Tossing the Veggies

On Monday, Los Angeles Unified fed my son a pepperoni calzone for lunch.

On Thursday, they fed him a pepperoni pizza.

On Friday, they fed him chicken nuggets.

OK, I’m cheating a little. The school cafeteria also offered my 7-year-old some shredded lettuce to go with the chicken nuggets. The lettuce came in a plastic cup, which he dutifully accepted and then tossed into a waste can placed, shrewdly, just outside the exit door.

You might think the parade of nuggets and pizzas would leave Casey in a state of gustatory delight. It doesn’t. The menu may say “pizza,” but the food item actually delivered bears scant resemblance to what he regards as a pizza. It looks exactly like the steam-warmed, moist, mysterious square that any boomer will remember from his own youth.

In fact, now in the second grade, Casey has come to regard the cafeteria with some dread. Lunch has grown into an ordeal to be navigated as quickly as possible on your way to the playground, where, if you’re lucky, you just might score a chocolate chip cookie to replace the meal you didn’t eat.

And that presents us with our mystery of the week. How has it come to pass that, approaching the millennium, we feed schoolchildren the same gruel, in more or less the same way, as we did 30 years ago?

In other parts of our culture, relatively good food can now be found in abundance. It’s everywhere except in our schools. Step into an elementary school cafeteria in Los Angeles and, I swear, you will catch the same waft of steam and grease you did in your childhood. You will feel as if you’re caught in a time warp.

And it’s costing us. A UCLA study, soon to be published, has found that more than half of elementary school students in 14 of the city’s poorest neighborhoods are obese. School breakfasts and school lunches alone cannot be blamed for producing overweight children, of course, but a diet of calzones and chicken nuggets surely does not help.

Dr. Charlotte Neumann, who conducted the UCLA study, says she began by looking for malnutrition but instead found fat.

“Everything is working against kids today,” she says. “You have a school system that has reduced P.E. and physical activity. You have the drumbeat of advertising from fast food. And then you have school meals that are loaded in salt and fat.

“If you’ve witnessed lunch at a big elementary school, you will see something resembling a mob scene. It’s controlled chaos. The cafeteria is offering food that’s modeled after fast-food operations, and no control is exerted over the kids as to what they eat and what they don’t. No one is watching. No one is setting an example.”

On her visits to schools, Dr. Neumann came across a number of small enigmas. For example, there was the mystery of the missing lettuce and tomato on student hamburgers.

“Almost every time, the hamburgers given to the children were simply patties of beef on a bun. When we went into the teachers lounge, though, the hamburgers would have lettuce and tomato.

“Maybe the district fears the kids will pick out the lettuce and tomato and make a mess. In any event, they don’t give them the option. That’s too bad, because putting lettuce and tomato on a hamburger is a good way of sneaking a few vegetables into the diet.”

Out of curiosity, I went to my son’s school last week on hamburger day and watched the kids leave the cafeteria line. Sure enough, the hamburgers were plain. No lettuce, no tomato.

The mystery of school food only deepens when you consider how adult cafeterias have transformed themselves over the last decade.

Take a place like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority downtown. The MTA may not be able to build a subway, but it runs a pretty good cafeteria. You can pick and choose from any number of soups and salads, hot items and cold. We’re not talking Tuscan cuisine here. We are simply talking about decent, everyday food that’s healthy and tastes pretty good.

Why can’t L.A. Unified rise to that modest level? Most likely you can guess the answers.

There’s the sheer number of meals, for example. The district turns out 700,000 breakfasts and lunches a day. Who could manage that logistical burden and still pay attention to niceties like providing lettuce and tomato on hamburgers?

Food Arrives From Central Kitchens

And there are new villains these days. The system has changed from the ‘60s, when boomers went to school and everyone blamed the cafeteria cook. These days, cafeteria cooks no longer exist in the true sense. School food now arrives by truck from central kitchens, precooked. The calzones or chicken nuggets are offloaded from trucks, delivered to the kitchens and warmed on steam tables.

And from there it goes down the gullet of your dearest child, who decides it tastes like gooey cardboard, ditches it in the nearest can and goes off in search of a Snickers.

Carol Noelting is head of this operation for the district, and it’s hard not to have sympathy for her plight. For each free meal the district serves--and the number reaches several hundred thousand per day--it receives exactly $1.96 reimbursement from the federal government. To receive even this paltry amount, the district must hew to dozens of guidelines set by the state and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For example, an elementary school lunch must include 8 ounces of milk, and each student must be given a choice of whole milk, 2% or 1%. It must also provide 2 ounces of meat or “meat alternative.” If the alternative is peanut butter, that amount must be 4 tablespoons.

And so on. Break any of these regulations, and the district does not get reimbursed. Even worse, if the district delivers a free lunch and the kid does not take it, that’s too bad. No reimbursement.

Also, as Noelting says, there’s the perverse issue of time. “Each student is supposed to have 20 minutes to eat. At some elementary schools, you might have 1,200 students, and the cafeterias are small. So you are in the position of putting people through quite fast in order to give them time to eat,” she says.

As you can see, Noelting is a master of diplomatic understatement. Picture the scene she suggests: 1,200 of these little tykes lined up, waiting, until they reach the cafeteria, where they are forced through with cold-blooded efficiency so they can receive their dollop of gruel and choke it down in the required 20 minutes.

We’re talking near-Dickensian conditions here. Or, as Dr. Neumann described it, “controlled chaos.”

I asked Neumann what she would do if she administered the district’s food operation. She laughed. “Probably I would tear my hair out,” she said, and then made some obligatory suggestions like offering more nutritional education and having teachers or parents eat with the students.

Good enough suggestions, of course, but they do not address the fundamental problem. Which is size. As long as my son is fed by a system that pumps out 700,000 meals a day, he will be fed badly and suffer accordingly.

On Thursday of last week I witnessed the perfect antidote to the malaise of L.A. Unified’s food system. This antidote gets displayed every day at Peabody Charter School in Santa Barbara.

Four years ago the school decided it would no longer tolerate the dreary, depressing fare provided by the Santa Barbara district and took control of its kitchen.

Now the school chooses its own menus and cooks its own meals with a small staff. The results are dramatic. Breakfasts and lunches have been transformed into tasty celebrations. Vegetables abound, and the kids love it. I know, because I positioned myself next to the wastebasket and watched what they threw away. Nada.

The program was started by Laurel Lyle, one of the school moms who grew fed up with the old system and suggested to the principal that they could make the lunch room the emotional center of the school.

“Laurel kept talking about the potential, and at first I was thinking, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Never would I have predicted that the results would be this spectacular,” said Peabody Principal Pat Morales.

“You hear people saying that kids just want fast food and will reject other stuff. I think we have proven that’s not true. Kids want good food, and if you give it to them they will love it.”

Good Meals Hugely Popular With Pupils

You might be thinking that Peabody, being in Santa Barbara, caters to rich kids. It does not. Peabody serves one of the poorest constituencies in the city.

So successful has been the program that the school now serves twice as many meals as it did previously. And last year the kitchen turned a profit of $10,000.

Back at L.A. Unified, I asked Noelting if individual schools would be allowed to take control of their food programs. The answer, in a word, was no. Contractual problems, legal problems, liability problems, regulatory problems.

That answer should surprise no one. But education is entering a period of deep ferment, no? Why shouldn’t good food, which is essential for every bright, healthy kid, be part of that ferment?

I think it should be. And I think the question of ripping away the district’s monopoly over food should be raised again and again. All we have to lose is a few million precooked pepperoni calzones.