Conscious Choice: The Trouble with Chicago School Lunches

January 2003

The Trouble with Chicago School Lunches

by Leah Samuel

It’s a bright, warm fall day at Chicago’s New Dawes elementary school and the high, white ceiling of the lunchroom seems barely able to contain the laughing, teasing and gossiping of bright-eyed children.

"Hello, and welcome," offers lunchroom manager Bridgette Mirabella, smiling as she oversees her team of neat, efficient and fast-moving lunchroom workers hustling silver pans of food out of an immaculate, organized kitchen and under the sneeze guards.

At the same time, teachers shepherd wiggly, giggly lines of boys and girls from their classrooms, past the Coca-Cola machine next to the lunchroom door. Principal Carol Lovely explains that the machine is there for the convenience of teachers and to raise cash for small expenses. The students, she said, are not allowed to buy soda from the machine. "We have a sign that says‘Teachers Only,’ and the kids are good."

Uniformed lunchroom workers collect lunch tickets and serve up the day’s meal of fish nuggets, biscuits, peas and carrots, an orange or apple, and a choice of whole, skim or chocolate milk.

It’s all a well-choreographed dance, which it has to be, if hundreds of children are to be served. Each classroom of children gets in, gets fed, and gets out — all within half an hour. It’s a short time, and a lot of food does not get eaten. For the kids, the teachers and the lunchroom workers, this is the routine.

But today their routine has a little interference. For the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), this was a special day — one that they put together just for us. No stranger to controversy — what with low test scores and other school embarrassments hitting the media — the CPS public-relations team took no chances. When they learned we were doing a story on school lunches, they sent us to New Dawes, a shiny new school with a shiny new lunchroom.

There to greet us was a representative from Chartwells/Thompson, the vendor that supplies lunches to the school. Insisting on not being identified, he explained that, while he doesn’t come to the school every day, today he is here as "moral support" for lunchroom manager Mirabella, since "a magazine was coming."

As the kids go through the lunch line, the Chartwells/Thompson rep eagerly points out that today the kids have another option besides fish nuggets — a chef salad with sliced turkey. He says that these are for "kids who are vegetarian or who otherwise don’t want the fish entrée."

No, you’re right. Turkey is not a vegetable, but more on that later.

After a while, the salads run out and peanut-butter-and-jelly bars take their place. These things are like a tart, with a sort of crust holding the pb&j.

Feeding Developing Bodies

Sitting at long tables, the children take advantage of their lunchtime to, yes, eat — but mostly to talk and laugh out loud. This chitchat comes in between — or instead of — taking bites of food. This is precisely the crux of the matter: if the kids don’t eat, their little brains don’t develop.

Scores of scientific studies corroborate that kids’ behavior, concentration, and intelligence are inextricably linked to the nutrients they take in and, hence, the food they eat. So it’s imperative to not only see that the kids eat but also to make sure they’re eating the right food.

According to many experts, what the CPS serves its students for lunch doesn’t support the unique nutritional needs of growing children...for many reasons.

LaDonna Redmond is alarmed by the current state of Chicago’s school lunches. Redmond is the president of the Chicago-based Institute for Community Resource Development, an organization that deals with nutrition and food-access issues in the city’s Austin neighborhood. "Four kids have had strokes and died in the Austin community and two have had heart attacks," she said. "And these are children under 12. Just the idea of children having these kinds of adult problems is discouraging."

The Institute, along with the Loyola University School of Nursing, is undertaking a project that looks at the impact of school lunches on the health of children in the neighborhood. "If the most calories come from school, that’s where we need to intervene," Redmond said. "The school diet is based on the food pyramid, which means that if there is a child in the school who cannot eat this traditional food, this child will not be well served."

What’s for Lunch

The issues surrounding what Chicago serves for lunch are manifold. For one, parents are distressed by studies linking meat consumption to aggressive behavior in children and encouraged by studies suggesting more plant-based foods will reduce chances of cancer and other illnesses. Moreover, there’s question as to whether bovine growth hormone, given to cows to hasten their growth and boost milk production, is passed along to humans when they ingest milk, cheese and other dairy products from these treated animals. How this might affect the small bodies of growing kids who generally drink lots of milk is still a matter of speculation.

Also, the widespread and serious problem of lactose intolerance has mobilized groups objecting to the extensive use of dairy in school lunches. Lactose intolerance, which is a sensitivity to the sugar component in dairy products, causes symptoms such as indigestion, bloating and diarrhea, which are often debilitating.

Last fall, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) proclaimed that requiring dairy in schools is discriminatory because of the disproportionate number of African-Americans who are lactose intolerant. PCRM sent a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) demanding that soymilk and other dairy substitutes be approved for use in the school lunch program saying, "The majority of African, Hispanic, Native, and Asian Americans are lactose intolerant. A normal condition, lactose intolerance starts in childhood and leads to a variety of digestive symptoms after drinking milk."

