Happy Halloween, everyone.  I hope you’re feasting on something better than an SFUSD lunch (perhaps BRAINS??? nom nom nom).  Michael Bauer, SF Chronicle food critic and blogger, writes here about his adventure in SFUSD school lunches.  Newsflash: they’re not good. The travesty that is the school lunch system has been all over the news lately (here, here, here, everywhere; methinks Revolution Foods‘ PR team hath been here), which is a bit of a surprise to me – what grizzled veteran of public school lunches didn’t grow up on reconstituted potatoes, frozen mystery meats, and salty canned veggies?  It hardly seems like news.  But it’s great to see these awful lunches framed as a real problem; as one facet of the growing movement to reform the food industry and grow good eaters, it’s great to see people paying attention to the food system that is embedded in public schools. As a teacher in a low-income school in Silicon Valley, it was depressing to see towers of Domino’s pizza boxes delivered to the school to be parceled out with chocolate milk and frozen orange juice; to see that Hot Cheetos, which many of my kids ate two or three times a day, were for sale before, during, and after school.  (Rare was the student who bucked norms by bringing a lunch; those who didn’t eat junk food ate nothing.)  For 13 years of my life, I ate two daily meals in a place where ketchup and french fries each counted as a serving of vegetables, and that’s probably why I’m looking at the picture above and thinking “mmm… chili dog.”  From the perspective of a foodie like Bauer, an SFUSD lunch must have come as quite a shock, but in truth, I looked at this meal and thought “well, at least there are real fruits and vegetables on that tray.” What was a surprise to me was the waste:  gone are the days when lunch ladies create your chicken tetrazzini and sloppy joes on-site. Like airline meals, today’s school lunches of mystery meat and frozen vegetables are shipped to schools in single-serving containers and reheated in the “prep area” (because the school “multi-purpose room” is not a cafeteria and does not have a kitchen).

Looking over the cafeteria line, it was like looking at a grocer’s shelf: every item was packaged in plastic, including the plastic sporks at the end of the line.

And in addition to the incredible amount of packaging, most of the food becomes waste as well:

the children have to pick up at least three items. Most of it, unfortunately, goes in the compost bin in the middle of the cafeteria.

Even those school-lunch providers who are trying to change the system, like Revolution Foods, have to work within a food-production system where it’s more economical to deliver factory-produced, single-serving lunch modules than to hire people for on-site food prep.  In schools that lack the funds to hire enough teachers or adequately maintain facilities, the dream of reducing waste seems impossibly optimistic.  (If I’m remembering correctly, Rev Foods containers are reuseable, and they pick them up afterwards.  Is this also true for SFUSD?  I can’t tell from the picture.) It was great to have Revolution Foods delivering organic and nutritious hot lunches to most Aim High sites this summer – as compared to the revolting Mayor’s Lunch program meals of years past, it was a huge improvement in taste, nutrition, and health education.  We are hopeful that we can continue to offer good food in coming summers.  Moreover, we hope to see more articles like this one, more people getting riled up about the deplorable nutritional content of school food and more people rejecting the fast-food mentality that is institutionalized when junk food is served to those who have no other options.