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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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LA County gets school lunch program wrong

Posted on December 29, 2011 by DebbieN

The LA Times recently reported that the public school cafeteria revamp the county worked so hard on for this year is a dead flop; kids are dumping whole trays of the healthier dishes they approved of in focus groups over the summer.

But there’s a catch: the dishes, which replace the concession-stand burgers-fries-pizza formula, were prepared well over the summer. The students say a lot of the stuff they’re being served now in the guise of “healthy” whole-grain salads and so on in the actual cafeterias is inedible: undercooked or burnt rice and other grains, undercooked meat, moldy bread, milk and other sealed cartons past their due dates, and so on. And when the students brought it to media attention, some of the cafeterias responded by removing the due dates.

The story was so eye-catching the New York Times picked it up last week to throw the issue to its own readers for comment. (Or you could say it regurgitated it–near the truth; the major newspapers seem to be following each other a little too closely these days. What is this, Reader’s Indigestion? what’s the nation coming to???)

The comments–well, as always for newspaper free-for-alls, they’re not generally on the ball. Most bashed the school board for being too liberal and trying to shove ethnic variety dishes like pad thai down the throats of poor kids trained on burgers and fries and pizzas. A lot of them were bemoaning the complete success of the fast food concessionaires in conditioning our kids not to like or even tolerate real food. A few–those who can read and think?– pointed out the spoiled or miscooked food problems mentioned in the LA Times but not in the NY Times digest version.

They all seem to have missed the most serious point, though: the school district may have retooled the menus, but they haven’t restored proper working kitchens to the school cafeterias. There’s no proper cooking facility behind that wall–certainly not for a thousand or so kids in each school. A lot of the new dishes are still being prepared offsite, just as the pizzas and burgers and fries were. Those prepared onsite are handled by staff used to doing nothing more complicated than heating up a bunch of frozen boxes from a concession company using minimal “kitchen” facilities.

The fault in the LA Unified School District healthy food menu plan lies partly in its complexity and partly in its execution. Upscale restaurant-style dishes might not be the best way to go for a first run at better food, and not just because they might repel students used to commercial stodge. They’re a bad starting choice because they’re more complex than the minimally experienced and underequipped cafeteria workers can handle on site, and the facilities that produce them clearly haven’t got their protocols down for “quinoa salads for 1000”.

The freshness factor is another problem. With “just reheat” trays of frozen pizzas, burgers and fries, no one has to think about sell-by dates. Heck, the sodium level is so high they probably don’t even need to freeze the meals. We’ve all seen the blog post where the woman let a Happy Meal sit on one of her shelves for an entire year…and nothing appeared to have changed in all that time. Real food with expiration dates? The school cafeterias are now out of their depth.

But by the same token, the schools shouldn’t have to throw in the towel so easily and go back to pizza, burgers and fries.

What would have been easier to get right–better balanced, and with better buy-in from the students–might have been “build your own” sandwich and/or salad bars.

You see the complicated versions  at any Whole Foods or Souplantation. But pick one theme per day–brown-bag sandwiches, Italian subs or hoagies, felafel and pita, soft tacos… Offer two or three nutritious and fairly familiar choices for protein fillings, one of them vegetarian. Two or three raw, fresh vegetables as accompaniment and a choice of sauces or toppings, and fairly simple bread. Then you’ve got the makings of something students can deal with and find appetizing as well as nutritious, but without a lot of complicated prep.

You don’t have to provide a zillion choices for lunch every day. You don’t have to salt or bread the dickens out of the fillings, and you don’t have to provide sweetened, oversalted sauces for them. Fewer ingredients and processes are better. Just make sure the food is fresh.

I wish to god the school cafeterias and the board members who debate what they serve would stop trying to imitate the  chain restaurants or the upscale restaurants–or indeed any restaurants. It’s lunch, not a field trip downtown to the California Science Center, where the brand-name burger chain running its concession stand/cafeteria sends the smell of frying grease wafting up to every one of the exhibits to make sure you know what you’re really supposed to be paying attention to.

Why don’t school cafeterias do regular sandwiches anymore?

