<p>Let me know how much the schools are spending to make those “$0 out of pocket” lunches. My guess is in the neighborhood of $7 - $10/meal.</p>
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<p>Where do you think the money is going to come from to send all kids to $25k/year private schools? Do vouchers grow on trees? Can a private school use vouchers to pay their staff and their vendors? Have you ever heard of the word “taxes”?</p>
<p>What reality are you living in, that food is “free” and school is “free”? Nothing in life is free. Someone, somewhere is paying for it.</p>
<p>That said, the reason the kids on this show had never seen a real potato or a real tomato has to begin at home. What the heck are the parents feeding their kids?</p>
<p>Are you excusing the schools for serving such crap to their students? </p>
<p>I think it’s unforgivable what this school is doing to its students. </p>
<p>All I hear from the admins on this show is “can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t.” **** and make it work. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I’m not expecting them to go to michelin star quality, but at least it needs to be something resembling real, actual food. You know, food that rots or makes us sick if we don’t handle it correctly. As Jamie said, students get fed better in Johannesburg. This country is wealthier than South Africa by every metric. Why is our food supply filled with such crap?</p>
<p>Outside of vinegar, mustard and the like, no food ingredient should stay edible in the fridge for more than 3 weeks. The exceptions would be dried products like pasta, root vegetables with naturally long shelf lives like potatoes, fungi like mushrooms, and cheese (which is already fermented). I get worried if anything else fresh doesn’t go bad in 3 weeks. Meat and meat products should make you sick after 2 weeks unless frozen.</p>
<p>I have a rule. With very few exceptions, stuff that you buy that’s around the perimeter of the store is food. Stuff that’s in the middle is generally not food (baking ingredients such as flour, dried products such as pasta, and SOME frozen products such as ice cream and IQFP vegetables excepted). I do agree though, the parents on this show are more at fault for this than anyone else. If your kid can’t tell a potato from a tomato, I don’t care how busy you are, that’s your fault and your fault only.</p>
<p>I’m not excusing anything. (I haven’t seen the show, so I’m pretty sure what our district is serving is better than what they show found in - where is it? West Virginia?) But you’re not living in reality when you say that schools should be able to do what restaurants do, and that public schools that are mandated to feed kids on less than $3/meal should be able to do what private schools do with - how much money to spend per meal? you don’t even know the answer to that question, you seem to think the food is $0.</p>
<p>Improvements are not only possible but are absolutely necessary. I get tired of hearing my boss say, “We can’t do this, we can’t do that, the kids won’t eat it, it costs too much money…” but there is a a reason she says that. And your analysis of the problem is WAY to simplistic and shows that you know-little-to-nothing about the economic realities of food service. </p>
<p>Our high school has a wonderful salad bar, with all sorts of fresh veggies, salads, pasta, some meats, boiled eggs, etc. It’s very popular. We have a full-time staffer who just prepares the food for the salad bar, supervises it to be sure the kids use tongs and not their hands (you’d be surprised…) and run the cash register. We lose money every time a kid buys a full tray of salad there. Where do we make up that money? Selling baked Lays chips, reduced-fat Doritoes, oven-baked fries, and flavored water at our snack bars and in our vending machines.</p>
<p>And by the way, we use potato pearls to make mashed potatoes that we serve with white-meat chicken nuggets. The kids LOVE them. They come back and buy and extra bowls of mashed potatoes for fifty cents. I don’t get it - I don’t think they’re very good - but the kids threw a fit the week we had problems with the vat and had to serve oven fries instead. They wanted those mashed potatoes. Our high school manager wants to try switching to baked potatoes instead, they’re cheap, easy to make, and nutritionally better than the potato pearls. We’ll see how the kids react.</p>
<p>Alice doesn’t know the first thing about food. I wonder if she’d eat that crap herself. Or if she’d feed it to her children. If you wouldn’t feed the industrial waste to your own children, what gives you the right to feed it to other children?</p>
