Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for October 7, 2006 FOOD POLICE

From the New York Times...

No More Mystery Meat

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER

"I miss the cookies and the fries,” Max Gold-Landzberg said.

Sitting in the cafeteria at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., Max, 17, a senior, chomped on a roast beef and cheese sandwich on a whole wheat roll.

Last year he would have had the sandwich on a regular roll, Max said, but white-bread products are no longer sold in this Westchester County school, which has introduced some of the most sweeping menu changes in the region. Even the pizza now has a whole wheat crust. And instead of Max’s favorite potato chips, there is white cheddar popcorn.

“It’s a good idea because obesity and all that is a serious problem,” Max said. He wasn’t enticed, though, by the healthier choices on the hot food line like herb-roasted chicken and stir-fried veggies.

Neither were his table mates, who were grumbling about the new higher prices — to $3 from $1.75 for a hot lunch and to $4.75 from $3.95 for a roast beef sandwich — as well as the revamped menu.

Across the table from Max, Alex Magid, 16, who was brown-bagging it, polished off a salami, pepperoni and Parmesan sandwich on a white roll, a few Double Stuf Oreos and some pretzels, washed down with a Snapple Iced Tea.

Last year Alex bought lunch at school, at least sometimes. Now he brown-bags it daily. “I have loved the French fries ever since freshman year, and now they are gone for my senior year,” he said.

Faced with a new federal law requiring school districts to outline nutrition goals this year, schools across the region have been scrambling to eliminate trans fats, toss their deep fryers and reduce the overall sugar content in food, while still keeping their pickiest clients — the students — on board.

The federal law, which took effect on July 1, required public school districts around the country that receive government subsidies for meals to develop “wellness policies” outlining nutrition and exercise goals before classes began this fall. Connecticut has taken further steps by banning sugary drinks from cafeterias and vending machines in kindergarten to grade-12 school buildings. New Jersey will do the same by next fall, along with forbidding schools to sell anything that lists sugar in any form as a principal ingredient. New York has been slower to adopt such legislation, but some school districts, under pressure from parents to revamp their menus, are not waiting for state regulations.

In many lunchrooms, school food directors have taken up the challenge. French fries are baked, if they haven’t disappeared entirely. Vending machines are being restocked with bottled water and juice instead of Gatorade. Snacks like baked soy and fruit chips are replacing deep-fried potato chips. Soft pretzels are shrinking; frozen-fruit bars fill the Chipwich racks.

John Jay and other schools in the Katonah-Lewisboro district have gone so far as to substitute vegetable frittatas and whole wheat vegetable lasagna for hamburgers and French fries. John Jay’s cafeteria this year also eliminated processed foods, trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, and stocked the salad bar with beans, nuts and low-fat dressings. (After trying to add tofu, however, the school had to drop it when it went uneaten.)

“The federal policy date gave us a goal post,” said Mary Ann Petrilena, a member of the district’s food committee, made up of teachers, administrators, parents and students. The committee sent out a districtwide survey last winter and received more than 2,200 responses.

“The feedback was overwhelmingly, ‘yes, the community would like to see healthier foods in the cafeteria, and yes, the community would be willing to pay more for healthier food,’ ” Ms. Petrilena said.

Few districts have done as much as Katonah-Lewisboro. Local school boards vary enormously in how they are interpreting the federal mandate, said Dr. Susan Rubin, founder of the Westchester Coalition for Better School Food.

“Some school districts have taken this to heart and made some significant changes, and other school districts have done nothing but a little window dressing,” Dr. Rubin said.

On Long Island, there are also wide variations, said Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, a registered dietitian and assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Stony Brook University, who is working with 93 schools to add substance to their wellness policies.

“Each school district develops its own policy; that is only a general statement,” Ms. Connolly-Schoonen said. The Heart Links program, financed by the New York State Health Department, helps districts make it work — for example, by suggesting that a school limit the amount of sugar in snacks to 15 grams per serving, about the amount in three Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Milano cookies.

Some districts are easing into the transition by offering baked chicken nuggets and turkey tacos in elementary and middle schools, but tiptoeing around rules in high schools, where students are more likely to balk.

At the high schools in Norwalk, Conn., where a new food service, Whitson’s Culinary Group, was hired to improve nutrition in line with a new policy passed by the school board last spring, themed food stations were introduced, with soup and salad, deli wraps, pizza, Mexican dishes and hot dishes like eggplant rollatini and double beef hot dogs with a side of Tater Tots. White bread is still on the menu, but being phased out.

