School cafeterias are swapping dino-shaped chicken fingers for carrot purees. They’re trading mac ’n’ cheese for kale salsa and replacing potato chips with green smoothies.
These lunchrooms are part of a pilot program that FoodCorps, a national nonprofit that promotes healthy foods in schools, launched in March in partnership with Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad chain. The program, Reimagining School Cafeterias, advocates for the adoption of locally grown produce in schools and offers curricula that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating. The goal is to give students more control over designing healthy school menus.
In March, Sweetgreen pledged $1 million to create scalable healthy eating and educational programming in 50 school cafeterias by 2020. Reimagining School Cafeterias builds off a previous nutrition-based curriculum of theirs called Sweetgreen in Schools. Sweetgreen in Schools launched in 2010 and reached 9,000 students. The new initiative aims to expand the number of students they reach and create demographic-specific learning opportunities for the students.
“In order for students to really want to eat healthier options, they have to be able to create the meals themselves,” Sweetgreen co-founder Nate Ru told FastCompany.
School lunches in America are frequently criticized for being unhealthy, as they tend to be high in fat, sugar and salt. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one out of every five schoolaged children is obese, a figure that’s tripled since the 1970s.
“We know that school cafeterias are an incredibly powerful place to connect kids with healthy food,” FoodCorps co-founder and executive director Curt Ellis told FastCompany. “There are over 100,000 school cafeterias in the country — seven times more than the number of McDonalds.”
Reimagining School Cafeterias is currently being piloted in three schools that all vary in terms of geography and socioeconomic status. In the 2019-2020 school year, organizers say the program will expand to 6,500 students at 15 schools. The year after, it will be implemented in 50 schools and will reach an estimated 22,000 students.
At Aberdeen Elementary School, a pilot program in Aberdeen, North Carolina, students are trying veggies cooked in new ways. For example, students traded in raw carrots for carrots that had been roasted or pureed, with the goal of showing students different ways that produce can be prepared. After each taste test, the students vote for a favorite. That winner will be incorporated into the school’s lunch menu. In the coming months, they’ll try asparagus and peas cooked in unfamiliar ways.
In New Mexico’s Navajo Nation territory, the focus is on flavor. Students at Wingate Elementary School are learning to use spices to create new tastes to complement traditional school-lunch vegetables.
Finally, in Oakland, California, at Laurel Elementary School, students look at the big picture, with a focus on how they might improve their cafeteria. Students redesign table layouts and lunch menus. They will work with Sweetgreen and partner organizations to get those ideas implemented in the coming months.
“There are 30 million children a day who walk in the front doors of our nation’s schools. Those kids are going there to learn but they are also going there to eat,” Ellis told Forbes. “If we care about the next generation of kids and their health and long-term potential, we better fix school food.”
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Tag: School Lunches
The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
School lunches are healthier than ever under First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Federal law now requires schools to serve more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, as well as cut down on food that’s high in calories, fat and sodium.
The new school lunch standard is wonderful in the fight against childhood obesity. However, its actual implementation has been fraught with controversy. School lunch companies are complaining that the tough nutritional guidelines are too rigid and claiming that they’re causing a steep loss in revenue. Picky eaters are also revolting about the taste of their foods, and many just end up going hungry when they throw whole trays of food away.
But there’s one school district where kids are actually eating — and even enjoying their meals.
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As the Atlantic reports, the Lincoln Public School System (LPS) in Lincoln, Nebraska “has gone above and beyond the legal requirements, dishing out a daily vegetable smorgasbord. On top of veggie burgers and black-bean chili, the school system serves up local yellow watermelons, black and green peppers, cherry tomatoes, blueberries, ripe plums and fresh cantaloupe.”
And according to the Journal Star, all of the district’s high schools, most of its middle schools and about one-third of the elementary school have a fruit and vegetable bar. Chicken nuggets are coated in whole wheat crumbs and lasagna made with low-sodium sauce and whole wheat noodles.
“Last year, we spent over $1.1 million dollars on produce. So we do serve a lot, and I’m really excited to see that children don’t waste it, that they eat it. That is really cool,” says Edith Zumwalt, the Director of Nutrition Services in LPS.