PCRM included a number of other objections to cow’s milk. "In the 1940s, no one knew about the various health problems associated with cow’s milk such as asthma, allergies, and increased risk of heart disease and some cancers, particularly prostate cancer. No one took into account the religious restrictions some cultures have regarding milk, or the philosophical objection some children have to consuming animal products. And, certainly, no one knew how popular soy milk would become. It’s time the USDA gave America’s kids the healthy choices they need."

Mobilizing for Change

As a result of these concerns, an increasing number of families are changing their thinking and their eating. For many families it has become crucial to switch to diets with less or no meat, fewer processed foods and fresher, organically grown fruits and vegetables. Parents are turning their attention to the food served in the nation’s school cafeterias.

Barbara Gates, a mother of a 6-and 9-year-old, is the director of Project Healthy Beginnings, a California-based advocacy organization working to bring more vegetarian and vegan options to school lunches. "If you talk to parents, both vegan and non-vegan, there is a general dissatisfaction with lunches," she said. "A lot of them are fast-food copies that exacerbate the problems with kids reaching for those kinds of foods, and the traditional fare that they are serving does not serve children as well as it could."

A View from the Top

There are 336,000 children in the CPS participating in the National School Lunch Program. With an accounting background and no nutritional training, Sue Susanke, director of food service and warehousing, has spent 37 years with the CPS — but no nutrition training — has spent the last six years making sure that children get safe, healthy food. "I am the person responsible for compliance issues and menu approval," she said. "I oversee employees and visit schools to see if they are following safety and sanitation guidelines."

Every school day, Susanke has to make sure that lunchroom workers, delivery drivers and food vendors are all working in sync to get schoolchildren fed and back out to their classrooms at the district’s 634 school sites.

Feeding all those kids has to be done in the midst of, and in spite of, snafus like the national meat recall last October when government officials feared that meat from some producers for school lunches might have been infected with listeria. This is where Tim Martin, chief operating officer at Chicago Public Schools, comes in.

"It was turkey products," he explained, going on to describe finding out about the problem "on a Friday, after four o’clock." He had to wait while the USDA determined whether turkey purchased for school lunches had come from a contaminated batch and could or couldn’t be used in upcoming school lunches.

Martin and Susanke lament that dealing with snafus like this, along with the day-to-day, week-to-week tasks of ordering food, overseeing workers and interacting with vendors, ultimately leaves little time for overhauling the school lunch program to emphasize less meat and dairy and more plant-based foods.

And the Kids have to Like it too!

Martin complains that schools must also compete with fast-food restaurants for the attention and appetites of children. Consequently, school lunches sometimes mimic fast-food meals, with pizza or chicken nuggets or burgers as entrées with a side of fries.

"When children are offered choices, they choose pizza, hamburgers and french fries," said Martin. "Kids are not going to eat broccoli, because no one advertises broccoli. If the broccoli growers of America would spend money advertising on TV, that would make our job easier. We’re constantly competing with major food advertisers."

Add to this the limits of government rules. Like many school districts, CPS buys food for its lunches and is reimbursed by the federal government for them, as long as those lunches meet federal, state and local requirements for content.

Preferred Meals, Sedexho and Chartwell/Thomspson are the primary vendors of food for the CPS school lunch program. These vendors provide "preplated frozen," "preplated cold," or hot meals to various schools. Vendors provide CPS the menu plans, approved by the district, and based on local, state and federal guidelines.

Little Room for Big Changes

But even as vegetarian and vegan meals hold promise for the nutrition that children need, Martin said that such choices are simply hard to come by in a poor school district. CPS school districts are overwhelmed by poverty. Most of the kids in CPS — 86 percent — have household incomes that qualify them for free or reduced-price lunches.

"For a lot of kids, we are serving them their only meal," said Martin. "If we were a district where parents could pay for that choice, then we could do something," Martin said. "Otherwise, if it doesn’t come out of the parents’ pockets, then it comes out of (spending on) the classroom."

Current USDA rules don’t leave much room for either creativity or variation. "The vendors are only going to do so much experimentation," says Martin, adding that while foods like brown rice, beans, fruits and vegetables are available, school districts cannot always make decisions on the foods they will get.

"Sometimes we don’t get a choice from the federal government," Martin said. "The USDA strongly suggests that we use certain things. They just say,‘Here, we subsidized this and now you’ll use it.’ So, we get turkey."

The NuMenu: Not So New

CPS has made some effort toward shoring up its school meals. This year, they adopted the "NuMenu" plan for school lunches. The previous meal plan program was a "food-based" formula, requiring specific amounts of meat, bread, milk, fruit and vegetables. Instead, NuMenu meals are nutrient based.

"Our menus are based on calories from fat and saturated fat, vitamin A, and other nutrients," explained Susanke. She adds that this makes it possible to offer more variety. The NuMenu plan, for example, does not require meat in order to satisfy protein requirements, which is a nod toward the desires of vegetarian parents.