<p>The kids will eat dirt and fertilizer too, but it doesn’t mean we should feed it to them.</p>
<p>Cooking classes should be a graduation requirement for high school. Not just for their sake, for the health of the whole nation. By 14 they should know basic cooking skills. As for a source of free labor? Two words: CULINARY SCHOOLS.</p>
<p>I can make a beautiful bolognese sauce for about $5 a portion. In New York City, shopping retail. From scratch. And it takes a little over an hour. The last batch I made that included the time I spent trying to revive myself after I cut myself pretty badly. If the school districts can’t wield their negotiating power to get the cost of those ingredients down to $1 a portion, someone’s not doing their job.</p>
<p>^ Good for you futurenyustudent, but I agree; food choices begin at home, and at a very young age. BTW, my D will be in New York for a semester of her junior ( in college) year, with no meal plan or kitchen . Her dad and I are from New York, moved to California for medical school/internship/fellowship stuff, and as a “foodie”, I think the life style/options are WAY better here. I grow a lot of what we eat, and use a CSA ( community supported agriculture), and the local farmers market. If you could “market” good, “cheap” choices for this population, you could make a career of it. Step up!</p>
<p>Wow, we’re supposed to negotiate to pay 20% of what you pay for food. An 80% discount. I hate to tell you this, but prices at BJ’s are about as good as the prices we pay from our vendors who deliver food to us - and we are in a food buying co-op with other districts so that we can get the best prices. Yes we get some ingredients cheap from the government, but the quality isn’t always the best and we can only get certain foods (the kind you’re complaining about, probably) - the rest we purchase from wholesalers. </p>
<p>And how much SALARY did you pay yourself when you prepared that bolognese sauce? Did you pay for any health benefits for yourself? Did you repair your refrigerator and meet stringent food sanitation codes, mark down the temperature of your prepared ingredients and the temperature when you served it? Were you wearing food-handling, latex-free gloves and discarding and replacing them every time you changed ingredient or touched your face or hair? Can you replicate that delicious taste to serve hundreds of people? And can you do all this between 6 am and 10 am, when our kids start eating lunch? (Yes, in order to get all the kids into and out of the cafeteria with 20 minutes to eat, “lunches” here start just after 10 am).</p>
<p>Food costs are only 50% of our budget. 40% is labor (and we don’t pay much). The rest is repairs/maintenance/purchase of equipment, and other purchases (like cleaning products). Did you include any of those costs in your $5 bolognese sauce? Your $5 bolognese sauce is now closer to $9. Do you plan to eat anything else in that meal? Have a beverage? </p>
<p>Again, try doing ALL of that for under $3. Believe me, if this problem was that easy to solve, it would have been done by now.</p>
<p>You buy for 10,000 portions and you can’t negotiate that kind of volume discount? No wonder schools are broke.</p>
<p>I don’t care why you can’t do it. By telling me why you can’t do it, you’re a part of the problem. Make it possible, I don’t care how you do it. Some of us are sick and tired of the excuses you know. And btw, I feel the same way about politicians. I don’t give a damn, just make it happen. And if you can’t make it happen, please let us know so we can fire your ass.</p>
<p>futurenyustudent, I just love know-it-alls who have zero experience with what they’re talking about. If you have positive suggestions, make them. Otherwise, just telling other people that they are idiots and “lazyasses” gets everyone nowhere. “Make it possible, I don’t care how you do it.” Translation: you don’t know how to do it either. </p>
<p>I am telling you the REALITY of the situation. You don’t have to like it, but ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. I’m not saying there can’t be changes. There should be, and hopefully there will be. But these changes aren’t nearly as easy or as obvious as you seem to think they are. Walk a mile in someone’s shoes before you decide that they’re “part of the problem.”</p>
<p>Really, re-read your posts. I don’t know what reality you live in, but if you think $25k+ private schools are REAL WORLD then you have surely lead an extremely sheltered life.</p>
