From Mother Jones. reporter Kiera Butler, Fri. July 18, 2014 for the whole story go here.
Striding past samples of Pop Tarts and pizza and cookies, Jessica
Shelly made a beeline for a booth selling individually packaged sliced
fruits and veggies. She picked up a pouch of sliced peaches and let out a
yelp of delight. "This could be really fabulous," she said. "I'm
thinking yogurt. I'm thinking granola. I'm thinking make-your-own
breakfast parfait!" She waved the peaches around in the air
triumphantly. People began to give us odd looks.
Before meeting Shelly, I hadn't known it was possible to muster quite
this much enthusiasm for sliced peaches. Then again, someone with any
less energy probably wouldn't be able to do Shelly's job: As the
director of food services for Cincinnati's public schools, she is wholly
responsibly for providing nutritious breakfast, lunch, and snacks to
34,000 public school students, three-quarters of whom are on free or
reduced-price meals.
Here in the exhibition hall at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association
(SNA), the group that represents the nation's 55,000 school food
professionals, Shelly wasn't the only one with a tough job—all 6,500
attendees had their work cut out for them. They had to find food that
would appeal to kids, otherwise it would go right from a child's tray to
the garbage can. The food must be easy to prepare; some school kitchens
are too small to do anything more than heat up a prepared meal. It also
has to be very, very cheap. Most of the nutrition directors told me
that once they pay overhead costs, they are left with only a dollar or
two per student.
This month, their job got harder still. A new set of federal nutritional standards—including
a requirement that students must take a fruit or vegetable with lunch
and a rule that half of foods served must be composed of at least 51
percent whole grains—went into effect on July 1. Even stricter rules are
coming: In 2017, the sodium limit will be further reduced. * (Read Mother Jones' Alex Park's guide to the food companies that lobbied on the new rules here.)
and:
...Shelly has found that with a little creativity, it's possible to
tempt kids to the lunchroom. Ohio tightened its nutrition standards
several years ago, so Shelly has had some time to develop tricks. One
winning strategy, she says, is to encourage kids to personalize their
meals. She worked with her produce distributor to create affordable
salad bars, where kids can load up on the veggies they like. She also
installed spice stations—think ranch, lemon pepper, and hot chili—so
that kids could decide how to season their food. One day a week, she
invites teachers into the lunchrooms to model healthy eating. On these
mentoring days, teachers eat free.
Another part of the job, she says, is marketing. She regularly asks
students to score foods served in the cafeteria. When she changed the
name of a sandwich from "chicken patty on a whole grain bun" to "oven
baked chicken sandwich," the students scored the sandwich three points
higher on average. She also made lunchrooms more inviting, ditching the
long tables for booths she picked up for cheap at restaurants that were
going out of business. During a conference session she led, she
underscored the importance of letting parents know that healthy food was
available at school. "They don't know," she said. "They think we're
feeding them carnival food. They think I'm making mystery meat in the
back kitchen with road kill."
Her tactics seem to be working. While the rest of the nation's
lunchrooms have seen historic declines in attendance over the last few
years, cafeterias in Shelly's program have actually grown more
popular—and turned a $2.7 million profit.
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