These alternative choices, however, are not easily available to all students who might want them. Whether a school has an alternative conveniently available depends on how well-equipped the school’s kitchen is. Those with modern cooking facilities get the basic ingredients for meals, which are then prepared, cooked and assembled for the students. "Kids can go through the line and choose a vegetarian meal; it’s there if anybody wants it," says Susanke.

The Clincher

In less equipped kitchens, all the meals must be ordered from and prepared by the vendor, which then delivers them to the school. In this case, students must request vegetarian meals ahead of time, so that the school can order them from the vendor. This limits the exposure of nonvegetarian children to the vegetarian choices. It is also inconvenient for children wanting an alternative lunch, reinforcing the notion that vegetarianism is a hassle.

Another problem is that, ironically, the alternative option is not necessarily vegetarian or vegan. The Chartwells/Thompson menu for November illustrates this. When there is a nonmeat option, it is sometimes a peanut butter and jelly bar, or perhaps yogurt with a soft pretzel. Many times, though, the alternative to meat entrées are things like cheese sandwiches, cheese enchiladas or cheese pizza — a real problem for kids with dairy allergies or lactose intolerance.

On other days, the entrée offering was either meat or...other meat. On November 6, kids could have either the regular entrée of ground beef and Spanish rice or choose a turkey and cheese sandwich. On November 18, kids could eat either oven-fried chicken or a turkey bologna sandwich.

NuMenu also offers nondairy drink options for children. But the alternatives, like apple juice, even when enriched with calcium, are not always nutritionally compatible with milk. Given such limited options, families may find that the nondairy choice is no choice at all.

Food as Part of the Education

Susanke and Martin admit to the shortcomings at CPS, but say that changes have to start with the families and their children. "A lot of parents have a meat-and-potatoes mentality," Susanke said. "You have to educate parents before you can educate children. In the lunchroom, we cannot do any actual teaching," she said.

Teaching healthy eating in order to improve children’s nutrition is the very focus of a New York state program. "Food is Elementary" was launched by the Food Studies Institute, a nonprofit based in Trumansburg, New York. Dr. Antonia Demas, the Institute’s executive director, has developed a curriculum designed to introduce children to vegetarian eating. "When you put nutritious food in front of kids and they don’t know what it is, it’s only natural that they’re going to reject it," she says. "You can’t expect children to want nutritious food without an educational curriculum around it."

"Food is Elementary" is used in classrooms across the country. In it, children learn to cook, for instance, a couscous and chickpea stew while studying the traditional eating practices of North Africa. Or they can make an Egyptian barley and vegetable dish while studying the Egyptian pyramids and the food pyramid. "I really coordinate the nutrition curriculum with the regular academic curriculum," says Damas. "(The students) will hear music from the country the food is from, or I’ll bring it with a geography lesson."

Sorry, Not in the Cards

Don’t expect anything that progressive to emerge soon from the Chicago schools as, according to Martin, the demand is simply not there. "It would be great if we could partner with organizations that would help combat what the kids see on a daily basis at home." He adds, however, that parents are not requesting changes in the curriculum or the lunch program. "There are parents and students who want that choice," he said. "But they’re not the majority."

Nonetheless, advocates of healthier school lunches point out that there are easy, low-cost steps that schools can take to improve their meals. "It can be as simple as adding beans to the salad and serving meatless spaghetti or chili," said Gates of Project Healthy Beginnings. "We’re not asking for huge changes right now, just small changes that point us in the right direction."

Susanke said that CPS simply does not have enough information to make those kinds of changes, whether it be to add more plant-based meals, organic produce or...soy milk, "I would not be opposed at all to offering soy milk," said Susanke. "We’ve had a big problem with lactose intolerance. But I don’t know the costs of soy milk. It’s something we need to look at."

Leah Samuel is a Chicago-based freelance writer whose specialties are social justice, poverty, race, and women’s issues.

Another Crack at Setting the Standards

The school lunch debate is heating up as the USDA is looking to update the rules for child nutrition by 2004. "They will come up for debate this year," explains Jean Daniel, public affairs director for the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services agency. "People who are concerned will want to interact with advocacy organizations and their senators and (congressional) representatives."

Every five years, national child nutrition programs are reauthorized by Congress. While the National School Lunch Program is permanently authorized, the program’s operation — including the content of school lunches — is up for review by Congress and the public.

Last year, public sessions in major cities, including one at the USDA Midwest Regional Office in Chicago, allowed parents, dietitians, doctors, and others to give input on new guidelines. The President will present to Congress a proposal for changes in January 2003.

Recommendations from the public are expected to be part of the Bush administration’s proposal, Daniel says. "They are all taken into consideration, but it is impossible to include all of them in the package," she adds, saying that the presentation to Congress will be "the beginning of the discussion, not the end."

Become a School Lunch Reformist

Here are resources to become an activist:

Institute for Community Resource Development , 773-921-1055

Healthy Beginnings, 619-442-5159

Food Studies Institute/ "Food is Elementary," foodstudies@bigplanet.com, www.foodstudies.org

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, "Healthy School Lunch Campaign," 202-686-2210, nutrition@pcrm.org

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