Freshening up school meals

School food is on just about everybody’s minds these days, including the first lady, Congress, farmers and celebrity chefs. Foundations are looking into the connections between the lunch line and healthcare costs.

Still, it’s up to the food service directors and the people (mostly women) who work in cafeterias to translate those ideas into meals served to children. And many “cafeteria ladies” have taken criticism for serving food that’s less than wonderful.

“We are partners in academic achievement,” Denise Ohm, president of the California School Nutrition Assn., told her colleagues at a meeting in August. And cafeteria workers are often feeding their own children as students in the schools, said David Binkle, deputy director of food services for Los Angeles Unified School District.

Cookbook author Georgeanne Brennan has come up with an approach to the way kids eat that includes lots of fresh food and has written a book with Ann M. Evans, “Cooking With California Food in K-12 Schools.”

The authors, Californians who acknowledge the extraordinary range of fresh produce available to cooks here, use a 6-5-4 formula to appeal to students and institutional cooking: six dishes (salads, soups, pastas, rice bowls, wraps and pizza) using five flavor profiles (African, Asian, European/Mediterranean, Latin American and Middle Eastern/Indian) and the four seasons of fresh food.

“Students today are experienced at eating in ethnic restaurants,” Brennan said. The recipes aim to take the sorts of foods young people already know and eat and find ways to add fresh local fruits and vegetables. That would also put money into local economies.

The ideas were worked out in a pilot project training the food services staff and feeding students in Davis, where Evans is a former mayor and a founding member of the Davis farmers market.

The book is available free as a download at https://www.ecoliteracy.org. Recipes are presented in family-sized versions, intended to be scaled up as needed. They include such dishes as whole wheat penne salad with tuna and capers, gumbo, ham and yam pizza and Thai cucumber salad.

The Center for Ecoliteracy, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that published the book and has been working on school food improvements for more than 15 years, brought together food service officials from about 40 districts at UC Davis to take a look at the book and talk about their progress and challenges. They came together in a place where they’d feel right at home: a university cafeteria.

The Cuarto cafeteria is a showplace of Davis’ efforts at sustainability. The soft-serve ice cream “with 50 ingredients” has been replaced with a local ice cream made from four or five ingredients, said Dani Lee, sustainability manager for the UC Davis dining services. Signs on the bowls of produce not only identify the farm of origin but also how far that is from campus. The tomato sauce was made from tomatoes grown on campus. Three of the five soda machines have been removed.

The cookbook has been downloaded more than 5,000 times in the two months since it was introduced. And several other meetings have been held around the state — in Fresno, Ukiah, Ventura, Santa Rosa and other cities — to train food service personnel to use it and cook more fresh food from scratch in schools, she said.

Many school districts, in California and elsewhere, moved away from on-site cooking as a way to ensure food safety and consistency and to save money. “It gradually turned into heat-and-serve,” Brennan said, adding that she has seen beautiful six-burner stoves in school kitchens being used to stack boxes. “It’s really quite heartbreaking.”

“Not too long ago, we did know how to feed children well,” said Zenobia Barlow, founder and executive director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, which has been working for more than a decade on improving school food and is working with the Tomkat Charitable Trust on several school and health projects.

Beginning in the 1980s, school food began to change to “what kids recognized,” which was, increasingly, fast food, as families ate more of their meals outside their homes, Ohm said.

The pendulum is swinging again, and districts are focusing on fresh produce. In Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, all the produce being purchased now is fresh — not canned or frozen, officials said. Districts are signing contracts with farmers and finding ways to take advantage of what’s grown locally.

“So how do you integrate that into your menus? Besides just putting broccoli and cherry tomatoes on the salad bar?” Brennan asked. That was one of the guiding principles of her book. Wraps would perhaps hold asparagus in the spring and sautéed onions and peppers in the fall.

“Isn’t it funny to think of simple as innovative?” asked Jamie Smith, food services manager in Santa Cruz. He said students will eat well-cooked fruits and vegetables. “If you do steamed broccoli and it’s the color of this floor, yeah, it’s hard to get them to eat it.”

The book has been published at a time when L.A. schools are trying an overhauled menu, absent of chicken nuggets and chocolate milk.

Challenges remain: “Twenty children a minute are served — and they’re 8 years old, 10 years old,” Binkle said. “We’re feeding children like they’re cattle. Go through as fast as they can. Hurry up, sit down.”

“This focus on changing the food in schools is happening everywhere,” Barlow said. “Everywhere I go people talk to me about this.”

mary.macvean@latimes.com