By Michele Chan Santos

At Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland, California, students are not permitted to have gum, soda or candy. Nor are they eating the notorious “mystery casseroles” filled with the USDA surplus-of-the-day and derided by school children throughout time. Instead, they eat fresh fruits and vegetables with every lunch, and fresh fruit with breakfast too.

The 550 students, grades K through 12, at this public charter school are from predominantly low-income families; 75 percent are learning English as a second language. Their school breakfast and lunch, and their after school snacks, come from Revolution Foods, a company which specializes in organic, hormone-free meals with whole grains and an emphasis on fresh produce.

“We really believe that the school has to serve the whole child. We want to ensure that students are learning and that they’re physically healthy, and an important part of that is nutrition,” said Jenna Stauffer, the director of strategic development at Lighthouse. Ms. Stauffer said she often eats in the cafeteria with the students, where she has noticed their enthusiasm for the program. “Many kids want to go back for seconds. The children are really satiated and satisfied. Kids just devour the fresh fruit,” she said.

The students are accustomed to the healthier food and don’t nag the staff to serve chips or candy.

“It’s really fun to watch them eat fruits and vegetables and not complain about it,” Stauffer said. Because of the financial situation of some of the students’ families, “for some of our kids, these are their consistent meals of the day. For example, yesterday for lunch we had Fettucine Alfredo with green vegetables, and breakfast this morning was bagels with fresh fruit.”

Change the school cafeteria food and you can improve the health of American children for the rest of their lives. That’s the reasoning behind an ever-growing movement to make school cafeteria food more organic, more locally grown and healthier, with a particular emphasis on low-fat, high-fiber foods.

Lisa Bennett, the communications director for the Center for Eco-Literacy, a nonprofit foundation in Berkeley, California, can see firsthand how interest in this change is growing nationally. The Center for Eco-Literacy is dedicated to education for sustainable living and has a program called “Rethinking School Lunch,” which helps guide school systems through the process of changing their lunch offerings. The center offers training through seminars, as well as a free guide to download.

In the last two years, more than 200 educators have attended a Rethinking School Lunch seminar, and more than 70,000 copies of the program have been downloaded, Bennett said.

“We are seeing constantly rising interest in this area,” Bennett said. “It’s driven by people seeing the connection between good food and good living. When children eat better, they perform better.”
Participating schools run the gamut from those which have made their usual cafeteria fare healthier with more fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains, to those who have really taken the mission to heart, and have community gardens where the students grow their own organic vegetables, prepare them and eat them.

The Rethinking School Lunch program has three main tenets:

• Improve the quality of the food
• Teach the students what makes food healthy and about the ecosystems from which it comes
• Grow some of the food themselves

“People sometimes think it’s too expensive to change their school’s lunch system, but that’s not true,” Bennett said. “With the growing cost of energy, it’s actually more economical to improve your lunches using locally grown food.”

A recent report showed that American children between ages 6 and 11 are four times more likely to be obese than similarly aged children in the 1960s. The report, by Duke University in North Carolina and the Foundation for Child Development, said overweight children have a greater risk of Type 2 diabetes, and may have elevated risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

“We know there is an epidemic of diet-related diseases,” Bennett said. “Habits children develop in youth tend to stay with them. In order to improve the long-term health of children, improving the school lunch is absolutely fundamental. It’s essential to health and positive performance.”

STARTING A REVOLUTION

Each weekday, Revolution Foods serves healthy meals with fresh fruits and vegetables to more than 12,000 children — including the students at Lighthouse Community Charter School . The company, based in Alameda, California, serves lunch at 45 schools in the Bay Area, and provides food for 75 afterschool programs. It also serves four schools in the Los Angeles area.
Kirsten Tobey and Kristen Richmond founded Revolution Foods in 2006. The two women met at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley where they interviewed teachers, students, parents and administrators from more than 40 schools before embarking on their mission “to get as much fresh, healthy food to as many students as possible,” said Tobey, who is chief operating officer of Revolution Foods.

