Taking a Closer Look at School Lunches
Posted by Margie Fleming Glennon on Thursday, October 15, 2009
The National School Lunch Program provides essential nutrition to 30 million children across the country every day, including 40,000 in the District of Columbia. Lately, the news has been filled with stories about school meals lacking adequate nutrition and containing many food additives, preservatives, and high fructose corn syrup as well as schools lacking the equipment they need to prepare meals with fresh ingredients. For all these reasons, Share Our Strength is helping some of Washington D.C.’s finest chefs go back to school to help us learn how to make a better, tastier school meal.
White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass, a prominent proponent of making school lunches more nutritious, participated at the Hyde Leadership Public Charter School’s celebration of National School Lunch Week in Washington yesterday. With the support of Share Our Strength, Kass has asked about a dozen area chefs to participate in “learning tours,” in which they visit school cafeterias across DC, have lunch with the children, and learn first-hand from both the kids and school personnel about the challenges of providing healthy school lunches.
A few schools have demonstrated that it is possible to make healthy lunches from scratch without exceeding the limits of the federal school lunch reimbursement rates. We hope that more chefs will connect with schools in their communities so that we can begin to drive up the numbers of schools capable of reaching this important goal.
We hope to share with you, in the coming days, some of the chefs’ reactions and lessons learned from the tours. But we’re interested in hearing your stories about how school meals can be improved. Is it unrealistic to expect school meals to be economical and healthy?
October 15, 2009 | | Tags: sam kass, school lunch, white house
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