<p>I still want to know how you’re going to make $9 bolognese for $1. Where did you get 10,000 portions? I told you I’m cooking for 600 kids who buy lunch at our high school. If it’s the whole school district, then 2500. And they’re not all going to eat your delicious bolognese. Some of them will want the “alternate” meals we provide daily - soup, tuna, vegetarian options like yogurt, etc. </p>
<p>I also still want to know how much private schools are actually spending per meal for those $0 lunches, and what restaurant is serving individually prepared, healthy meals for under $3 per meal.</p>
<p>How about rolling up your sleeves and showing how this can be done on a real scale, not in your tiny kitchen? Please be a leader and not a whiner - with such “I don’t give a damn” attitudes you will not get too far up the corporate or political ladder.</p>
<p>Returning to the topic . . . I watched the show last night and thought it was great how Jamie got those HS kids in the kitchen and cooking! I think it is very unfortunate that so many children grow up thinking they don’t like vegetables. My daughters have always loved them and enjoy a wide variety, including turnips (rutabagas) that I make for Thanksgiving and Christmas, acorn squash, and eggplant. I remember when my son was in pre-school, the school did a survey on how many of the children liked broccoli and it turned out that almost every single one of them liked it some way - raw with dip or cooked. I find it interesting to see the snacks my First Graders have - a lot have the packaged sugary things, but many bring is cut up red peppers and cucumbers, applesauce, and other fruit options, as well as, granola bars. I think that more Americans are beginning to get the nutrition message and Jamie’s show is one way to get that message out.</p>
<p>I certainly hope his message gets to the parents… kids model what they learn at home. My kids have eaten whole wheat bread since they were infants. They like it because it’s what they’re used to. </p>
<p>My boss IS watching the show, I hope Jamie can give her some good ideas. She’s been told we need to serve more vegetables. Her solution? Coleslaw. <em>sigh</em> </p>
<p>Coleslaw is perfectly fine is it is made with no mayo. It is great with lemon juice, olive oil (a little) and loads of other fine chopped veggies and herbs including parsley and basil and mint. Fantastic.</p>
French fries=vegetable (actually, tuber)+fries+heat. I see their logic through these rolleyes :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I saw the excerpt of the kids not able to identify a potato, one of them called it a tomato. :eek: I mean, even if you only eat pizza, you know the red stuff comes from tomatoes! How do you get from potatoes–>tomatoes?</p>
<p>Yes, I worry about the next generation. Already. That’s not good if a high-schooler is worried about your health.</p>
<p>A very interesting tv show but I question why this is the school’s responsibility. Is it because the food is so far below the standards it should be at that the schools are compelled to make changes? In certain districts, I understand the thinking that the students’ most substantial meal may come from the school so it should be healthy. But in the majority of districts, it seems like families can do whatever they want at home so if they choose not to feed their kids enough veggies for them to recognize a tomato, then that’s their choice and they shouldn’t blame the school for serving fries daily. For those families that are health conscious and don’t want their kids eating fries and pizza daily, isn’t packing lunch an option? I’m not quite clear on why they’re so focused on making a change that families could make for themselves (at least it seems like they could in this town).</p>
<p>Our high school contracts with a company to run the food service out of our cafeteria. They keep the official meal price pretty low. One way they do that is to run two food lines. One line is for the kids who pay the low price and get the standard meal, which complies with federal regs. The other line is the ala carte line, or as I call it, the “expensive line.” Kids going through the ala carte line can load up on fries, corn dogs, chicken nuggets, pizza, etc. They pay more for this food.</p>
<p>The way the company keeps the “official meal price” low is by the money they make off the kids who go through the expensive junk food line.</p>
<p>Actually, a walk through the cafeteria at lunch time to see what the kids are eating is pretty depressing, and I am NOT a food nazi. I am ready for the revolution.</p>