In New Jersey, where school menus, starting next September, will be among the most tightly regulated in the nation, cafeteria directors are already experimenting with new options.

To entice children in the South Orange-Maplewood, N.J., district to eat more vegetables, Pat Johnson, the food services director there, has been mixing greens in with pasta.

“It worked,” she said. Schools that used to consume 5 pounds of fresh vegetables daily are now using 20 pounds, she said. Besides the vegetable of the day, she has added carrot sticks and celery sticks to the food line, along with fresh oranges, apples, bananas and pears.

Like Katonah, the district uses an automated system that allows the school and the parents to track what the child is eating. Parents deposit money in an account, indicating whether it is to pay for a meal or snacks and whether the student has dietary restrictions. Children enter a PIN at the cafeteria’s checkout counter; a red box flashes on the checkout screen if a child is a diabetic, for instance, to alert the cashier to check if the meal is appropriate.

In high schools, however, nearby fast-food and pizza restaurants can easily undermine the efforts in the school cafeteria. On Long Island, deliveries of takeout food at Great Neck South High School were banned this fall. In Irvington, N.Y., calls for fast-food deliveries to the high school are being curtailed to two days a week, said Dr. Kathleen Matusiak, the superintendent.

Students “were lining up at the sidewalk for things like pizza,” said Dr. Matusiak. “It was in conflict with all the good work that the cafeteria was trying to do.”

In Elwood, on Long Island, Delia Neitzel, the food services director, said she had been phasing in healthier changes over the past few years, starting with the younger students. The district is following the New York State School Food Service Association’s “Choose Sensibly” guidelines for snacks. They allow up to 7 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, 360 milligrams of sodium and 15 grams of sugar. When students at Elwood High sampled the whole wheat pizza last year, “they didn’t like it at all,” Ms. Neitzel said. “We will wait until the middle schoolers move over” to make a full transition, she said. Next year, the high school cafeteria will offer half regular pizza and half made with whole wheat flour.

The students “are our customers, like any restaurant,” Ms. Neitzel said. With many fast-food restaurants nearby, high school students can eat lunch off campus. “We don’t want them to go elsewhere,” Ms. Neitzel said.

Andrea Martin, a chef from the Culinary Institute of America who was hired by Katonah-Lewisboro earlier this year to help introduce the changes there, was not surprised by students’ negative reactions.

“As with any change there is some resistance,” Ms. Martin said. In elementary schools, where the menus are simpler, the new fare has been more readily accepted, she said.

The school food revolution was sparked in part by reports in recent years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta that estimate that one in six school-age children is overweight, triple the proportion in 1980, and that Type 2 diabetes will reach epidemic proportions among children if current trends continue.

In addition to banning sugary drinks in Connecticut, the state is also trying to provide financial incentives to school districts to make changes. The Connecticut law, which did not abolish junk food, set aside up to $4.7 million in state school lunch reimbursement funds. Schools that follow the State Department of Education’s guidelines for healthier choices in snacks and à la carte menu items receive an additional 10 cents for each reimbursable lunch served; that is in addition to the 23 cents they receive from the federal government for each paid lunch.

Dana Plant, a former president of the School Nutrition Association of Connecticut and director of food services for Windsor Public Schools, which signed on for the new state program, said that à la carte selections at her school now included a trimmer bagel — three ounces instead of four — and only low-fat ice cream. Whole wheat tortilla wraps with chicken Caesar salad, turkey or tuna salad are such a hit — 400 a day are sold at Windsor High — that Ms. Plant added a second serving line.

One Windsor High School student who is not happy about the food at school is Onyeka Obiocha, 16, a junior. The changes in the cafeteria, including smaller portions, have left him hungry, he said.

“I am an athletic young man and now I have to buy two lunches to fill my appetite, when last year I only had to buy one lunch,” Onyeka said.

He also lamented the loss of Gatorade in the vending machines. “Water does hydrate you, but it doesn’t give you that boost of energy,” he said.

Some critics are concerned that the changes aren’t going far enough. Amie Hamlin, executive director of the New York Coalition for Healthy School Lunches, a nonprofit advocacy group, said that most school districts were taking baby steps and that “baby steps aren’t going to make a difference.”

“Some food service directors feel that students should have ‘choice,’ and that this choice should include healthy as well as unhealthy choices,” Ms. Hamlin said. “As long as there are unhealthy choices, most students will not choose the healthier items.”

