Of course, I’ll look like a Syrian refugee child sitting at a desk in the 7th grade, but it might be worth it after reading about the plans for school lunches in Western Washington.
After years of serving processed, reheated, pre-packaged lunches, some Western Washington schools are going back to good old-fashioned cooking from scratch.
Their goal is to serve meals prepared in an actual kitchen, with fresh ingredients for thousands of picky kids. That’s a tough assignment.
Bellingham Public Schools just made a curious hire. The district now has an executive chef, Patrick Durgan.
“We’ve got some BBQ chicken, baked beans, and there’s also a chicken gyro option,” Durgan said, as students lined up to fill their trays.
His job is to fix lunch, not just reheat something from a box.
Now, alongside the frozen pizza, they’re providing a full salad bar, some of it harvested locally.
“I think it’s definitely improving, but there is some ways to go,” said 8th grader Linnea Barrett.
What they really need is a big central kitchen with the tools and space to cook for more than 10,000 hungry kids. They plan to open that facility in 2019.
“We will be reheating some things on-site, but we’ll be taking all that raw food and all those raw products and breaking them all down in our own kitchen, so we’ll be able to source local ingredients, local products,” Durgan said.
The Bethel School District in Spanaway is using its central kitchen to wash, chop, and prep whole ingredients for dishes like chicken pot pie, chipotle sloppy joes, and beef teriyaki.
In Monroe Public Schools, a typical lunch might include Asian wheat berry salad, bok choy with garlic-ginger drizzle, roast turkey and gravy, and vegetable soup, all made from scratch. They say they’ve even stopped using canned vegetables.
The South Whidbey School District, though, is transforming lunch and cultivating better eating habits in a way few other districts are. Kids are growing some of what they eat. On a recent day, the menu included lettuce, spinach, and kale harvested from the school yard. A few days earlier the lunch staff chopped up some bok choy the kids grew and made an easy stir-fry.
“Eating is an important part of our curriculum,” said Cary Peterson, who helped launch the School Farm Program in 2013.
“The long-term goal is that every meal has fresh vegetables from the garden and that we have scratch cooking,” she said.
They now have seven gardens, where students learn about agriculture, science, and nutrition, while munching on fistfuls of sorrel, an edible weed that’s kind of sour.
“It’s glorious, it’s delicious,” said one student.
!snip!
ht/ illustr8r
Every day, when I managed to get to classes in high school, I had a meatball sandwich, chocolate milk and a giant chocolate chip cookie for lunch. And look, I’m still alivvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvmmghkv
Yeah but Illustr8tor still had monkey bars, four square, and dodge ball. Far to dangerous for today’s kids.
This is a great start let the kids know how there food is grown and prepared and maybe they won’t take it for granted.
@BB I told BFH I grew up on PB&J and egg salad sandwiches that my mom made. Some days I might have extra money to buy French fries. Good for the kids to learn about agriculture and farming-that’s great. Kids today eat…book choy?!?
-my game of choice was tag because I could outrun everybody. LOL! Even the boys! I had girl empowerment without crybaby feminists telling me how.
My mom was a stay at home mom. The school was 2 blocks away from my home. So
every day I walked home for lunch. I’d just tell her what I’d like and she would make it
Sandwiches, meatloaf, stew, chili.
But…. never pizza. Pizza makes you fat and lazy.
Her kitchen her rules
I survived on 10,000 dollar bars.
Inflation changed them.
We walked at least 12 blocks to school.
That was life.
My mother taught school. So, i ate every day in the school lunch program, from K-12
Simpsons High
Chocolate Milk and 2 Honey Buns at 945
In the Smoking Court
With a Honey Bun
Next to the Automotive Industrial Wing
I got a nickle every day for lunch, my mom would say, “a nickle to buy a pickle.” That nickle got me 1 pint of 1% white milk (I wasn’t allowed to have 2% or chocolate and they didn’t offer skim, the preferable milk of choice at home). The nickle turned into a dime to buy a lime when rates doubled in junior high. The rest of my lunch was brown bagged, usually a meat sandwich, I always threw away the bread I hated white bread, some fruit, and a stale hostess treat of some type that would sit in my locker with other treats that got thrown away after a while.
As much as I really despised lunch in school, it was always the same shit mom tossed in a bag, I do miss mom making the days reliable.
My mom was a strict believer in cooking every meal from scratch. My school lunches were typically made from leftovers from the previous day. Daily exercise included playground equipment, tag, Dodge ball, kick ball and the mile plus walk to and from school.
Milk was three cents when I started school; brown bagged it most days unless they were serving something I really liked…hamburg or turkey gravy over mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, Salisbury steak. 25 cents; included entree, vegie, milk, and desert. Real whole milk, not 1%, 2%, skim, or chocolate.
My grade school cooks used to bake as well as cook everything from scratch. By 10:00 a.m., the school smelled of hot, fresh bread or baked cake, or something. It made our mouths water and we couldn’t wait for lunch. At times, it was almost unbearable. All of us kids today have PhD’s and geniuses for kids who have two or even three PhD’s… well, not me, of course, but, hey, the turkey tetrazzini was to die for and made you SMART!
I don’t recall much from school lunch but the stewed prunes. We would get those frequently as “desert”. I was a very picky eater, but stewed prunes were more appetizing than succotash or butter beans.
We used to go for the education. We brought our lunch in a box with a fragile thermos or in a paper bag. Now it seems they go for food. In some places they serve dinner and breakfast and keep the “schools” open all year to feed the children. Are they schools or restaurants?
This is an interesting thread. I love hearing about everyone’s experiences with lunch at school! We didn’t have a cafeteria until 1960-61. Until then all lunches were from home. I got selected to be a “helper” in the new cafeteria. Bless the nice lady that ran that place! I still remember her. I learned all kinds of kitchen tricks in that “internship”. I was in charge of serving up the apple crisp and another girl squirted the whipped cream on top. We had a blast. EVERY thing was cooked in that kitchen. The greatest food ever: turkey and gravy, chili mac, spaghetti, beanie wienies, shepherd’s pie, giant home-made cookies, cornbread with honey. Man! I only ate there when I worked, but what a treat. I remember the lady’s trick for cutting up jell-o squares: big huge sheet pan full of jell-o, cut deftly with a big knife into 1-inch squares and then to my wonderment and surprise, magically scooped up from the bottom with a giant pancake turner/spatula in like 2 seconds. I was so impressed.I still do it like that for kids when they come over here. Great memories!
Feeding kids healthy food is a great idea. Doing it this way will have some unintended consequences. How many kids know what Asian wheat berry salad is? They are also going to lay out a ton of money to build, equip, staff, and supply this mega-kitchen they’re going to build. How many tax hikes is it going to take to keep the ball rolling? Lastly, my wife was a school teacher. Her school had a free lunch program for every student! A lot of the kids would pick at the meals or simply not eat them and then dump them in the trash. When something is ‘free’ it has no value to them. Of course they brought in their candy bars, etc. from home so they never went hungry.
Senior year I’d run through the cheeseburger-n-fries in a bag line & take it to an out-of-the-way court yard to hang out with a few friends. Great times.