solve the obesity crisis, but it will continue to create healthy profits for the food industry. The 1.5 trillion calorie cut recently pledged by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation in response to the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity is a fancy ploy to avoid legislation that might keep these money-making products out of schools.

There is another calorie count that is far more important than the food industry’s smoke and mirrors. Right now, 10 calories of fossil fuel are required to make every 1 calorie of industrialized food. Considering we now consume six barrels of oil for every one barrel we discover, we need to understand that we’ve got to create ways to produce food using less oil. The underwater oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is a grim reminder that the era of easy oil is over. Let’s consider just some of the ways the food industry burns calories.

Fertilizers and pesticides used to grow food are derived from natural gas and petroleum. Machinery used in planting and harvesting industrial food guzzle large quantities of fossil fuels. Packaging utilizes plastics, another petroleum product. Most food products travel thousands of miles en route to their final destination burning more fuel. Some are refrigerated or frozen, burning yet more calories of energy so we can conveniently buy these foods and beverages everywhere. Burning these calories results in more CO2 in the atmosphere and pushes us closer to peak oil.

When we start to consider how many resources are used to produce those “low calorie” edible food-like substances, we end up with real costs to our health, our wallets and our environment. How do we produce food that supports our health and burns fewer fossil fuels? The best food is closest to home: backyard gardens are the answer to both. The White House Task Force on Obesity should recommend gardens be placed in every schoolyard and outside every town hall. This strategy would cut trillions of calories and put better food on our tables.

Dr. Susan Rubin is a nutritionist, former dentist and organizer of Better School Food.

D.C. to Pay for "Healthy Schools" with Sales Tax on Sodas

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

The D.C. Council yesterday agreed to fully fund the recently approved "Healthy Schools" initiative, but not with the "soda tax" proposed by Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3). Rather, the city will begin imposing a more traditional sales tax of six percent on all soft drinks sold in the District.

What, you might be asking, is the difference between these two approaches to taxing sodas?

The beverage industry vigorously campaigned against the 1-cent excise tax on sodas because it would have raised the shelf price that consumers see when they purchase soft drinks. The sales tax of six percent, by contrast, appears only on the sales receipt after beverages have been purchased.

Although the industry also opposed the sales tax, it brings the District in line with neighboring Maryland, which already taxes soft drinks at six percent. Virginia levies a much lower 2.5 percent sales tax.

D.C. council members were more comfortable with the traditional sales tax approach because it is already familiar, in contrast to the more progressive excise tax, which was aimed not only at raising money to improve food served in the District's public schools, but also was seen as a weapon to combat obesity by making sugary sodas more expensive.

The penny-per-ounce excise tax would have only applied to sugar-sweetened beverages. Diet drinks, calorie-free drinks, juices (with at least 70% juice), milk, coffee, and tea would have been excluded. The six percent sales tax applies also to artificially sweetened beverages, including diet and zero-calorie drinks, sports drinks and energy drinks. It will not apply to beverages containing milk, coffee, juice or tea.

The one-cent excise tax also had a cap of 30 cents per container.

The six percent sales tax is projected to raise more revenue--$7.92 million annually--than the penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages--$6.3 million. Costs associated with the "Healthy Schools" initiative are expected to run about $6.5 million per year.

But the "soda tax" may not be dead. An aide to Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who authored the "Healthy Schools" legislation, said last night she will continue to press for the one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary beverages sold in the city. "Because the obesity epidemic is such a enormous health crisis in the District (73% and 72% of residents in Ward 7 and 8 are overweight or obese!), Councilmember Cheh plans to continue to push for a penny-per-ounce excise tax because it is a good health policy."

Stay tuned.

What's for Breakfast: Quesadilla Inc.

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I'll bet you hadn't guessed that this "breakfast quesadilla" is made by the same company that makes the infamous "scrambled eggs" that travel 1,100 miles pre-cooked and frozen from a factory in Minnesota to schools in the District of Columbia.

That's right, Michael Foods, Inc., of Minnetonka, MN, bills itself as "the world's largest egg processing company." Besides frozen scrambled eggs and frozen "breakfast quesadillas," the company sells an array of egg products you probably never heard of--and others you have no doubt seen on your grocer's shelves.

"From our plants in the U.S. and Canada, we offer a complete line of Easy Eggs® Extended Shelf Life refrigerated liquid, frozen liquids, dried powders, pre-cooked, and other value-added specialty egg products," reads the company website. "Our brands of Papetti's®, M.G. Waldbaum and Inovatech Egg Products have a long history throughout the foodservice/catering, commercial baking, retail and food processing industries as providing leadership roles in the development of egg-based products to meet the needs of the modern operator."

Apparently, one of those "modern operators" would be D.C. Public Schools, or its hired food contractor, Chartwells-Thompson.

From Michael Foods, "modern operators" can purchase a whole line of liquid eggs, frozen eggs, dried eggs and something called "extended shelf life eggs." The "breakfast quesadillas," shipped frozen, then re-heated in a steamer while still in their plastic wrappers, are sold under the Pappetti's "Table Ready" brand. (Sorry, no clue who or what "Pappetti" is.)


This is what the quesadilla looks like fresh out of its plastic wrapper. In the background you can see one with wrapper.

Last year Michael Foods posted gross earnings of more than $1 billion. It's being sold by current owners Thomas H. Lee Partners, an investment group, to a division of Goldman Sachs--GS Capital Partners--for $1.7 billion.

That's a lot of eggs.

In case you were wondering what's in those quesadillas, here's the ingredient list from the box they came in. Each 3.24-ounce portion contains:

"Tortilla, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, vegetable shortening (partially hydrogenated soybean and or cottonseed oils), contains 2% or less of the following: baking powder *sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, corn starch and monocalcium phosphate), salt, calcium propionate (organic acid and calcium salt), distilled mono and diglycerides, sorbic acid and baking soda. Filling: whole eggs, cooked turkey sausage (mechanically separated turkey, water, textured vegetable protein concentrate, caramel color), salt, spices, paprika, flavoring), pasteurized process low fat mozzarella cheese (culture milk, water, skim milk, sodium phosphates, salt, sorbic acid (preservative), enzymes, Vitamin A Palmitate), pasteurized process reduced fat cheddar cheese (cultured milk, water, skim milk, sodium phosphates, salt, annatto color, sorbic acid (preservative), enzymes, Vitamin A palmitate). Contains 2% or less of the following: modified corn starch, salt, citric acid, xanthan gum.