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When Serving Healthy Food Means Taking a Risk
It’s truly sad that, these days, schools have to take a gamble to serve healthy food. The latest illustration of that comes from an editorial in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which describes the district’s new meal program as “ambitious — and risky.”
Santa Cruz City Schools recently hired a new meal program director, and the northern California district is looking to ditch processed food in favor of healthy meals cooked entirely from scratch. While the new director works on a plan, the district will contract with Revolution Foods, a local company that supplies all-natural and often local and organic school lunches.
This all sounds great. But the Sentinel editorial warns that “simply providing higher quality meals, both in taste and nutritional value, will not be enough to make this program a success. Getting students to pay for the food will be the real test.”
The contract with Revolution Foods could add as much as $250,000 to the district’s food services costs. Administrators hope that the overhauled program will attract more customers, bringing in enough revenue to cover the extra expenses. That’s placing a lot of confidence in kids (”What if students don’t buy into the program?” the editorial asks). If they decide they don’t like the lunch offerings, the food services department will find itself in the red. As schools face budget cuts (enormous ones in California), that’s a big risk to take.
It is admirable that Santa Cruz is taking the gamble. But it’s sad that healthy food should be so risky in the first place. We need to give schools the resources to make healthy lunches the standard. That means more funding and less reliance on student preferences. As the Sentinel editorial argues, nutritious food and nutrition education should be “the norm, not the exception.”
August 7th, 2009 at 11:28 am
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August 9th, 2009 at 7:41 am
Yes, this City School Board is taking a financial risk attempting to please students with healthy lunches. The new program will have to be introduced by further class room discussion on healthy foods: what they are, what benefits accrue from healthy meals. There must be a discussion around buying healthy foods in the supermarket and how these meals are prepared and presented.
Nutrition information nights could be held for interested parents. These nights could be led by a supermarket nutritionist, with handouts, open discussion, shopping lists and suggested menus and of course, tidbit sized samples. Just serving up the lunches and hoping students will respond isn’t enough. Home and school have to work in concert to make the wonderful concept viable.
Remember Jamie Oliviers’ school lunch crusade? He was able utimately to get federal funding for his project but he rode a bumpy road introducing healthful school meals. Do keep us posted on the progress of the Califorian project.