In three days, my little girl will start Kindergarten. I have deadlines to meet, articles to write, clients to schedule… and yet that fateful Monday is all I can think about. For three years I’ve been really lucky to have Helen attend Water and Sunshine Preschool, a home-based preschool in Sunnyvale run by a family that keeps an organic garden in their spacious backyard and cooks three meals a day from scratch. For Helen, life is about to change, and while she’s excited as can be, I enter into this new phase of life with one big trepidation… school food.
Our new school district uses… someone ring a gong please… Sodexo. And while the educational philosophy of the charter school we were lucky enough to get in to is amazingly progressive, the campus is about 80% concrete and blacktop. Luckily, the philosophy at Stevenson PACT is centered on parent participation (PACT stands for “Parents Acting in Community Together”) so I’m pretty confident that what I don’t like, I can work to change.
So I’m giving myself two years. I’m writing it here because I am promising myself, my daughter and the world. Hold me to it.
By the time Helen is in second grade, my plan is to:
1. Have Sodexo out of PACT, if not the entire district,
2. Raise the funds to build a kitchen on the Stevenson campus,
3. Organize local chefs, Stevenson parents, and volunteers to build a menu and cook meals from scratch,
4. Expand the raised bed garden, yank out at least a third of the concrete, and establish a natural play area, and
5. Create a unique school environment where kids take part in growing and preparing the meals that they eat together.
Ambitious? Yes. Optional? No.
I’ve spent a lot of time on school lunch reform, long before Helen was in school herself. Thank goodness for the work of Chef Ann Cooper and the many trailblazers in the healthy school food movement before me, and for all the moms before me who have worked on this issue so tirelessly. My work with school food service at Full Circle Farm was a long, painful slog through miles and miles of bureaucracy, red tape, and inertia. But I’ve always found it totally worth it – even when it was not my own kid’s lunch at stake. Because all kids deserve access to fresh, healthy food and green spaces. They deserve the home & hearth feel that life centered around the kitchen and the garden creates. As a working mom, I have one chance a day to create that feel for my daughter – that’s what made me so grateful that she had a school that created that for her as well. Now I need to fight to keep that experience in her life.
In the meantime, I’ll be packing her a lunch every day. We have a painfully cute rainbow & unicorn Planet Box all ready to be stocked with her favorite foods – tomatoes, hummus & pita, avocados, and dark chocolate covered almonds (aka “chocolate beans”), along with a thermos cup of raw milk. It’s nutritious, sure, but it’s not home and hearth – it’s not the way we were meant to experience food. We were meant to experience food from the field to the plate – growing together, cooking together, eating together – it’s how we build healthy emotional connections to the earth, to each other, and to our food! If there’s one big lesson I’ve learned doing school-based farming and with my own daughter’s preschool experience, it’s that school lunch reform needs to go WAY beyond the cafeteria – that the only way to turn the tide on unhealthy habits is to incorporate healthy food – growing it, thinking about it, preparing it, and understanding the reasons why junk food companies don’t want you eating it, into the school day.
Home & Hearth need to be written into the curriculum.
How exciting! As future hopeful PACT-parents, we thank you and wish you the greatest success. Let us know if we can help.
- andrea & steve @ parentsguild
Well girl, you have a LOT on your plate!! (Lame pun intended..sorry about that…)
School lunch= generally unidentifiable, scary
vending machines= sadly identifiable, scarier
Lucky my three have great eating habits- started young with the colors of the rainbow, and I get ridiculously excited about broccoli and brussel sprouts but straight from the vine/tree/earth to the mouth? There is no comparison.
Onward ho!
This is wonderful.
I remember when Sodexho took over my college cafeteria – ugh.
As a working mother myself, I understand the need to have activities and experiences that are comforting and as home-centric as possible for our children while they are away from us.
We are fortunate to be able to send our children to a wonderful Montessori where the children learn to garden – vegetables and flowers, and care for animals (like collecting the eggs from the hens), and are really a part of the cycle of nature. The meals & snacks are made by hand and the children are always a part of preparation as well.
“Ambitious? Yes. Optional? No.”
Yes, this. Every child should have these experiences. Good luck in your goals!
Great goals! I love it and I wish all schools had motivated parents like you or at least I with you were on my team at my school!
