Oct. 25, 2011
America’s epidemic of child obesity is a health crisis in the making, which has prompted new concerns about what’s being served in the school cafeteria. The federal and state governments have instigated new nutritional standards for school lunches, an initiative that’s in line with county concerns as well: Here in Ulster County, 24 percent of kids are overweight, a statistic the Ulster County Department of Health hopes to reduce to five percent through its “Healthy Kids” initiative, which includes addressing the food served in schools.
Four years ago, in compliance with the requirements of the New York State Education Department, the Kingston City School District instituted a wellness policy that in part addresses the healthiness of its breakfast and lunch programs as well as snacks. The policy limits the amount of fat and added sugar in food that is served (although the way of ascertaining those amounts is confusing to some; see sidebar), which has definitely brought improvement. However, limited funds, the huge quantity of food that must be prepared, and other obstacles prevent the school district from cooking most meals from scratch using whole foods and fresh ingredients.
The policy, which is probably typical of other school district wellness policies in the county—it was modeled after the sample policy of the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity, which is an advocate of federal standards and requirements—requires all the food and beverages sold or served in the schools to meet the nutrition recommendations of the federal U.S. Dietary Guidelines. It requires breakfasts and lunches to include a variety of fruits and vegetables, allows only low-fat and fat-free milk to be served, and specifies that half of the grains served are whole grain.
No more than 35 percent of the calories of a food served can come from fat, and no more than 10 percent of the calories of a food can be derived from a combination of saturated and trans fats. In addition, no more than 35 percent of a food’s weight can be derived from added sugars (which, to those of us seeking to limit our sugar intake on the heels of cutting-edge scientific research indicating sugar may be quite harmful, seems like a pretty liberal limitation).
The KSD no longer sells soda in school vending machines, and the policy bans any kind of marketing by the manufacturers of junk food. Previously, soda was sold only after school, said Ed Carelli, the KSD’s food service director. Beverages in the vending machines and cafeterias now consist of 100 percent juices, water, fruit slushies, and at the high school, diet iced tea. While some students still bring soda from home, “our kids are beginning to accept what’s offered,” he said.
To meet the Wellness Policy requirement that half of the grains served are whole grain, whole-wheat bread is a choice at every meal. Of the five food components offered at lunch—students can choose three for each meal–two are for fruits and vegetables (the others are milk, bread, and protein). However, some of the equivalents are sweetened, such as applesauce.
One criticism of the National School Lunch Program, to which the KSD subscribes, is that French fries qualify as a vegetable, along with other potato products, and fulfill that requirement rather too often. Under prodding from the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had planned to authorize a rule limiting the number of potato servings served in schools to one cup each week (and none for breakfast) starting in the 2011-2012 school year. However, the Senate in effect nullified the change by passing an amendment proposed by Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Senator Mark Udall, D-Col., prohibiting the Agriculture Department from enforcing any limit whatsoever—legislation indicating the effectiveness of lobbying by The National Potato Council.
A few items served are locally sourced. Carelli noted the KSD gets its apples from New Paltz-based orchard Red Barn and also buys its milk from a local dairy, Boice’s. Carelli, who has been with the school district for 15 years and is a graduate of the Culinary Institute, probably would be the first to agree that it’d be great to serve more locally sourced food and meals cooked from scratch, but he pointed out several obstacles that prevent this.
The first is sheer scale: Carelli’s department, consisting of 90 employees, purchases, plans, and prepares breakfasts and lunches for an average of 3,800 lunches per day and 1,500 breakfasts per day, out of a total school population of approximately 7,000, which is spread among 14 buildings. All the food is stored at a single facility at Bailey Middle School, which includes a central kitchen where food for the middle and elementary schools is prepared, then shipped by truck to the schools (the hot entrees are reheated in convection ovens in each school’s “finishing kitchen”). Ingredients are shipped to the high school, where most of the food is prepared in a kitchen at the facility.
Food for the KSD is 95 percent subsidized by the federal government and five percent by the state, which means the district is required to bid on its food suppliers and select the lowest bid, provided the quality of the food meets the USDA standards. Kingston, along with most if not all of the county’s other school districts, participates in cooperative bidding with BOCES. Carelli said a lot of the vegetables are canned or frozen—although salads are served at the high school—because “fresh costs us more, and it requires more labor to prepare.”
“We have to go by price, since the money comes from everyone’s taxes,” Carelli said. “The food locally grown should be cheaper coming from here not Washington State, but it isn’t always. We’re trying to work with local farmers to help us out.” Furthermore, storage space is limited, and if a local farmer wanted to supply the district, not only would he or she have to bid competitively but also produce sufficient quantities and do daily deliveries. Plus, except for the fall, fresh produce from local farms simply isn’t available during the school year, Carelli noted.
Furthermore, Carelli said he needs to devise menus that the kids will like; unfortunately, some of the healthier items that are served aren’t very popular. Recently, when he had to go through the garbage looking for a retainer a student had lost, he discovered “whole oranges and apples thrown out. They don’t want to peel it, or take the time.” (In contrast, he said applesauce flies off the shelf.)
New proposed federal guidelines, which could take effect next year, require school districts to increase the size of their fruit and vegetable portions from four ounces to eight. Carelli said while there might be a slight increased in the government reimbursement, most of the extra cost will be absorbed by the district. And then there’s the problem that “if a kid isn’t eating a quarter cup of broccoli, I don’t know how he’s going to eat a cup of broccoli. It’ll end up in the garbage.” (He said the loose policy now is to allow some extra portions of healthy ingredients if the children request it.)
