Mexican Meals Fail Student Taste Test in Oak Park : Menus: When burritos or tacos are served, sales plunge at 2 elementary school cafeterias. The contract will be rebid.

Burgers, si! Burritos, no!

When it comes to lunch, the kids of the Oak Park Unified School District are saying gracias pero no to Mexican food. Instead, they are voting with their stomachs for such blander fare as hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets, said food services director Virginia Leigh.

“Mexican food of any kind is not popular in this district,” Leigh told members of the Oak Park school board this week.

Lunch sales at the district’s two elementary schools plunge by about one-third whenever Mexican items such as tacos, burritos, nachos, or enchiladas are on the menu, Leigh said.

Dismayed by the Mexican meal mystery and other complaints, board members said they will rebid the contract for school lunches this summer.

“My child used to enjoy eating at the cafeteria at Brookside (Elementary),” board President Wayne Blasman said. “He would rather die than eat at the cafeteria now. The food stinks.”

Assistant Supt. Stan Mantooth said that in a new contract the district will insist on the ability to modify lunch menus and eliminate Poor-selling items.

Under the current contract, with the Illinois-based company Preferred Meal Systems, menus are set weeks in advance and cannot be changed.

“We look at the menu and can black out the whole month,” complained Jeri Fox, president of Brookside’s Parent-Teacher Assn.

Leigh said only about one-fifth of all students at the district’s two elementary schools buy a $2 lunch, which are prepared at Preferred Meal Systems’ plant in Chicago and trucked, frozen, to California.

The district stopped preparing its own meals to cut costs.

By financial measures, the program is more of a success. After losing $20,000 last year, the lunch program will lose no more than $2,000 and could break even this year, Mantooth said.

Preferred Meal Systems was chosen after board members conducted a taste-test of lunches last year. Company officials could not be reached Wednesday.

“I don’t think the quality is any different, more or less, than if we had a central kitchen doing the same thing,” Leigh said.

She said she was surprised by the cool reception given the spicy Mexican fare. “Southern California is a place you would expect to find people who like that,” Leigh said, adding that Oak Park’s nonLatino residents just may not be used to Mexican cooking.

The eastern Ventura County community is predominantly Anglo and has a small Latino population. At Oak Hills Elementary, for example, Asian students outnumber Latinos nearly 4 to 1.

“I think there’s some ethnic taste buds being offended,” she said. “It may be something that the family perceives as unhealthy food. It may be that beans are not served at home.”

Leigh noted that students at the middle school and high school have rejected Mexican dishes offered by vendors other than Preferred Meal Systems as well.

El Pollo Loco, a fast-food chain, had been selling enchiladas, taquitos and burritos at the two secondary schools. But Leigh said that after a initial spurt of popularity, sales fell and the district stopped buying from the chain.

Leigh said she will send a survey to Oak Park families this week asking what they would like to see--or avoid--on next year’s lunch menus.

At least, she said, lunch sales should be up today. The menu features the kids’ all-time favorite: pizza.