<p>I watched this show last week and was fascinated by the ignorance of people regarding basic nutritional health.</p>
<p>It’s on right now (if anyone is interested).</p>
<p>It’s such a battle to get people to change their ways.</p>
<p>I work for the Food Service Director at our public school. She’s 65, overweight and diabetic, and we’ve been dragging her kicking and screaming to the healthier-food revolution. (She thinks we can’t make the food healthier without it costing more or the kids will refuse to eat it. Her idea of healthy is oven-baked fries.) She’s been watching this show… I hope it helps.</p>
<p>DS2 really likes this show. He loves to cook and to watch cooking shows. This show bugs me a little, like all reality shows like this do, but the idea is a good one.</p>
<p>From your mouth to God’s ears, Laf. Hope it helps.</p>
<p>We also watched last year (and are watching now). I understood how some kids didn’t know what an eggplant was, but a tomato? Now that’s really sad. </p>
<p>And I’d like to slap Alice upside the head. How can you be a cook anywhere and claim that the potato pearls are good food???</p>
<p>I give you a lot of credit for trying to make a change. </p>
<p>Last week, Jamie went into a class of 6-year olds. They couldn’t identify a tomato,
potato, eggplant, or avocado. They were clueless. It’s such a shame. Don’t parents teach their kids basic food facts? When our kids were little, a trip to the grocery store was always an adventure—especially the produce section. They would touch, smell, identify, and help to pick out the produce.</p>
<p>PS–The schools actually consider french fries a vegetable? Ridiculous!</p>
<p>I watched the first one - and have last week’s taped to watch. Forgot to set the DVR tonight. :(</p>
<p>I have always been interested in nutrition and people’s eating habits and even more interested when it involves kids. I definitely would like to continue following this show.</p>
<p>Our school district revamped the menu offerings at all school cafeterias a few years ago. It was very hard at first for the kids to give up french fries and white bread products. Now all bread is whole wheat, including pizza dough, hamburger buns and sandwich bread. There are still a few “bad” items offered - like General Tsao’s chicken - but it now comes with brown rice. The fries are baked and there is no more soda sold in vending machines and the drinks have to meet sugar guidelines. The changes took a while to get used to, but now there are no complaints. The one part of the wellness policy that bothers parents is that they are no longer allowed to bring cupcakes or other high sugar items for kids birthday parties in school. Luckilly, my kids were in HS when this wellness policy was instituted. They would have revolted if they couldn’t have cupcakes in school for their birthday!</p>
<p>We’ve never had any form of soda in any schools, only the high school has vending machines which sell water, 100% fruit juice, and G2 (low cal Gatorade). All our sliced bread is 100% whole wheat, but the french bread, deli rolls, burger buns, etc are still white. All meals come with fruit, and we don’t include dessert in any meal. </p>
<p>I argued with my boss last week, she insists corn is a vegetable. I say it is a carb. We serve both corn and rice with tacos, and I can’t talk her out of it. Also, I say beans are a vegetable, she says they’re a protein (actually I think they’re both). Did I mention my boss has no formal nutrition training (not even a college degree actually) but she has been managing our Food Service Dept for 25 years? She does have a nutrition menu planning program that figures out the number of calories and % of fat, as well as protein and a few other things. We do pretty much follow federal guidelines, so over the course of a week our menus average out to no more than 30% of calories from fat. But did you know that the USDA expects school lunches to have 815 calories for high school students, and 600 calories for elementary kids? I am not kidding. And people wonder why kids are fat.</p>
<p>All our rice and our pastas are white. We can get white rice and pasta AND/OR whole wheat pasta and brown rice thru gov’t commodities. HS tried whole wheat pasta once and the kids turned up their noses. I’ve tried to convince her to try a 50/50 mix of white and brown rice - that’s what I do at home and it’s pretty good. Kind of like pilaf.</p>
<p>We are a suburban school district in the northeast with only 8% of our students classified as low-income. While my boss was out on medical leave, in an attempt to be healthier I took advantage of some gov’t commodity frozen chicken pieces - breast, leg, thigh, wing - and scheduled a “Baked Chicken” day on the menu. Our high school manager seasoned it well, and it was delicious. We sold half of what we normally sell - the kids looked at it like they had never seen real pieces of chicken before. They prefer nuggets (ours are all white-meat) and chicken sticks. Maybe it’s just that they weren’t used to seeing real, unprocessed chicken for school lunch?</p>
<p>I should add that it’s not easy to come up with 800 calories of healthy food, cook it, serve it quickly (kids only get 25 minutes for lunch), buy the food, pay your staff, and maintain our cooking and refrigeration equipment for less than $3/meal.</p>
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<p>Does it have to be a specific brand of whole wheat?</p>
<p>The reason I ask is because several CC posters turned me onto a brand of whole wheat pasta that can just about pass for white pasta. It’s made by Bionaturae, but I can only find it at Whole Foods around me, and it’s relatively expensive compared to white pasta. But it is darn good, and I doubt many kids would even know the difference. Whenever I go to Whole Foods, I buy quite a bit… so I’ve been sharing some packages with others to get them to try it; so far everyone has really liked it.</p>
