A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to share with you some articles that have appeared in various newspapers and magazines before there was the blog. The following article appeared in the Kansas City Star about a year and a half ago.
Let’s redo school lunch
By GAIL BORELLI
The Kansas City Star
The food served for lunch at Oakhill Day School in Gladstone doesn’t have to travel far.
The whole-wheat buns and cookies come from Bread of Life, an organic bakery in Stewartsville, Mo.
Honey used to sweeten the school’s made-from-scratch muffins comes from hives in southern Johnson County.
Eggs come from free-range chickens at family-owned Campo Lindo Farms in Lathrop, Mo. And the hormone-free milk the students drink comes from cows on family farms near Firth, Neb.
Like many schools across the country, Oakhill, which serves toddlers through sixth-graders, has redesigned its lunch program in an effort to improve nutrition and reduce obesity among school-age children.
But not many schools have gone as far as Oakhill in adding locally grown foods to the menu. Bistro Kids, an area company that operates the Oakhill lunch program, has been serving meals that are 70 percent to 80 percent locally sourced. A schoolyard garden, recycling program, nutrition curriculum and school visits by producers are also part of the Bistro Kids program.
Helping children put a face to the farmers who grow their food is a concept that is building momentum, says Anupama Joshi, director of the Farm to School Program, a national clearinghouse for information and assistance. Each school’s program is unique because of seasonality and community support, she says, and most include in the lunch line just one or two local foods, such as apples.
Schools face challenges that include distribution; most farmers have no way to deliver their products to schools. And in the Midwest, the school calendar runs counter to the summer flush of produce.
But across the country, more schools are finding the value in feeding students fresh, locally grown food.
“It’s a win-win situation for schools, but also for farmers who are participating,” Joshi says. “Kids get the whole cycle of how food is grown by getting their hands dirty in school gardens and learning about the environment and sustainability. It’s a powerful tool to get kids acquainted with the idea of eating healthy.”
Time for a change
The lunch program at Oakhill was ripe for change. Lunches were prepared off-site, then scooped onto Styrofoam trays by the teachers and delivered to the classrooms. Students ate at their desks. The menu was heavy on hamburgers, pizza and french fries.
Suzanne McCanles, who took over earlier this year as head of the private school, wanted something better for her students. She asked Bistro Kids chef/owner Kiersten Firquain to devise a healthier alternative.
Firquain, a personal chef and cooking instructor with a master’s degree in business, became interested in childhood nutrition after taking a weeklong “Techniques of Healthy Cooking” class at the Culinary Institute of America at the Greystone campus in California. She says the menus she plans for Oakhill meet or exceed the USDA’s guidelines for school lunch — no more than 30 percent of calories from fat over the course of a week and at least one-third of the RDA of vitamins A and C, protein, iron, calcium and calories.
“Schools can’t continue to feed kids the way they’re feeding them,” Firquain says.
Parents were enthusiastic about switching the lunch contract to Bistro Kids, McCanles says. Now entrees such as Asian Marinated Turkey and Tomato Basil Frittata are prepared from scratch by Bistro Kids chef Jacqueline Bopp, a 2007 graduate of the culinary program at Johnson County Community College.
Bistro Kids has found retail partners in Ball’s Food Stores, which promotes locally grown foods in its Hen House and Price Chopper supermarkets, and Green Acres Market in Briarcliff Village. Both give Bistro Kids a discount on its purchases.
Firquain orders fresh produce, meat and milk twice a week from a Price Chopper near Oakhill. Many of these foods come from Good-Natured Family Farms, an alliance of more than 100 family farmers who live within about 200 miles of Kansas City.
If Firquain can’t find an item locally grown, she orders organic or natural versions. A recent order from Green Acres Market included organic versions of brown rice, applesauce, ranch salad dressing and pumpkin filling. “We give them a heck of a deal — cost plus 10 percent,” compared with the usual grocery markup of 30 percent to 40 percent, says Steve Wilson, operations/grocery manager at Green Acres.
Even in winter the Oakhill menu could include a large variety of local foods. Amish members of Good-Natured Family Farms can jams, jellies, beets and pickles, says Diana Endicott, director of the farm alliance, and all those products are available to Bistro Kids.
Cool-season crops such as bok choy and lettuces are coming on strong, and farmers are extending the growing season for other vegetables with hoop houses.
Lunch envy
One important element of the Bistro Kids program is education. Last week the K- through sixth-grade classes were bused to the Overland Park Farmers Market to chat with producers and get a better idea where food comes from.
On “Fun Fridays,” Firquain teaches classroom lessons on nutrition in the morning. A lunchtime visitor talks to the students about food production and sustainability. The first-semester schedule includes a beekeeper; a demonstration on worm composting; samplings of “sun butter,” a peanut butter alternative made from sunflower seeds; and Eco Elvis, who sings about recycling.
Fun Friday is also salad bar day, which has been a hit with the students.
The salad bar includes many of the usual suspects, such as fruit salad and cucumber slices, as well as more offbeat offerings such as dried apple slices, edamame and cinnamon couscous. Trays of whole-wheat breadsticks, crackers and cookies fill a table at one end of the salad bar.
Staff members encourage the children to try different foods, and they can take as much or as little as they like.
“Oh, my goodness, this tastes wonderful,” first-grader Brit Richardson says as he gobbles two bowls of cinnamon bananas, a rhapsodic look on his face. “Every food here is good.”
About two-thirds of the 240 students eat school lunch, McCanles says, and the number is increasing as brown baggers succumb to lunch envy. Brothers Ethan and Carson Gates have even agreed to do extra chores at home in exchange for eating school lunch.
“Their classmates kept telling them how yummy it was,” says their mother, Stacey Gates of Kansas City, North. She usually packs sack lunches for her four children who attend Oakhill as a way to hold down expenses.
Now the boys are doing dishes, folding laundry, vacuuming and raking in return for eating the Bistro Kids fare.
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