School Lunches Not All Healthy

With Child Obesity Epidemic as a Backdrop, Island Schools Begin
Paying More Attention to Lunchroom Nutrition

By IAN FEIN

On any given school day, students at the Martha's Vineyard
Public Charter School are likely to eat a rather sophisticated lunch
- featuring Japanese seaweed salad with tofu and rice wine
vinegar, for instance, or Island-grown butternut squash soup. The
healthy meals are made almost entirely from scratch by a professional
chef who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and Paris.

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Across town, students at the West Tisbury School eat lunches
outsourced to a nationwide food service company, which cooks the meals
at the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School and trucks it to
West Tisbury in the morning, where it is later reheated by school
custodians. On Wednesday this week the warm meal consisted of a slice of
cheese pizza, a pile of corn, iceberg lettuce salad and a cookie.

Such is the disparity among the different school lunch programs on
the Vineyard, which have varying levels of funding and support.

With childhood obesity emerging as a national health crisis, school
lunch nutrition is the subject of increasing attention. The Centers for
Disease Control says that at least one in three children born in 2000
will have diabetes in their lifetime, and because of nutrition issues,
young children today are set to become the first generation with a
shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Although the obesity epidemic is a part of a much larger trend of
unhealthy eating and lifestyles, school lunch programs play an important
role in the discussion because they are the only nutritional option for
many growing children.

"Some kids have no choice in the matter. They don't have
parents with the time, money or knowledge to make a healthy lunch for
them," said Tina Miller, a private chef and author of the Vineyard
Harvest cookbook, who has two children enrolled at the West Tisbury
School. "My kids are lucky, because I can do that for them. But
there are many, many children on the Vineyard that rely on these school
lunches. And that's what I find disturbing."

A graduate of the West Tisbury School herself, Ms. Miller is now a
member of the school advisory committee, where she has made improvements
to the lunch program a top priority.

"School is not just a classroom. It's social, and it
helps form habits that you will carry through for the rest of your
life," she said. "Healthy eating and nutrition are just as
important for kids to learn as everything else. But for some reason,
it's been overlooked."

Ms. Miller and others agreed that all the Island schools are
stepping up efforts to provide healthier lunches, and that, on the
whole, Vineyard children and adults are better off than their
counterparts on the mainland, who have much higher documented rates of
obesity.

But despite growing awareness about the issue, school health
officials face an uphill battle. A statewide youth behavior survey found
that between 1999 and 2005 the percentage of overweight adolescents rose
to more than 25 per cent in Massachusetts, while the percentage of
students who eat the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables
per day declined to only one in ten.

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A longtime teacher at the Edgartown School said last week that the
Island has not been entirely shielded from the trend. "We're
definitely seeing a lot more kids who are not just a little overweight,
but really dangerously obese," she said.

Pending legislation in the Massachusetts state senate would set
strict new standards for removing junk food from school cafeterias in
the commonwealth. Also, by state mandate, each school committee on the
Vineyard this year adopted a new wellness policy, which spells out goals
to provide students and staff with nutrition education and access to a
variety of affordable, healthy and appealing foods.

State efforts only go so far, however, as the vast majority of food
offered to local schools comes from unhealthy, surplus commodity crops
subsidized by the U.S. Farm Bill, which is currently up for its
five-year reauthorization in Congress. On recent lists of food offered
to the Vineyard charter school between April and June, the only item
described as fresh was a 50-pound bag of russet potatoes.

"It's a real challenge," said Christine Napolitan,
food service director at the charter school for the last ten years.
"The state is pushing local school programs to use fresh produce
and whole grains, but most of the food they give us is prepackaged stuff
like canned fruit in corn syrup, or chicken nuggets and preseasoned
sloppy Joe mix."

Ms. Napolitan uses some of the options offered by the state, but
then buys about 75 per cent of her food, including all her fresh fruits
and vegetables, with additional money provided by the charter school.
The extra funds allow her to buy Wholesome Farms milk instead of the
Hood brand distributed at other schools, and to offer a full vegetarian
option available at every meal.

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Charter school founders saw a progressive lunch program as a key
priority for their school. Between bites of a whole wheat burrito at his
desk on a recent Friday, school director Robert Moore said that in his
nine years at the charter school he has never heard a single complaint
about the lunch program from a student or parent.

Vineyard schools superintendent Dr. James H. Weiss acknowledged that
budgetary constraints limit the quality of lunches offered at the other
five public schools on the Island.

"Cost is an issue, and given the limitations we have, I think
all of our schools do an excellent job," Mr. Weiss said, recalling
a bowl of corn chowder he had at the Edgartown School which he described
as phenomenal. "But without casting aspersions on anyone,
there's always room for improvement."

Currently, the three down-Island elementary schools employ cafeteria
staff in their own kitchens, while the two regional school districts
contract with the large national food service firm, Chartwells, to run
their lunch programs. The on-Island company representative cooks
hundreds of lunches at the high school each morning, and trucks meals to
the smaller schools in Chilmark and West Tisbury, neither of which have
full kitchens.

Though school officials praise the company for its responsiveness to
requests and concerns about the lunch program, they also admit that it
is not an ideal arrangement. Only about a quarter of the 270 West
Tisbury School students eat lunch offered by the school, compared to
roughly 75 per cent at both the charter and Edgartown schools. A recent
student-initiated lunch survey at the high school found overall
satisfaction relatively high, but recommended that nutritional
information be posted about the food, and that unhealthy foods like
french fries, cinnamon sugar, pizza and cookies be more expensive and
offered less frequently.

Improvements to the West Tisbury program have been a priority for
school officials this spring, and will result in a number of modest
changes when school reopens in the fall. Smaller portions will be
available for the younger students, and hot soup will be ladled from a
large tureen, instead of being stored in individual Styrofoam bowls as
it is now.

Ms. Miller said she would eventually like to see a full kitchen in
the school, where fresh meals can be prepared from scratch. But she
acknowledged that would require renovations and ongoing staffing
salaries, which is money that the school does not currently have. Ms.
Miller noted that while other schools on the Island allocate between
$50,000 and $100,000 for cafeteria staff each year, West Tisbury spends
roughly $3,000 - and still had to make cuts elsewhere this year to
win approval of its budget.

"It's a process," Ms. Miller said of improvements
to the school lunch program. "Things don't change
overnight."