For the company’s clients, which are public, private and charter schools, the impetus to change can come from many different sources. Sometimes, the administration approaches Revolution Foods first; sometimes teachers have gone to the administration because they’re embarrassed by what’s served in the cafeteria; in other cases parent groups have pushed for change, Tobey said. (With school about to dismiss for the summer, now is the time to consult with your local PTA and school authorities to plan for better school food in the coming school year.)
Once the changeover is made, the kids need some convincing to eat what’s good for them. For some children, eating the food provided by Revolution Foods is a big change. Couscous and brown rice and a variety of fruits and vegetables are not always foods they are served at home. That’s where the faculty plays a big role.

“Teachers have committed to eating lunch with the kids if we’re serving something new,” Tobey says. “For the teachers to sit with them, and eat brown rice, and tell their students it’s important to try new things, is an important factor in our success.”

If children at a school which is new to the program seem resistant to trying new dishes, “we set up a tasting booth and make it really fun,” Tobey said. “We tell them, put on your chef’s hat, what would you add to this, how would you make it?”

Typical school lunches are often processed foods that come from a factory. These processed items are then shipped out and then reheated in a microwave, Tobey said. In comparison, the Revolution Foods meals are prepared fresh daily and don’t contain any corn syrup or trans fat.

The company practices careful cost control, she said. They want their meals to remain affordable, but also to contain fresh fruits and vegetables, which can be more expensive than less healthy food.
Some of their client schools have a student body where 80 to 90 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. For those schools, “we work really hard to comply with the national school lunch program, so the schools can file for reimbursement,” Tobey said.

A typical menu from Revolution Foods? Spaghetti with organic marinara sauce (made with beef which has no hormones or antibiotics), fresh steamed broccoli and an apple from a local farm.

The handmade chicken tamales, which are made from scratch, and served with Spanish rice (made with brown rice), a fresh piece of fruit and organic baby carrots, are an especially popular dish, Tobey says.

Parents whose children are eating the Revolution Foods lunches are thrilled. “We have heard all kinds of good things,” Tobey said. “One mother said, my child never wanted to eat vegetables and now he’s trying new things. The best thing that we’ve heard is that having this new lunch platform had encouraged their children to try new foods.”

The company has already expanded from the Bay Area into the Los Angeles area. “That’s been a major step for us, to launch a second market,” Tobey said. “We’re looking for further markets. We want to serve as many kids as we possibly can.”

WAITING FOR THE REVOLUTION....

If the food revolution hasn’t hit your school cafeteria yet, here are some options for packing a more healthful and yummy lunch:

1. Use whole-wheat pita bread for pocket sandwiches. Stuff them with vegetables and chicken; you can also add seasoned cream cheese or Italian dressing to the mix.
2. Make a wrap out of whole-wheat tortillas, cheese and meat.
3. Make it easy for your child to eat fresh fruit. Too often, the whole orange or apple packed by a well-intentioned parent gets tossed in the trash. Peel the orange and separate the slices, and put these in a container; toss apple slices with cinnamon.
4. The night before, wrap some vegetarian hot dogs in crescent dough and bake them. These can be packed for lunch with some ketchup.
5. Try this twist on the PB&J sandwich: spread rice cakes with nut butter and jam, and then stick these together to make a sandwich.
6. You can make your own trail mix with granola, raisins, nuts, dried banana slices and whatever else your child likes. Create a large batch on the weekend and put a kid-size serving in a container with their lunch.
7. Another sandwich option is bread spread with apple butter and topped with apple slices.
8. Fruit smoothies can be placed in a thermos and put into the lunchbox with a straw.
9. Homemade whole-grain muffins are easy to make on the weekend and then pack.
10. If your child likes the frozen yogurt in a tube, buy the organic version of these. Horizon makes organic yogurt tubes which are free of food coloring and are low-fat, too.

To find more tips, recipes and suggestions on feeding your children healthfully, check out recipes from Revolution Foods, school lunch ideas from Healthychild.com, and these good recipes from Familyfun.go.com.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media