Margaret Ellen Kalmanowicz has got her hands full. She’s the director of both transportation and food service for Kent County schools. Transportation is sorted now, but food service is ongoing. In an effort to improve the school food, Kalmanowicz got a fresh fruit and vegetable grant for two schools, Rock Hall and Garnet. Similar to a farm-to-school program, which more directly connects local growers to school breakfast and lunch programs, it tries to reintroduce real food to kids who were not only raised on Cheetos and chicken nuggets, but have come to expect those things in school, too.
“We had [the fresh food grant] last year too,” says Kalmanowicz. “Every day through fall and spring they have a sampling of different fruits and vegetables.” Kalmanowicz also got a Team Nutrition grant for Worton and Millington Elementary schools, which offers those kids a fruit and vegetable taste-testing one day each week for a year. This grant also requires physical activity and nutritional education for the kids.
The taste testing has gone ‘extremely well.’ In addition Kent County’s schools, like others across the nation, have begun to introduce whole grains in place of white flour for breading, pancakes, etc, but it’s a tough sell among a lot of the kids. And it’s small potatoes nutritionally speaking, but it‘s a beginning.
For anyone who has been horrified by the school menus, and wondered why, when something like 60% of our public school children eat both breakfast and lunch in school – and childhood obesity is increasing exponentially — the menus are so heavily carb-based, one has to look to a software program called NutriKids. Nutrikids is a menu-planning program produced by the LunchByte Systems Company in Rochester, NY, and is the food-planning tool used ‘in over 8,000 schools districts in all 50 states’ according to its website. Interestingly, one of its four partnerships and associations’ listed on the website is Kellogg’s NuCrew program, Kellogg being the grain and processed food people. Presumably there are nutritionists who plan the menus on this software and vet the balances and the calorie counts – I have not yet dug a little further down to find out who they are, but will – but it doesn’t look like it.
For Kalmanowicz there’s the ‘will the kids eat it?’ issue. Waste at any time, but especially now, is anathema. There’s also the perpetual question of economics. And the logistics – fresh fruits and vegetables in late winter, during what some Native Americans dubbed ‘hunger moon’ from local producers? Tough. But if we’re going to seriously address the issue of our nation’s health, we need to make healthy changes in school food.
On Thursday at 7:30 PM, Prince Theatre, The Chestertown Spy is sponsoring a showing of Food, Inc, which addresses some of these issues. Tickets for a suggested donation — a fundraiser for Colchester CSA – are available at the door.
Wade Nutrition says
Watch out for school lunches that have become high in fat and refined carbohydrates. Wade Nutrition