How to get this in D.C. school meals?
I wonder if anyone else attending the “food services round-table” this week at D.C. Public Schools headquarters was struck by food services director Jeffrey Mills’ comment that he and his crew have recently taste-tested some 300 different “food products” for the upcoming school year.
Mills said he personally had tasted “30 different chicken products,” in the effort to improve school meals.
“Food products”? “Chicken products”?
The emphasis seems to be on “products” rather than fresh food. And that’s one of the problems schools face when their idea of serving children depends on hiring a giant food services contractor–in this case Chartwells–whose method of producing meals involves reheating industrially processed convenience foods. Or should we say “products”?
D.C. schools under Chancellor Michelle Rhee have determined that cooking is not a “core competency” of schools and so have farmed out the job to Chartwells. This year they are introducing two pilot programs–14 schools to be served meals either from Revolution Foods or D.C. Central Kitchen–to create a little competition and light a fire under Chartwells.
Still, the problem remains: how do you get fresh produce into the meals if no one in the kitchen is trained to handle it, or doesn’t have the equipment?
As well as being pressed by healthy food and farm to school advocates, Mills has a financial incentive to put some sort of locally grown food on every cafeteria tray. The “Healthy Schools Act”passed earlier this year by the D.C. Council offers a five-cent bonus for each school meal that contains a locally grown component.
That wouldn’t be hard at all if D.C. schools had salad bars. But D.C. schools don’t have salad bars. They could put it in the soup. But D.C. schools don’t make or serve soup. They could put local vegetables in the the pasta sauce. But D.C. schools don’t make their own pasta sauce. It comes out of a can. Does that mean replacing the cooked-to-death broccoli from Mexico or California with local cooked-to-death broccoli?
Mills remarked that “there’s a ton of local produce around us” here in the District of Columbia. He said one local distributor, Keany Produce, has assured him it can deliver all the local produce D.C. schools might require. But as far as actually using that produce in school kitchens: “Hopefully as years go on, we can improve the skills of our kitchen workers and upgrade our kitchens.”
Years? Is there a plan we don’t know about?
Anthony Tata, chief operating officer for the schools, seems perfectly content to rely on vendors. When asked whether D.C. schools might ever emulate other schools districts who “self operate” their food service and cook with raw products, he said it’s all about “good contract management.” “I can’t predict the future,” Tata said, “but we will make decisions to bring the most nutritious food to our kids. We think we’ve found the sweet spot of what we’re driving toward. We’ll be ruthless in holding [vendors] accountable.”
Meanwhile, other school districts around the country are doing everything they can to train their own cooks and upgrade their kitchens in order to prepare meals more economically from scratch using fresh produce and other raw ingredients. Here’s a report that aired last night on PBS Newshour, describing how schools in Colorado are using federal stimulus funds to conduct “culinary boot camps” to train their own cooks.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
I can see how the lack of cooking tools and competency in school kitchens could hold up the effective introduction of local produce. On the soup/pasta sauce type “product” issue, I wonder if a central kitchen might be set up to prep massive quantities of these products the night before for delivery to schools the next morning? Obviously less ideal than cooking in school but perhaps a stop gap?
Keep up the good work, Ed. Love the idea of culinary boot camps … maybe the start of something. Did you go to Maine yet?
I love ‘from scratch’ food – but as you say, cooked to death is cooked to death. Or as some people say, ‘braised.’ Given that the salt hasn’t been pushed too high, etc, canned and jarred tomato sauce can be better than ‘recently cooked to death.’ It can use fresh, in season produce from a place that produced tomatoes well and efficiently. And the pasta… who is going to make pasta from local wheat? The whole point is that it is dry and keeps.
The food revolutionaries need to try cooking for, say, 300 people per meal for several meals in a row, with a tight budget, with no $100,000/yr chefs; instead, with near minimum wage labor. Yes, it can be done. I’ve done it with minimally trained volunteers, which is as close as I’ll get. It’s hard, it’s a skill very different from gourmet platings and nouvelle cuisine.
We need to maintain sanity in the debates and plans. Locally grown isn’t as big a change or improvement as simply using much better quality minimally processed foods – frozen thighs, not frozen patties, better quality canned sauce, whole wheat pullmans that aren’t 80% white flour and gluten.
The term “product” is used in the food service industry is used to identify incoming goods. Nothing sinister here. Fresh locally grown organic broccoli would still be referred to as a product.
It sounds as though you are looking for a quick fix to a very complex problem. Up until a couple of years ago the school district WAS running the food service. The food was worse then. Simply getting rid of Chartwell’s won’t solve anything.
Have you asked for a detailed listing of the kitchen facilities in the 121 schools in the district? How many are equipped with commercial ranges, ovens and exhaust systems? How many have walk-ins large enough to store fresh product? By product, I’m referring to produce, meat and dairy. Have you an idea of the cost and feasibility of bringing the school kitchens up to an operable level?
The current cafeteria staff is primarily made up of servers, not cooks. To suggest that a couple of days of boot camp would give these people the needed skills to produce large volume cooked-from-scratch meals is unrealistic, and disrespectful to those of us who have spent years in school and workplace learning these skills.
I know it can be frustrating to look at what is currently served in the schools, but jumping to the conclusion that Chartwell’s is an evil company trying to fatten up children, and Anthony Tata & co. don’t care is not helping to educate the public about the real challenges.
While it has always been the goal of many who teach science via school gardens for the school cafeteria’s to serve the produce in lunch meals the bureaucracy is overwhelming. Therefore, food grown in school based gardens should be grown so that the children/students who work the gardens can take them home and feed their families.
Paul, thanks for weighing in. When Jeff Mills refers to “products,” he is indeed referring to pre-manufactured processed goods, not fresh farm products. I’ve written many thousands of words now on this subject in recent months. Take a look around the blog and I think you’ll see that nobody is jumping to hasty conclusions or bringing any unrealistic expectations to this discussion. In fact, a professional evaluation of the District’s kitchen facilities and cooking capabilities is something we strongly advocate.