 

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on LA County gets school lunch program wrong

Bravo to LAUSD

Posted on June 16, 2011 by DebbieN

Some actual good news on the school lunch front appeared in the LA Times  yesterday:

L.A. Unified removes flavored milk from menu

The Los Angeles public school district, one of the largest in the nation, had to vote its bigger contracts for things like milk early, so they made the announcement yesterday. They’ve also announced they’re going to drop breaded, fried wastes of space like chicken nuggets and offer more vegetarian options, more farm-to-school contracts for actual fresh produce, all the good things we’ve been waiting decades to see again.

This is all in deep contrast with the frosty reception Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” show has received from actual LA schools in the past few months. And there’s a reason for it that you don’t have to dig too deep to get to. A lot of the fine upstanding revisions to the LAUSD school lunch menus and cafeteria revamps have not actually gone through for budget-crunch reasons. Some of the salad bars were never installed and implemented. As with many pieces of legislation, the intentions were good, or sounded good, but the money never showed up. Benefit: zero.

And a friend of ours who’s a school principal says the federal food subsidy program for poor students–there are an awful lot of them in his school, as in many of the LA area schools–is woefully underserving those kids. Some wouldn’t get a meal at all if they didn’t eat at school, and the food they get today is barely worth the name.

If the LAUSD can actually manage this year’s resolutions right, it’ll be a big step forward. The chocolate milk wars in the city board offices have been surprisingly intense–proponents of keeping the sugared chocolate and strawberry-flavored drinks argued that if they were pulled, most kids wouldn’t drink milk at all, 60 percent drink the flavored milks when available and that there’d be a big drop in milk consumption.

Proponents of going to plain (and Lactaid, and soy, to accommodate everyone, this is California after all) countered with the ugly fact that  the amount of sugar in the flavored milks puts them just about in the range of Coke, and argued that if fast food choices weren’t waved so constantly in the kids’ faces and the cafeterias offered real food instead, rather than alongside, the kids would eat more real food. And they’d get used to plain milk quickly enough.

I can attest to this phenomenon. We don’t keep fast food or junk food in the house, and I’ve been serving fresh vegetables and whole foods rather than prepared or processed things out of a box most of my adult life. I don’t get too many complaints, not only because my husband’s no cook, but because that’s what there is to eat and it’s the way we grew up eating at home.

Our daughter came along and started out with plain unsweetened yogurt, vegetables, bread and plain oatmeal or the lower-salt store brand versions of Cheerios. Also, for reasons that aren’t particularly clear even now, she had a thing for Indian food, spices and all. The maitre d’ at our favorite restaurant laughed when he saw this two-year-old kid tucking into a hot cauliflower dish and saag paneer. He remembered me coming in for a serious feast with my husband when I was very, very pregnant and hoping it would either induce labor or at least last me until I was in shape to come back. I’d never considered that she’d like to eat what I ate while pregnant–I’m still not sure it’s true, but I figure Indian families would have more experience with seeing how their kids develop a taste for vegetables and varied spices. Even now, she likes a wider variety of non-sweet flavors than her friends. I like to think it’s because she’s gotten to taste them, and because we like to experiment.

Part of the comparatively low-sugar diet for her was self defense–she was an up-like-the-rocket, down-like-the-stick kind of toddler if she ate many sweets at a time, even then. Years before, my sister’s older son had gotten stuck in a serious chocolate milk habit at that age, because my sister had given it first as a treat, then as a regular drink, then for comforting him or to appease temper tantrums, then to get him to do the things he should have been doing with or without milk. She had a hell of a time getting them both back out of the vicious cycle. I’m not as organized and can’t fool myself, so I took it as a warning.

My daughter got sweets occasionally, but mostly she was eating the kinds of foods we ate and now that she’s diabetic AND eleven at the same time (pity me!), I’m extremely grateful that she got the taste for nonsweet foods early in life. She only really wants junk foods if they’re right in front of her, or hungers out loud for what she knows are exaggeratedly high-carb items if her blood glucose is a bit high. When she’s in good shape, she goes for vegetables and fruits and cheese and Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bravo to LAUSD