Trimming the Fat, Growing Good Eating Habits
By Kyle Craig

Schools face many challenges when delivering a school meal service to their students.  Giving kids a healthy and affordable meal that they will enjoy eating is not easy. If you take a look at the numbers, it becomes alarming how serious the problem is. In the last 30 years, childhood obesity has tripled and, with it, so has the prevalence of type two diabetes, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, as well as physical and social problems. While much of the problem starts at home, schools share a responsibility. When a school allows a student to purchase French fries and a soft drink for lunch, they are not promoting healthy eating habits or delivering “good food.”
  
How can you give picky kids a healthy meal and keep them happy?

“Kids today come from a culture of chicken nuggets and pizza,” said Brian Albertson of SLA Management. “It’s a delicate balance of giving creative food options within the food groups.” 

School leaders understand this challenge, but that doesn’t make solving it easy.

“I do feel a great responsibility to offer healthy options for our students,” says Calvary Christian School’s Lee Ann Tipton. “Of course they would eat chicken fingers and French fries every day if we would offer that; we need to help our students, not hurt them, in this regard.”
 
Having an outside food vendor allows schools to accomplish creative food options without sacrificing quality.

“There is no way we could offer the variety of options. An outside service has chefs, dieticians, and menu planners on their staff,” said Tipton. 

Having healthy food that kids eat is great, but that is not the only concern. 

“The biggest change was a relief of not having to worry about food quality or food liability for food-borne disease,” said Carolyn Baldwin at All Saints Academy. “We are educators and could not provide nearly the same quality product. We let them be the food experts.”
 
Running your own school lunch program can be a heavy and costly burden. Schools like All Saints Academy and Calvary Christian School now provide a better product for less money, but consider more than just the food costs. What about the time and manpower needed to provide food?

“Some schools break even, and most lose money,” Albertson said. “Tens and tens of thousands of dollars of valuable administrative time can be devoted to managing a school lunch program.” 
 
In the competitive private school arena, your school’s lunch program speaks volumes about who you are as a school. Every day, students depend on what they eat to keep them healthy, happy, and physically and mentally strong. Providing “good food” that creates positive eating habits is a responsibility every school should take seriously. Your students are your most valuable resource, so keep them healthy and happy.

Kyle Craig is an Emmy and AP award-winning journalist who currently works in the health and fitness industry.    

Get Out and Garden
Berkeley, California, has become a model for how to make schools more sustainable. Thanks to Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard Project at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, the idea that food can go from farm to table and never leave campus is becoming reality. Sixth through eighth grade students use their school's organic garden as a centerpiece for learning not only about planting and harvesting, cooking and eating, but also biology, ecology, nutrition, and sustainability.

Students plant, grow, tend, cook and eat food that they grow in their school garden. Children are introduced to new varieties of vegetables, and though some might be hesitant at trying something new, the program has shown that children are much more likely to eat food that they have helped grow. This program has become so successful that many schools around the country now have their own gardens.
Source: Sustainable Table

Linking the Classroom and the Cafeteria
Health teachers and the school cafeteria manager can jointly sponsor an art/essay contest to get students thinking about how school meals feed body and mind and contribute to overall good nutrition, health, energy, and learning. The theme might be “The Power of Choice.” Teachers can give extra credit, and the cafeteria manager can display entries in the cafeteria and hallways, and give an appropriate prize.
Source: www.safehealthyschools.org


Reduce Waste with “Tap and Stack”
Many schools don’t have the money to use reusable trays and therefore are forced to use polystyrene trays. Our school (approximately 750 students) generates about 15 bags of garbage every day and, by volume, is probably the school’s largest source of waste.

If students tapped the food off of their trays and neatly stacked the trays prior to dumping them in the trash, this would greatly reduce the volume of trash generated.

Some schools have reduced their cafeteria’s waste volume by almost 50%. It’s possible that the waste volume can be reduced to the point that the school can reduce their dumpster size and/or pickup frequency, saving money.
Source: www.getenergysmart.com