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Fast Food in Schools, and Some Other Cafeteria Numbers From 2008
After sampling my way through the School Nutrition Association’s food expo earlier this month, I picked up a copy of the organization’s annual survey of school cafeterias. I just got around to leafing through it, and some of the numbers jumped out at me.
The most shocking piece of the report was the section on brand-name offerings in cafeterias. Back when I wrote about fast food in schools, I didn’t have a figure for the number of cafeterias that served restaurant entrees. According to the SNA survey, more than one-third of schools dish out restaurant-branded items for lunch. Among districts with over 25,000 students, 50 percent served brand-name fast-food. That number is alarmingly high.
Domino’s is the restaurant of choice for many schools, the survey found. Of the schools that offer restaurant fare, 27 percent offer Domino’s Pizza. Another prominent choice was Papa John’s (which had a booth at the food expo and was giving out samples of a new branded frozen pizza for schools). Pizza Hut, Subway and Chick-fil-A are also popular, as are Little Caesar’s and Arby’s. Panda Express, Dairy Queen, KFC and Taco Bell show up too.
The SNA survey also reported on the number of schools that cook from scratch. Considering the above, it’s not surprising that over 80 percent of schools cook fewer than half of their entrees from scratch. Almost 40 percent of cafeterias cook fewer than a quarter of their entrees from scratch. These numbers mesh well with the statistics on commodity usage, which show that almost half of schools use their commodity dollars mainly for processed foods (government chicken becomes chicken nuggets, government cheese becomes pizza, etc).
On the bright side, the survey found that about one-third of school cafeterias purchase some of their food locally, and an additional 20 percent said they were considering doing so. That’s all the more reason to expand farm-to-school programs and make it easier for schools to bring fresh, local food into the lunchroom.
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