In Chappaqua, N.Y., which has passed a new wellness policy but has not yet set specific nutritional guidelines to carry it out fully, Nancy Huehnergarth, a mother of 11- and 13-year-old girls, said the changes had been more cosmetic than real.

“It’s very positive, but to get to the next level we need systemic change,” said Ms. Huehnergarth, who is working as a volunteer with the American Cancer Society and other organizations to put together a statewide alliance to improve food and fitness. “We need to start cooking from scratch and we need to pay careful attention to our ingredients and we need to model in our cafeteria what we are teaching the kids in the classroom.”

Dr. Lyn McKay, Chappaqua’s assistant superintendent, said that even before the wellness policy was adopted in June, the district had made changes in snacks and beverages, including serving only decaffeinated coffee, not regular, in the high school. Guidelines for fat, salt and sugar content in snacks were also carried out last year.

When Otis Spunkmeyer cookies were removed from the district’s cafeterias last year, Ms. Huehnergarth recalled, the outcry was “like someone’s grandmother was killed.” Now, no one mentions their absence.

“Food is emotional,” she said. “It is painful at the beginning, but the long-term benefit is worth it.”

Also from the New York Times...

Producers Agree to Send Healthier Foods to Schools

By MARIAN BURROS

In an effort to fight the rise in childhood obesity, five of the country’s largest snack food producers said yesterday they would start providing more nutritious foods to schools, replacing sugary, fat-laden products in vending machines and cafeterias.

French fries, ice cream, candy, cupcakes and potato chips from the machines, lunch lines, school stores and even school fund-raising events could disappear under a voluntary agreement between the companies and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.

The plan, which may take effect at the beginning of the next school year, is the first nationwide effort to set strict nutrition guidelines for school vending machines.

Because the guidelines are voluntary, critics say they will not be effective.

Both the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a frequent critic of the food industry, and the School Nutrition Association want government regulation instead.

“Our organization feels pretty strongly that we need some kind of nutrition guidance from the Department of Agriculture,” said Janey Thornton, president of the nutrition association.

Dr. Carlos Camargo, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health was more positive. “I think it’s helpful for groups that have traditionally denied any connection between snack foods and obesity or health to be acknowledging now that there are links, and that moves the agenda forward,” Dr. Camargo said. A bill introduced in the Senate this year would require the Agriculture Department to set standards for snack foods based on those that the Institute of Medicine is expected to issue by the end of the year.

The agreement will be more difficult to implement than those announced in May between the three largest soft drink companies and the alliance, which is a partnership of the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association, in which companies agreed to replace sugary soft drinks with more healthful beverages.

The soft drink companies account for 90 percent of soft drinks in schools, which are sold through the company distributors. But there are about 70 snack food companies that supply schools, and those products are sold through independent vendors who are not in the agreement.

That means yesterday’s initiative will require the companies to educate vendors on the need for more healthful snacks. At the news conference announcing the new initiative, former President Bill Clinton said: “The companies are going to work to convince distributors and even their competitors to follow suit. I think after today, their competitors are going to have a very difficult time explaining why they won’t.”

Several company officials agreed.

“The power of this alliance is to get others to join it,” said Charles Nicholas, a spokesman for Frito-Lay.

Under the guidelines, products could contain no more than 35 percent sugar by weight and have no more than 230 milligrams of sodium. No trans fats would be allowed. No product could get more than 35 percent of its calories from fat. The guidelines would also set calorie limits for each serving based on age: 150 calories for elementary school children, 180 calories for middle school children and 200 calories for high school students.

The five food manufacturers — Dannon, Kraft Foods, Mars, PepsiCo and the Campbell Soup Company — agreed to make specific changes in what they sell to schools. They are the following:

-Mars has created a new line of nutritious snacks.

-Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo, is reformulating several products to meet the guidelines.

-Kraft is decreasing the sodium and calories in products it sells for school vending machines.

-Campbell is promoting soups that are lower in calories, fat and sodium, and offering additional products with less sodium.

-Dannon is reducing the sugar content of its Danimals drinkable yogurt by 25 percent.

Some states and school districts already have strict limits on food sold outside the government-regulated school lunch and breakfast programs. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest in a survey of states found that two-thirds of them had either extremely weak policies on snack foods or no policy at all.

Dr. Thomas Robinson, associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine and director of the Center for Healthy Weight at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, takes the long view: “This problem is similar to what happened to tobacco over the last several decades; things happened incrementally,” Dr. Robinson said.

Mr. Clinton reminded his audience that problems of this magnitude aren’t solved in a day.

“We didn’t get in this fix overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight,” he said.