School Food: Texas Gets It

As it turned out, a lot of the supposedly amazing academic improvements in Texas schools were more mirage than miracle, the result of officials manipulating numbers instead of improving education.

The newest Texas school reform, though, has real potential for helping kids. Instead of taking halfway and sometimes meaningless measures to improve nutrition and combat childhood obesity, the state’s Department of Agriculture has drawn up common-sense rules for food in all public schools.

Sure, many schools across the country recently banned soda on campus -- only to find that some of the juice drinks replacing pop had even more sugar and calories, with precious little more nutrition. Texas is reaching beyond the vending machines, demanding that cafeterias switch to lower-fat ways of cooking, dramatically cut back trans fats and prohibit teachers from doling out candy for good behavior. Cafeterias also must offer more fruits and vegetables -- fresh, whenever possible.

Maybe the most likable aspect of the rules, though, is their understanding of how kids eat. Texas isn’t banning French fries or potato chips but requires small servings. Same for juice drinks. That’s a good lesson in moderate eating and a healthful antidote to fast-food joints. McDonald’s may have renounced “supersizing,” but that merely puts its fries at six ounces instead of seven.

Of course, Texas isn’t exactly the Calhoun School. That elite private school on New York’s West Side hired a chef from the French Culinary Institute to turn its meals into sophisticated, high-nutrition cuisine.

Robert “Chef Bobo” Surles gets the children involved with cooking and nutrition and serves them mostly organic foods with an emphasis on vegetables -- such as rutabaga “fries” (baked, of course). Gag them with root vegetables? The kids reportedly love it, along with the cauliflower soup. And the lunch budget is only $3 per meal, just a bit more than public school meals.

Public schools would be hard put to fully mimic Calhoun’s recipe for feeding children, but they can learn from schools as small as Calhoun and states as big as Texas that refuse to let a fast-food culture hijack kids’ health without a fight.

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For Chef Bobo’s rutabaga fries and cauliflower soup recipes, go to www.calhoun.org/ recipes.htm.