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Beyond the Food Challenges: Part 3 in the Berkeley Series
By Ann Cooper —
Revamping the menu isn’t the only step to creating a successful school meal program. In Berkeley, we also addressed our facilities, our funding, our human resources and our marketing efforts.
Facilities: I found that Berkeley’s kitchen facilities, like those of most public school districts, were in a state of disrepair or nonexistent. Refrigeration, heating, serving and cooking equipment has since been installed in all 17 sites in the district. The central kitchen has been remodeled, and a second central kitchen is being considered. Rebuilding cooking facilities is a mandatory part of the change toward a healthier food system.
Funding: In Berkeley, the school district allocates approximately 0.022 percent of its general fund, or about $250,000, to Nutrition Services. We’re fighting to raise the national reimbursement rate, but in the meantime, school districts elsewhere can follow Berkeley’s lead by allocating a small percentage of their general funds to ensure nutritious, delicious food for all schoolchildren. An increase of just half of 1 percent would result in significant improvements nationwide.
All U.S. public schools need more money to adequately finance their breakfast and lunch programs. Currently, the federal reimbursement rate is $2.57 per lunch. In addition, all districts receive 18.5¢ more per child for commodity foods. California schools receive another 19¢ from the state as a reimbursement for both breakfast and lunch.
Most schools spend less than $1 on food per child per day. With an increase of 50¢ to $1 per child per day, we can feed kids healthy food. Many of us typically spend more on our daily coffee than most schools have allocated for food for a week’s worth of meals for their students.
Human Resources: Unlike school-cafeteria staff of the past, most of today’s kitchen workers lack adequate food-service training. In Berkeley, we provided uniforms, implemented culinary training programs, and developed guides for professionalism, pay scales, new job descriptions and staff configurations — all essential for running safe, effective and healthy kitchens. If we want better food for our children, then we have to hire and train professional staff.
Marketing: It’s one thing to make the food, another to get kids to eat it. Many successful school lunch programs around the country have employed traditional marketing techniques that treat children as potential customers — they “sell” the food. Attractive advertising, packaging, and service have been shown to increase consumption of a larger variety of school-lunch foods. A marketing campaign both supports and augments nutrition education as part of the basic curriculum. “Big food,” spends $20 billion a year marketing non-nutrient food to children. Schools, too, need to focus on marketing school food as cool food.
If we are going to positively impact the health of our children and our children’s children, then we need to make a change and make it now. I believe that we must demand the following:
• Provide universal breakfast and lunch — healthy schools meals should be a birthright in America
• Make school meals a health initiative, and move oversight of the program from the USDA to the CDC
• Raise the federal reimbursement rate for lunch to $4.00 with a sliding scale based on local demographics
• Update the dietary guidelines to ensure that chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk and canned fruit cocktail aren’t a reimbursable meal
• Promote fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains, and eliminate all highly processed foods and foods of minimal nutritional value
Perhaps, just perhaps if we can do all of this we just might save our children and the planet as well.
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