For its efforts, the district was recently given the “Golden Carrot Award” from the Physicians Committee (PCRM), a nonprofit medical organization of 12,000 physicians. The award came with $1,500 prize for the nutrition services program. Remarkably, LPS was the only public school to win; private schools in California and Arizona also shared the award.
Following the award, the school district even received praise from one Kourtney Kardashian, who’s apparently a big healthy food advocate and has teamed up with the PCRM. “As a mom who makes her healthy eating a priority, I’m so impressed to see that Lincoln’s lunch trays are filled with colorful, locally grown cherries, savory carrots, yellow watermelon, fresh blueberries, and plums,” the reality star writes in a letter to the school.
Clearly, healthy food doesn’t have to mean bland. Hopefully more schools can take up this philosophy too.
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NYC’s Solution for Food Waste Should Happen in Schools Everywhere
Will kids eat their fruits and vegetables simply because they’re told to?
Unfortunately not. So while there’s the good news that school lunches are healthier than ever under Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (which helps fight childhood obesity), the bad news is that even if the lunch lady piles the peas and carrots onto every tray (instead of French fries), picky eaters will just end up throwing them away.
We’ve mentioned before that 40 percent of food in this country gets thrown away (to the tune of $165 billion in wasted costs), and uneaten school food is naturally a part of this problem.
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To tackle this wasteful and expensive issue, many schools across the country are now utilizing a green solution to turn something unwanted into something valuable: Composting.
The New York Times reports that more than 230 schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island are taking part in New York City’s composting program that turns unwanted scraps into nutrient-rich soil.
It starts in the cafeteria, where kids sort their food into all the appropriate waste bins. The students at Public School 30 in Staten Island, for example, toss their trash (plastic bags, foam cups and wrappers) into containers for landfill garbage and recyclables (metal, glass, plastic and milk cartons), and put their food scraps and liquids in compost containers. The food is then picked up by city sanitation trucks and taken to a compost heaps Staten Island, upstate New York, or Delaware. From there, the waste decomposes into all-natural mulch that is then sold to farmers and landscape architects.
This plan works because not only are these students learning how to recycle and conserve food, but also because the whole process saves the city $10 to $50 per ton of garbage. Last year, it cost NYC $93 per ton to dump garbage in landfills.
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Based on the success of the composting program (it’s expected to reach all five of the Big Apple’s boroughs by this fall, with a larger goal to eventually expand to all 1,300-plus schools) it only seems obvious that more schools in the nation should start their own food waste initiatives. Already, school districts in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago have their own similar composting programs.
As P.S. 30 assistant principal Joseph Napolitano told the Times, “[The food is] really being recycled whether they eat it or not; it’s not really a waste.”
Getting kids to eat healthy might be a food fight for the ages, but, hey, if we can’t teach them how to enjoy fruits and vegetables, at least they can learn how to dispose of them properly.
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How This Third Grader Makes Sure None of His Classmates Go Hungry
We’ve heard about fathers getting behind the cause. We’ve heard of entire states getting behind it, too. Now, an elementary school student is also making sure no kid at his school goes without a hot lunch.
Eight-year-old Cayden Taipalus from Howell, Michigan’s Challenger Elementary was inspired to take action after seeing a schoolmate getting denied a meal because he didn’t have adequate funds in his meal account, Detroit-based ABC affiliate WXYZ reports.
“I was in lunch one day getting lunch and a kid in front of me didn’t have enough money and they had to put their tray down and that made me sad,” the generous boy told the TV station. “So I went home and asked my mom what I can do to help.”
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To raise funds, Cayden accepts donations and recycles bottles for money, too. In just two short weeks, he was able to pay for a whopping 295 lunches. In addition to paying off delinquent lunch accounts, he also adds money to them as well, so no one has to worry about whether or not they can afford future meals.
Denying a school child a hot meal is not only humiliating, for some children, it could be the one nutritious meal he or she gets for the day. And while Cayden’s elementary school never allows someone to go hungry, the youngster wants to make sure that no kid ever has to settle for the reduced lunch option of a cold cheese sandwich.
To help Cayden’s cause, you can donate on his online fundraising page, fundrazr.com/campaigns.