Schools hungry to improve taste, nutrition of lunches

(USA Today) – When diners at an exclusive food tasting recently noshed on sesame green beans and flame-roasted redskin potatoes, they weren’t celebrating at the area’s newest culinary hot spot.

Instead, these gourmands were huddled in a high school cafeteria sampling nearly 40 delicacies that could soon become permanent items for thousands of children who eat lunch and breakfast in this Northern Virginia school district each day.

The annual tasting show, a popular event for Prince William County officials to showcase new foods and collect input from students, parents and school staff, has taken on added significance following new U.S. Agriculture Department nutrition standards approved last year. School districts must now limit the calories that students consume, phase in whole grains, gradually lower sodium levels, and offer at least one fruit or vegetable per meal, among other requirements.

Schools are working to comply with these new measures by adding more green vegetables, such as spinach and broccoli, and overhauling traditional mainstays like pizza by substituting in low fat cheese and wholegrain crust, all within a limited budget. But officials are aware their efforts to improve nutrition will ultimately fail if their finicky customers at more than 100,000 institutions nationwide refuse to eat the new offerings.

For each food item, we look and say “can we afford this, is it good for them, does it meet all the new food requirements, those kind of things, but what’s really important is are they going to buy it if we put it out there,” said Serena Suthers, director of school food and nutrition services in Prince William County, located southwest of Washington, D.C.

The challenge is to win over students such as 8th-grader Terrell Worrell who only buys school lunch once a week. Worrell, one of the students attending the tasting, said he was surprised to find that he liked many of the foods he tried, especially the buffalo chicken and sweet potato swirl. In the past, Worrell and his friends have thought that as the meals have gotten healthier, the taste has failed to keep up.

“These examples that they’re thinking of putting in the school lunches, they seem like they’re trying to make them better because they’ve noticed that us kids don’t really like what they’ve been putting out so far,” said Worrell. The 13-year-old said he would be open to buying lunch more often if some of the items he enjoyed during the tasting were on the menu when he starts high school later this year. “It depends on how this turns out,” he said.

School meal programs feed nearly 32 million children each day, according to the USDA. In Iowa, nearly 400,000 students eat lunch at school every day — about 73% of all kids enrolled in participating state schools. An estimated 93,000 Iowa kids also eat breakfast at school.

The new nutrition guidelines were put in place at the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, starting with changes to the lunch program, to address the childhood obesity epidemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 17% of children and adolescents are considered obese. Since 1980, the obesity rate for this group has tripled.

The new standards require lunches each week to average from 550 to 650 calories for kids in elementary school, 600 to 700 calories for those in middle school and 750 to 850 calories for high school students. An example of a typical elementary school lunch before the new standards had cheese pizza, canned pineapple, tater tots and low fat chocolate milk. Today it would be replaced by whole wheat cheese pizza, baked sweet potato fries, grape tomatoes, applesauce and low fat milk.

The new school lunch regulations have been widely criticized by students, parents, lawmakers and administrators for being too costly and not providing enough flexibility. Opponents have argued the lunches are too small and lack enough calories for active children, especially high school students who are involved in sports and other activities.

“You could have a 70-pound freshman in high school on the same diet as a 250-pound high school football player and obviously both of them would need a different level of calories,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a vocal critic of the new guidelines. “The school lunch program was established in order to ensure that kids had a nutritious diet so they could learn and now (USDA is) using it to put them on a diet. I think they have overreached on this substantially.”

King said limiting the number of calories students consume could backfire by leaving kids hungry and more likely to consume weight-inducing junk food when they leave school.

Across the country, the foods offered to students during breakfast and lunch vary by school district. Each year, about 15% to 20% of the funding for the programs is used by the states and school districts to purchase items — ranging from unsweetened applesauce and low sodium canned beans to lean ground beef and turkey roasts — from a list of more than 180 items offered by the USDA. The remaining 80% to 85% goes to states and schools, giving them the flexibility to buy the items they need, such as a particular food popular in their region.

School districts are left to decide their own breakfast and lunch menus, as long as they comply with federal nutrition guidelines. To come up with a list of new recipes isn’t easy, and ideas are regularly mined from both traditional and unusual places.

Suthers said the school district holds a recipe contest among the staff to come up with suggestions. Some food items are taken directly from restaurant menus and adapted for use in the school. But it’s the input from students during the school day and at tastings like this one that have the most impact on shaping the course of foods that make their way into the cafeteria.

“(Children) just love the idea of having some say,” said Suthers. “So many things in kids’ lives, they don’t get to have much say in, so they love this event where they get to come and give opinions to adults.”

Those attending the tasting at the Prince William County high school were given a one-page form to evaluate whether or not they liked the food items they tried and provide any comments. During the two-hour event, students, parents and school staff were able to visit as many of the eight food stations as they wanted before sitting down at round tables in the cafeteria to eat. USDA officials, who were in attendance, regularly go to tasting events around the country put on by schools. They also visit cafeterias during the day to talk with kids and staff about the food and identify growing trends.

Increasingly, the foods offered by the USDA and put on the menu by schools are being shaped by what children eat and see at home. Government officials in charge of ordering and buying food for the school lunch program said as the popularity grows of Thai cuisine, intense flavors like buffalo wings and vegetarian options, kids have started asking for the items to be served in their cafeterias, too.

In addition, as parents instill a healthier lifestyle at home, kids are expecting similar characteristics in the food they eat away from the dinner table.

“Schoolchildren are becoming very sophisticated eaters,” said Laura Walter, a USDA official in charge of reviewing the foods offered to schools through the department’s Food and Nutrition Service. Walter said sometimes they get inundated with requests from school districts for certain products. The most recent delectable surprise: frozen broccoli. “Word of mouth is spreading through the grapevine. We want this,” she said.

Items do get dropped by USDA if they get too expensive to purchase or not enough schools demand them. Batter-breaded chicken and sloppy joes are some of the most recent casualties. In their place, new items are added to the menu. Later this year, USDA is considering letting schools purchase string cheese in a single serve pack, frozen spinach and fruit cups for grab and go lunches and breakfasts.

Casey Tran, a high school senior, said at the recent tasting the food he sampled was fresher and there were more flavors than he’s used to.

“It’s pretty good compared to the stuff we have currently. I wouldn’t throw it away,” said Tran, a 17-year-old who buys lunch every day. “I’ll eat it but it can’t compare to home cooking.”