Team Sets Out to Help Students Eat Smarter

Sandy Gooch looks out her Mulholland Drive window and sees opportunity. No longer in the grocery business, having sold her chain of Mrs. Gooch’s health food stores, she isn’t thinking about cash registers these days, but she’s still thinking about food.

Gooch has become the moving force behind a nonprofit group called the Healthy Meals Team, which is dedicated to improving local school lunch programs.

“They’re very open to it,” Gooch said, referring to the school officials responsible for food service in the Valley.

The idea is that school cafeterias should adopt more of a food-court look, emphasizing salad bars and juice bars and offering lower-fat, lower-sugar entrees. “Good nutrition has an effect on the mind and in-school performance,” Gooch said, “and it can have long-lasting and positive results in improving on-the-job performance.”

This month the team launched a pilot program at one Los Angeles Unified School District high school. That was Venice High, where Principal Bud Jacobs wanted to “set some new paths.”

Now the Healthy Meals Team is recruiting Valley parents, teachers, students and administrators to bring the idea to this area.

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Indeed, the pilot required getting the school district, unions, vendors and even businesses involved.

And as Warren Lund, the district’s food service director, pointed out, there is one key group that must sign on, and that may be a harder sell. “There’s a tough issue--what’ll kids eat,” he said.

In the pilot project, lessons on good nutrition were introduced into regular classes--not just via signs in the cafeteria. So far in the Valley, Monroe High has a project of this sort underway.

Also, Granada Hills High School has installed a “healthy start cart”--a sort of mobile food court devoted to healthy entrees. Similar offerings have been put into the cafeteria at Nobel Middle School in Northridge. Lund also reports most Valley school cafeterias now offer low-fat veggie sandwiches, low-fat muffins and low-fat chicken fajitas. Districtwide, beef has been replaced by turkey meat in the school cafeterias’ tacos, chili, spaghetti sauce and sloppy Joes.

* FYI: Valley parents interested in information about the Healthy Meals Team can call Sandy Gooch at (818) 905-9667. Valley teachers and administrators can call Wendy Lusky, East Valley nutrition services specialist in the food services branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District, at (213) 625-5536.