Smart School Lunch

We loved this story from Alaska. It demonstrates that kids like vegetable and kids are ready to take their health and nutrition into their own hands when they can. KTVA11 (Alaska) reports…

Earlier this year students at Polaris School did a taste test of roasted Alaska vegetables. Students chowed down on squash, turnips, parsnips and beets. The highest score in the taste test went to parsnips, and now the Anchorage School District is looking to put those and other Alaska-grown veggies on the menu.

“It was really great to go out there and see kids who were excited to try these vegetables,” said A.S.D. head dietician LaDonna Dean. “You typically don’t think about students lining up outside the door to try parsnips but they were and they were really excited about it!”

We applaud the kids for taking the lead and having great taste. We applaud the school and especially the school service staff for incorporating the changes!

Earlier this month, we had the opportunity to speak with Angie Gaszak, RD Nutrition Specialist with the St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS). We’ve been tracking our visit on our Smart School Lunch blog, but we wanted to share a little here too.

SPPS is a larger school district. They have 39,000 students and serve 30,000 lunches each day! We were delighted to make that 30,002 when we stopped in for lunch at Como Park High School.

We were pleased to see the colorful, nutritious options offered to students. It made it easy to follow the MyPlate standards – as you can see from the picture of our trays.

Angie was able to tell us that their lunches have been very successful. The lunch menus meet and surpass the new dietary and nutritional standards – and they see 78 percent participation. Aside from a passionate staff, there were a couple of other things we noticed about SPPS.

Meals made from scratch! This has allowed the school to work with local providers. They have full control of what goes into the food. They have been able to make incremental changes, which have proven especially important with reducing sodium. Students were not necessarily interested in a dramatic taste difference but have been brought about with a series of small changes over time.

Good marketing! Nutrition Services wanted to get in front of the parents and media on the new nutritional standards. They invited parents and media in to the lunchrooms to see the changes being made to their lunches. With this, SPPS has seen very little push back. Parents and the community have been very supportive.

We thank SPPS and Angie for letting us in to see MyPlate in action in the schools.

Earlier this month, we had the opportunity to speak with Angie Gaszak, RD Nutrition Specialist with the St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS). We wrote about their success with adding new and nutritious items to their menu. We also asked Angie if she had any advice for other schools looking to improve nutritional value of their meals and meet new nutritional and dietary guidelines. She provided great insight that we feel other schools can benefit from.

SPPS is a larger school district. They have 39,000 students. They have the equipment and resources to make 30,000 muffins in a single day! As we toured their facility, it was clear that efficiency was a large part of their strategy. We can see from their 78% participation rates, they are truly an example to follow.

We thought folks might appreciate some of their wisdom.

What advice do you have for other schools/district that may be struggling with the new school lunch guidelines?

• Choice bar- This is an additional option complete with a variety of fruits and vegetables that can be added to any meal. It helps meet all of the vegetable categories on a weekly basis. There are also grants available to help get salad bars in schools!
• Try to develop a cycle menu. Once you have several weeks that work, it is much easier to rotate in variety by replacing entrees with similar ones in terms of calories and nutrition profile.
• See if you can integrate some scratch cooking (even one item!) or work with a local bakery to get whole grain products that are low in sodium. Develop a game plan to gradually decrease the sodium.
• Go local! Create a big marketing campaign on local fruits and vegetables, bring in the farmers, make signs and show students how things are grown. Let the veggies sell themselves!
• Make sure your staff members are cheerleaders for the new regulations; integrate customer service skills in training. It goes a long way.
• Check with vendors in the area on items you are looking for (with specs) so that they know that there is a need. This can also create some healthy competition if they know you are also looking elsewhere.
• Network! Use recipes that are hits from neighboring districts—don’t reinvent the wheel

Would you ever consider going vegetarian in your school lunch room? The New York Daily News reports on the first school to go vegetarian.

Public School 244 in Flushing is the first public school in the nation to serve all-vegetarian meals for breakfast and lunch, according to city education officials.

Chefs at the Active Learning Elementary School have swapped chicken, turkey and ham for black beans, tofu and falafel, and kids are digging in with delight.

It’s a bold step and a fantastic way to introduce kids to a new way to think about nutrition. They are already promoting the choice to other schools…

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who often crows about maintaining a fit lifestyle, said the launch of the vegetarian food-fest should be duplicated in schools across the city and country.

According to the New York Post, the school has been working with parents during the transition…

School officials said that parents have been consulted every step of the way and that the school began by piloting an all-vegetarian menu three days of the week.

Parents still have the option of packing meaty offerings into their kids’ lunch boxes.

Each month in our school cafeterias we are highlighting a new fruit or vegetable to showcase in our “Harvest of the Month Cart”.  It’s a simple wooden cart with a basket to hold the produce and the cart is then decorated with seasonal garland, scarecrows, vines and even blinking hearts for February’s presentation or shamrocks for March.

Students have the opportunity to come touch, feel and experience the fruits/vegetables as they would see it in nature.  Most students don’t realize that vegetables have leaves or come with roots attached or that there are many varieties of that one vegetable or fruit. For instance, last month students learned that there is red cabbage, Napa cabbage, savoy cabbage in addition to the traditional green cabbage they see shredded in their coleslaw.

We have a bulletin board behind the cart with Farm to School Learning Zone posters showing colorful produce and lots of information cards on fruits and vegetables.

Our monthly menus include family recipes and fun facts about the Harvest of the month item and of course, we make sure and serve that produce item at least once that menu and will sometimes try out a new recipe to add excitement.

This month it’s the Avocado (most kids think the avocado is a vegetable but it’s really a fruit).  We are starting to sprout avocado seeds in our cafeterias window sill.  We show how students can grow their own miniature avocado tree at home and of course we will be serving Guacamole with their “South of the Border Lettuce Salad” this month.

The last Harvest of the Month Cart will contain a big basket of the Garden plushy fruits and vegetables, we want to challenge students to see how much they can to recall about what they learned from the Harvest of the Month Cart this school year.  We will include fact and recipe cards in the cart to jog their memory.

By adding tasting and touching to our nutrition lessons this year we added a lot more interest and we think a lot more fun too!