One of the district’s food suppliers is the government, which accounts for approximately $150,000 worth of food a year–approximately 15 percent of the total supply. The government purchases food items, ranging from pork to catfish to beef to beans, when there are surpluses to help sustain the price, re-distributing it to schools and other nonprofit organizations. Carelli, who makes his government orders on-line once a month, said part of his challenge is to take these surplus items “and turn it into food kids will eat.”
Some of that government food is delivered to government-approved processors. For example, 40,000 pounds of mozzarella cheese ordered by the district would be sent to the processor Tony’s Pizza, which prepares all the pizza served in the KSD. Another government processor is Tyson’s, which sells various grades of poultry. The KSD can’t afford “100 percent muscle meat,” such as chicken breasts, so instead purchases the “shaped” product from Tyson’s—chicken meat that’s been chopped up, breaded and shaped into nuggets. Ditto for fresh eggs; although they are served occasionally at the high school, for example in egg salad, a liquid product is usually used. Burgers are bought from a processor, so they only have to be heated up. Other staples are American cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Carelli said the KSD does make a few of the meals on the menu. It prepares items such as chili, nachos and cheese, and turkey nuggets and gravy on Thursdays in its central kitchen.
Prior to the wellness policy, he said the KSD benefited from a revenue stream resulting from the now-banned snacks. The money was used to purchase replacement trucks and help maintain equipment. But when the school wellness program went into effect, the budget took a hit. “It hurt sales very much. If we sell you a bag of potato chips, it’d be a 100 percent markup. We’d take that money and put it in our program and wouldn’t have to raise the price of our school lunches.”
Almost half of the breakfasts and lunches served at the three schools are free or reduced, a number that’s increased from 43 percent to 46 percent in two years due to the weak economy. Lunch costs $2.30 for students who pay the full amount—a ten-cent increase over the price a year ago–and will increase by the same amount next year, since the government is requiring the districts to up prices, said Carelli. Since the reimbursement for students getting lunch for free is $3—the reduced-lunch reimbursement for other students is $2.75—there was a subsidy for the paying kids, who didn’t have to pay the full amount.
Because it no longer makes money from snacks, Carelli said the food program “now has to stand on its own two feet with the free and reduced meals, which it wasn’t able to do. We don’t have revenues coming in to pay for the program. And this is the first year the government said the price of the meals had to go up.” Furthermore, some of the items required by the wellness policy cost more, putting the squeeze on the district’s budget.
Whether the improvements are resulting in better health for Kingston school kids will likely soon be a matter of debate. Recent research by scientists points to Americans’ high consumption of carbohydrates, rather than fat, as the culprit in the obesity crisis, suggesting the prevalence of potatoes and other starches on school menus might be the real culprit.
Scientists tested the Atkins diet–previously the source of ridicule by the medical establishment–which prohibits the consumption of bread, rice, potatoes and other carbohydrates but lets people eat as much protein and fat as they like. The theory is that fat and protein satiate people, while carbohydrates makes them hungrier, raises insulin levels, and lowers blood sugar. The studies seem to bear out the theory. For example, one study at Mount Sinai Medical Center found that overweight teenagers who were put on the Atkins diet lost twice as much as those on a low-fat diet—even though they ate more than 700 more calories a day.
So the USDA’s emphasis on lowering fat in kids’ school meals and allowing plenty of starchy vegetables might soon be challenged. But judging from the recent Congressional action, it will be difficult to dislodge the ubiquitous potato, not to mention all those items that contain corn syrup.
Last Monday, October 24, was National Food Day, and the Healthy Afterschool Snack Food Committee, part of the Healthy Kids for Kingston project, which is being funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, used the occasion to draw people’s attention to what it considers a flaw in the KSD’s School Wellness Policy: limiting the amount of fat and added sugar served in snacks in terms of percentages.
“We’re trying to get them to revamp it,” said Laurie Deutsch Mozian, project coordinator of the Community Heart Health Coalition of Ulster County and the committee chair. “It requires the consumer to have information they don’t have,” since labels on food don’t mention how much added sugar there is, she said. So on Monday, members of the committee planned to be at the Forsyth Nature Center for an hour and a half in the morning and at Shoprite in the Town of Ulster all day to see if shoppers, in evaluating a food label, could say whether the item conformed to the wellness policy.
Mozian’s committee is suggesting the policy be replaced by an alternative, based on Choose Something, which was developed by the New York State School Nutritional Association and is more user friendly, she said.
Carelli defended the policy, noting that the KSD followed the guidance of the New York State Education Department to use the model from the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity. (He noted that a ruling to make that wellness policy law is due to be finalized next year, when it will become federal law.) He said that by dividing the weight of the sugar or fat listed on the nutritional label—a process that he acknowledged required a calculator–one could easily figure out if the snack item met the standard.
Acccording to Mozian, the committee also discovered that 40 percent of the snacks sold in the school vending machines are out of compliance with the wellness policy. (Carelli said the vending machines in school cafeterias do comply and speculated Mozian was referring to school vending machines located elsewhere, such as in the high school’s Field House.) Since most kids buy snacks off campus, she said her group plans to investigate the healthiness of food served from establishments in proximity to the high school.
Getting kids to make good eating choices is a “sticky wicket,” she said. “It’s about making choices all day long about what you eat.” She said three surveys, conducted at the high school, a middle school, and elementary school, by high school seniors participating in the New Visions BOCES program revealed that kids do have a sense of what’s good for them. Whether they’ll choose an apple over a candy bar is a different matter entirely.