School Food Brain Dump Day 2: Where does it come from?

One of the beautiful moments my membership in certain trade associations affords me, is to sit right next to representatives of companies I wholeheartedly dislike, listening to their side of the story. The date is late 2009, and I am taking a food science and nutrition research class, perched between a representative from Kraft Foods and ConAgra Foods. “Honestly,” one says, “we’re really not in the business of making you healthy. That’s a useful side effect. We’re in the business of not making you sick.”

Bridgett, my teacher friend, says the same. “School lunches,” she admits, ” are a bit like McDonalds. Sure, it’s not making you healthier to eat that stuff, but it’s fast, convenient, and it has so many checks and balances we can be sure we won’t get food poisoning from it or eat something other than what they tell us they put in there.”

After eating in one school, late 2008 or so, I got curious. Where does the stuff come from. That day’s lunch menu consisted of six “chicken nuggets”, two tubs of BBQ  sauce, cherry or banana flavored milk, an apple, and a small portion of French fries.

The chicken nuggets, according to the box I picked up in the kitchen area, are 234 calories per five. 215 calories from fat. Produced in California. Produced, not grown. A quick call later, some insults hurled at me, which – after asking for the food scientist by name and identifying myself as a fellow trade organization member (there’s a reason I keep the directory they send me next to my desk) – subsided, I had a little more complete picture.

Today's "free range" chicken farms look like this. Two people can operate this whole plant, producing 35,000 chickens every day.

The chickens for lunches like this are raised in Owensboro, Ky. Cargill, the owner of said chicken, leases husbandry operations to local farms, of which there are 108 in the Owensboro area alone. Each and every one a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), cranking out from 20,000 to many more in one “pass”. Operators are given contracts by Cargill only for the next pass, which leads to fierce competition and lots of corner cutting. And, of course, waste. In Arkansas, for example, chicken feed lots produce an amount of waste daily that is comparable to that of eight million humans.

Chickens are then killed, flash frozen, and shipped to California’s Central Valley and other operations around the United States. There, breasts and thighs are removed and packaged separately, while less desirable bits are scraped off, boiled, seasoned, formed into patties, breaded, and flash-fried for sale as chicken nuggets.

Luckily, United States law at least prohibits the use of bone meal, a common ingredient in European Nuggets.

The frozen nuggets are sent to fulfillment centers in Texas, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Kentucky, from where they are delivered to local distribution hubs and into kitchens.

Quite the travel for one chicken, isn’t it?

French Fries aren’t much better. Potatoes are harvested in Ohio and Maine, sent to New York state for processing, delivered to the same distribution and fulfillment centers, and ultimately into our schools.

When questioned about the benefit of such a voyage, answers range from pricing to food safety. “We have strict regulations what needs to be in a school lunch,” says the Vice Principal of one school I spoke to, “those boxes come pre-portioned and pre-labeled for nutritional value. We just have to serve them and avoid any potential lawsuit by parents.”

True. The USDA guidelines state clearly what has to be in our children’s school lunches. What it doesn’t do a good job of, is tell producers what can not be in them. Like excessive amounts of artificial coloring, sugar, stabilizers, high fructose corn syrup, or other non-natural ingredients.

In fact, the USDA guidelines simply restrict calories while requiring servings of “grains”, “vegetables”, “protein”, or “milk”. Serving 6 oz of milk not to exceed 105 calories can be done two ways – serve whole milk and meet those numbers via natural fats and sugars while providing vitamins, essential minerals, and 209 grams of dietary fiber, or serve “processed” milk, which reduces the natural fat content and removes most dietary fiber and essential minerals, adding 94 calories from sugar. The rest is artificial coloring and flavor enhancers, tricky little combinations of nutritionally completely empty compounds creating the illusion of strawberry (or, better, what children think is strawberry) taste.

The same goes for chicken nuggets. 234 calories, over 200 of which come from fat. The rest is breading, glue, and a little sugar mixed in for good measure. Chicken, real chicken, could fit this bill as well. Only here our calories wouldn’t come from breading and fat alone.

After taking a trip around the country and back, empty calories and fat-laden snack food feeds our children every day. Setting aside the questions of carbon footprint and poor animal husbandry in CAFO units, the whole idea should shock anyone whose idea of “eating” includes actual nutrition.

One solution could be to move from national purveyors to local producers. This doesn’t have to happen in one huge crushing “revolution” as Oliver wants us to (though it would be nice, Britain’s food worries are more related to convenience than large scale producers keeping a stranglehold on local and national politicians, essentially mandating the use of Cargill, ConAgra, and others. That’s a fight Oliver hasn’t encountered, yet.), small steps would do just fine for 2010.

The Dallas Independent School District is the 12th biggest in the nation, educating over 160,000 students from diverse backgrounds. Adjusting for non-serving schools, students bringing in their own meals (a practice frowned up in most Dallas schools, something to talk about tomorrow), that’s 120,000 meals served daily. Quite a lot of money, every day, shipped outside of the county, state, sometimes even country.

Keeping parts or all of those food productions local would not only create a more diverse food landscape, enforce accountability, and reduce carbon footprints, it would also spur local economies, create local jobs, and keep taxes “in house”.

Instead of satisfying the USDA’s “two servings of vegetables” via a small heap of french fries, Dallas’ schools would be free to negotiate the purchase of seasonal greens, from beans to broccoli, corn to cauliflower.

Do we REALLY want this to be the daily meal for our children?

To get there, we need to help educate the men and women serving lunches. We need to create lists of local producers and production volume, give schools the freedom to buy locally, parents the transparency to see where things come from and where they’re going, and we need to take the fight to our elected officials, ensuring they understand that, no matter how powerful the large food producers are, nothing compares to the wrath of parents wanting their children to be fed properly.

We need to take the fight to the homes. I have offered, and have been taken up on this a few dozen times, to come into schools and houses to showcase easy, fast, meals that do not come from a bag and don’t cost more than the bag. I am only one guy, but five chefs in every city can make the difference.

As I said in my intro post, I believe it’s time for us, the chefs and food service professionals, the cooks, the bakers, to enter this discussion. No one knows better how to control food cost while creating great meals than a chef. USDA and school superintendents might know a lot about money and nutrition, I know better than either one how to translate this into a healthy meal.

There’s good news. The USDA recently published a theory paper titled “bringing small farms and schools together” (PDF). Like every other idea, this one is not worth the electrons used to distribute it until it finds traction and a voice. And that voice can not be Jamie Oliver, me, or anyone else alone. You, we, are this voice. Talk to your principal. Schedule a meeting. Call me and I’ll happily listen in and offer my small part to this movement. We can do it, we can make America’s schools healthier. The foundation is here, now all we need to do is take the building blocks, learn from the past, and build the house. It’s not that hard, I promise.

Circling back to yesterday, bless Jamie Oliver for opening more eyes and hearts to this issue. You, I, we have said this for years. Now it’s time to ride, let’s do it.