<p>It’s the government commodity whole wheat pasta, no brand name. Guaranteed, if they sell it at Whole Foods, we can’t afford to buy it. Both our white or whole wheat pasta can be obtained from the gov’t for $7 per CASE - and a case is a LOT of pasta.</p>
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<p>Yes, a normal, active kid probably does need that many calories of balanced nutrition for normal growth. What USDA does not account for is the fact that most kids lead sedentary lifestyles and their nutrition is not balanced.</p>
<p>I’m frankly disgusted at the sight of some of the things that are said on this show. Since when were potato pearls real food? I make mashed potatoes one way, and one way only-from scratch. And I’m a college student. It takes me 20 minutes to make one batch. Either they’re complete, utter lazyasses or they’re just stupid. If I were Jamie, I totally would have fired Alice. I wonder if she feeds her own children these things. Real chefs can push 200 covers in one night, making EVERY PORTION from scratch, cooking every portion individually. They have 3-4 hours to cook a few hundred portions. I’m thinking they need to hire people with culinary skill, or at least people who don’t think potato pearls are food.</p>
<p>The soft, persuasion approach doesn’t work with people like Alice. You need to steamroll over them, and basically say “Do what I say or go find another job.” I think Gordon Ramsay’s more of the right type of person to implement change in that cafeteria. He’s the aggressive type that can get something done with Alice. Because frankly he won’t give a flying rat’s ass what they think, he’ll just get it done.</p>
<p>The problem is that he has to fight the individual school plus the bureaucracy of the entire school district (and the governmental guidelines on nutrition) Add into the equation the ignorance of basic healthy nutrition on the part of the students and parents and the power of the school unions. Another big obstacle is cost and finding the money within the school budget to make a significant change to the menu. It’s not an easy task for one person. It’s a near impossible task without a strong backing from the administration and board members.</p>
<p>Seriously though, that food service admin makes the Soviet look efficient. Typical bureaucrat.</p>
<p>I think the way to go is to force public schools to compete with private schools. Private schools serve real food. Most parents in the know will send their kids to private schools over public if they were given a voucher and were basically told they were free to send their kids anywhere they wanted. And the food served is an important QoL measure that parents do consider when they make these decisions.</p>
<p>Like the school on the show last night, our h.s. has french fries and pizza every day…not just “school pizza”, Domino’s pizza that cost something like $2.75/slice and that’s what the kids buy. There was also chicken patty sandwiches and sub sandwiches (white bread) every day, everything is processed, nothing fresh. I’m certain there was no whole wheat anything. A carton of milk comes with the lunches but most don’t bother to pick it up, drinking soft drinks or bottled water instead.</p>
<p>Our large urban/suburban district is in huge financial distress now with teacher layoffs looming and even talk of closing some schools. In this scenario, potato pearls are the least of their worries. Not saying it’s good but just that the public schools systems are facing an uphill climb these days. Our schools have almost 50% of kids recieving free/reduced lunch.<br>
Sadly, the worst food nutritionally is generally the cheapest. It all comes down to money.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the show last night. I thought it was great how the kids turned out the catered meal and really enjoyed it and saw that healthy food can be good.</p>
<p>futurenyustudent, may I ask what bubble you are living in? A “real” chef at a restaurant does NOT sell a complete meal for $2.75. They do NOT cook enough food to serve 600 people QUICKLY - 150 kids at a time need to get their food in under 5 minutes in our high school. The cafe manager at our high school was a chef at the best restaurant in town for 15 years. He makes absolutely DELICIOUS soup. But there’s only so much you can do for $2.75 for a meal - that revenue not only buys the food but it also must pay the staff.</p>
<p>As for private schools selling “real” food? Our food vendor salesman tells us some of the stuff he sells to the nearby Catholic high schools. We can’t sell it because it’s: a) loaded with fat, and b) costs more for a single serving of the entree than we charge for the entire meal. The private schools are charging in the neighborhood of $5/meal. I wonder what they’d sell for half that price.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about michelin star quality food. I’m talking about consistent, tasty REAL food, or at least something resembling it. The crap the lunch ladies were serving was basically industrial waste. I’d be ashamed to serve that to the rats in my wall that I want poisoned to death. That’s more than doable.</p>
<p>BTW the food served at the private schools that charge $25k+ a year is actually decent and something resembling fresh.</p>
<p>People with true culinary skill won’t work for minimum wage like the lunch ladies.</p>
<p>futurenyustudent, let me know what you can find in any restaurant other than McDonalds or Burger King that is a COMPLETE MEAL, including a DRINK, for LESS THAN $3.</p>
<p>And how much are they charging per meal at the $25k+ private school? We figured out the cost per meal on S’s college meal plan - it came out to $11/meal. Almost 4 times as much money as we are working with in the public school lunch program. </p>
<p>(TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND PLUS private schools are your model for reality? Our public school district educates kids for less than $10k/child.)</p>
<p>Like I said, you need to step out of your bubble and into the real world.</p>
<p>The $25k a year private schools include lunch in the tuition. So $0 out of pocket.</p>