With all the nonprofits, blogs, articles, films, exposés, and books devoted to improving school lunches, I sometimes imagine that things have already changed. That students around the country are eating healthy, delicious, local meals prepared by well-paid cooks in naturally lit school cafeterias. But for every Boulder school system (currently being overhauled by Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper), there are thousands of regular public schools around the country, where kids are still eating tator tots five times a week.
We’ve reported before on Mrs. Q, an anonymous public school teacher in Illinois, who is eating lunch in her school cafeteria everyday in 2010, taking pictures, and writing about it. Her blog, Fed Up: School Lunch Project, is a straightforward and smart account of what’s being served every day in our public schools. On Day 16, a prepackaged PB&J sandwich, which she could barely choke down, brought on some post-work vomiting. Other meals, she says, aren’t so bad. One thing you’ll notice right away is all the packaging. Everything is plastic wrapped, served on disposable plates, with disposable utensils.
Now Ed Bruske, a dad, urban homesteader, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter, has spent a week investigating his daughter’s school cafeteria, writing about his findings in a six part series, Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen on his blog, The Slow Cook. Just prior to his week in the kithcen, the food service provider for the D.C. schools, Chartwells-Thompson, decided to do away with pre-packaged, military MRE-style lunches, and serve “fresh-cooked” meals. Bruske, an avid gardener and cook, was expecting to see actual cooking in this kitchen, which was recently renovated and outfitted with a new freezer and stainless steel equipment. What we found was a lot of frozen, processed foods, reheated and steamed to appear “fresh-cooked.” Not surprising. But the stories are engaging, and give a full picture of school lunches and how budgetary concerns are dictating the health and nutrition of our children.
One of the reasons school systems have been able to serve bad food for so long is that adults were not paying attention. Now that the national spotlight is on school cafeterias, and grown-ups are peeking around inside, things are going to have to change.