One thing I’d just like to throw out there about Sodexo. Remember that they are a vendor – nothing more, nothing less. They have the ability to do really poor food, or really good food if given the resources and direction. I’ve seen with some charter schools in Chicago, where budgets were increased and standards were raised, that they came through with a high quality product. So I’d suggest that getting rid of Sodexo shouldn’t be a specific goal – because you may find that if approached correctly, they may actually help you make improvements in the food and be an asset rather than a hindrance. So it’s just a thought, but if you were able to fund a full kitchen, have healthy scratch meals, incorporate student involvement… That would be HUGE! I personally wouldn’t care if it were Sodexo or a in-house staff.
Hi Mark,
As a person that is employed by a (socially and environmentally responsible) food service company that does college food service, I have to respectfully disagree. While I believe that a company like Sodexo can be cajoled into making marginally better (processed food) choices, and can be watchdogged into not outright scamming a school district out of its meager funds, I do not believe that the corporate culture of Sodexo will ever be in line with truly healthy school food. The list of violations and bad moves they’ve made is mind-boggling: http://cleanupsodexo.org/. I’d never go to a restaurant chain with this many bad reviews. Why would I trust them to feed my daughter?
My best,
Liz
P.S. If it turns out to be impossible to have a kitchen on site, I will try my best to get in a food service company like Revolution Foods or Choice Lunch. The reason I know both? They both bought produce from Full Circle Farm. So did Bon Appetit, where I work now. Sodexo never came a-knocking.
Point well taken. And Revolution Foods does great work. I strongly support them. And I look forward to reading more about Choice Lunch.
You go!!
My college age daughter is the kitchen manager at her tiny school’s cafeteria. She expressed a wish to have better yogurt available, and I asked why they don’t just make it themselves, as it would be far superior, and cheaper. Her response? “I don’t think that is legal, Mom.”
She has recently begun eating gluten-free and is recovering from a lifetime of the supposedly healthy meals I fed her. I always did a lot of my own cooking, but I was a product of the 80s and margarine and oils had been solidly beaten into my head. Though I must say, I dove headlong into butter the moment I found out it was healthy!
Even though her supervisor at her job is also in to whole food, he just doesn’t see a way to be able to offer better food at prices that would be affordable to the kids. In addition, they survey the students every year, and are constantly called upon to offer more and more unhealthy food. It is a private school, and they can not rely on anyone other than the students to subsidize the meals.
Interestingly, the school has been there for over 100 years. The setting is like a park and has plenty of forest and green space. They could easily raise chickens, a garden plot, or even have a milk cow as many of the faculty and students live right there. Of course, it would be illegal for them to sell raw milk from the cow, so I guess they’d have to give it away and run the costs of keeping the cow into the rest of the program.
When the school was founded they raised much of their own food, but now, people seem to think that real food is tainted somehow, and it’s only “clean” or “right” if they get it from a store. It is such a strange attitude, based in unreasonable and baseless, backwards fear. People fear raw milk, but they still buy store tomatoes and bag salad. They won’t make their own yogurt, but they buy special probiotics in tablets. I know people who don’t like to eat garden veggies because they are “dirty”, but will happily purchase vegetables from a grocery store that have been sprayed with animal poop. Why do we fear all the wrong things?
Would love to see more about packing your daughters lunches. My daughter is going to be packing my 5 year old grandsons lunches for school now. She was asking me about what to pack that would be healthy and nutritious. I gave her some basic ideas but would sure like some more. She tries but finances and time are both limited for her.
You have a great set of goals for your next 2 years. All the best with them. I live in Canada, and our school lunch programs are a bit different. Often there just is no lunch program. Lunch-kit lunches are the only option.
This sounds appealing compared to dealing with Sodexo, but one day my son forgot his lunch. So I slipped away from work picked it up from home. It contained a thermos of homemade stew, sourdough bread, and a few other things.
When I got to the school, I had him paged and decided to wait to give him his lunch instead of just leave it at the office. I had to wait for a while as he made his way down.
As I was standing there, about 20 parents came through with Happy Meal bags for their kids.
I asked the office assistant about what I was seeing. Turns out she was as appalled as I was. She said these are not kids that forgot their lunches, or lost their lunches. These are the same parents everyday that bring the Happy Meals to their kids for lunch.
So, if those are the parents pushing for food programs in our schools – I’d rather pack lunches in the morning.
Cheers!!
OMG….I think I’m in love with you! This is the first time reading your blog. I’m facing battles at my daughters special school and in 2 weeks have brought about massive changes…..managed to convince them they needed chickens….but this is truly inspiring! Thank you.