Me and Chocolate Milk

 This piece about the controversy over including chocolate milk in the school lunch program reminded me of something.

Growing up, dad would bring up some milk from the morning milking which went into the refrigerator.  As it was raw milk, the cream rose to the top.  Mom would skim the cream off for use in tea, coffee, cereal.  We'd drink the milk remaining, the skim milk. So I was accustomed to the taste and texture of skim milk.

When dad drove the truck to Greene, our market town for feed from the Grange-League-Federation (co-op) store and bigger grocery stores than our local one, we'd often go in the morning and get lunch at a diner.  My order was always the same, tuna fish sandwich and chocolate milk.  I disliked the taste and texture of the homogenized milk, so chocolate milk was the only thing I'd drive.

The Hole in School Gardens/Local Food for School

This is prompted by something I read a few days ago, on the difficulty of caring for school gardens during summer vacations. [Updated: here's the link.]

The food movement, including Mrs. Obama, has pushed for local food in school cafeterias.  It's also pushed for schools to teach their kids gardening.  Both efforts are laudable; both have a hole.

What's the hole?  Schools, most schools anyway, don't operate year round; they close down during the summer.  So to develop local sources of supply you're asking a farmer to ramp up production in the spring and fall, and idle the operation during the summer, or find another market.  It's doable, I suppose, but it adds in another level of complexity for management.

In contrast if school cafeterias rely on national suppliers and don't limit their requests to fresh food, the suppliers can more easily manage things to provide a flow of food during the school year and direct the flow elsewhere (food processors).  Diversification of the market leads to more stability in price and more resilience in response to disruptions and disasters.

Those Healthy School Lunches

The cynic in me gloats over this report in the LA Times, hat tip Kevin Drum, on how poorly the newly healthy lunch menus has been greeted in the LA schools.

I wonder if USDA will pull the award: "This year, L.A. Unified, which serves 650,000 meals daily, has received awards for improving its school lunches, including one last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and another from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine."


To be fair, some of the innovations are working well; as I've always said, it's hard if not impossible to do things right the first time.  One of the key faults is that the food which was acceptable in their tests turned unacceptable when prepared by the regular kitchens.  As Megan McArdle would say: scalability, and repeatability could when you're basing decisions on pilot tests.

[Update: McArdle picks up the story and discusses reasons why pilot tests aren't necessarily predictive.]

Kids and Nutritious School Lunches

Petula Dvorack has a column in today's Post on the problems of feeding kids nutritious school lunches.

Bottom line: it's very very difficult.

French School Lunches

Andrew Gelman posts on American versus French school lunches.  Apparently in France you can't bring your lunch, but payments for the schools and the lunches come from the state and the mayor respectively, putting the mayor on the spot if the lunches aren't good.

Michelle's School Lunches--a Chink in His Armor?

Just skimmed a piece about a school district banning lunches brought from home, which included a reference to kids tossing lunches mostly uneaten.  Made me wonder: if there's 10 million school children by next year who are unhappy with their lunches, does that mean there will be millions of parents who are unhappy with Obama? After all, her school lunch campaign is probably the one effort of the administration which is obvious and impacts the lives of Americans 5 days a week.  Here's a related post at Obamafoodorama.

Variety in School Lunches, A Thought

The White House has released a "before" and "after" school lunch menu. Obviously the "after" is both more nutritious and more attractive (at least to a geezer's eyes, perhaps not to those of a 10-year old).  One thing which strikes me about the menu is there's more items in every "after" menu than in the "before".   Just on a fast skim, the "before" averages about 4 items, the "after" about 7.  Just thinking about logistics, as a bureaucrat often should, the difference implies an increase in costs as you've got a more complicated inventory to procure and manage and a more complicated and more labor-intensive process to assemble the meal.  I wonder whether school lunch administrators were involved in creating the menus.

Improving School Lunches

I've been a bit skeptical of efforts by the food movement to reform school lunches.  However, the sort of incremental improvements and changes in the food and the presentation described in this Post article make sense. Remembering the past I suspect school lunch programs never got much respect, so getting smart people involved can only improve things, even if it doesn't make major changes in our obesity problem. I have to admit I'm skeptical of how long chefs will remain involved, but I'd hope people will learn.

I wonder what are school lunches like in other countries?  I typed that, then said to myself I should do something to satisfy my curiosity.  This BBC piece from 2005 has interesting data, but what's even more interesting is the range of comments from viewers all over, not all over the UK, all over the world.  It's an incidental reminder of the scope of the British Empire and the legacy it left behind.

Kids Don't Like Vegetables, Particularly Beans

That's the lesson I get from Ed Bruske's latest report from the school lunch front, spending time in school kitchens from DC to Berkeley.  Apparently roasting vegetables helps, and camouflaging them within the recipe also helps, but at the end of the day school kids won't eat them.

Although the school lunch reformers Ed talks to retain their optimism, I wonder. If kids are used to snacks, and they're living in a society which gives them the right to say what they like and which honors their decisions, what's the use? Maybe in 10 years or so the foodies will have evolved a set of recipes which are nutritious, cheap, and eaten by kids. But maybe not.

 I  remember (vaguely) my own school days.  We had a kitchen where the food was prepared.  The cooks were neighbors, sometimes mothers. The food was standard 1950's fare, meat loaf, liver, etc. Almost all the time I carried my lunch--a sandwich, fruit, maybe carrots, and milk. So I don't remember how much choice you had in the cafeteria, but my impression is: very little.  Adults had authority and you took what you were served.

Unless and until we're willing and able to deprive kids of their "right to choose", I'm afraid the school lunch people are rolling a rock uphill.