Wednesday, March 10, 2010
S.F. students ask Pelosi for better school food

Dear Speaker Pelosi,
Something is wrong with my lunch!
The veggies are brown and have lost their crunch!
We want good food to munch!
We need healthy foods to learn and grow,
corn beans, and potatoes, ya know?
Please, please, please, please, etc.,
help us have better food.
Thank you,
Derek Kong

This is one of the many messages written on the paper plates S.F. public school students adorned with requests to improve public school food and presented yesterday to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

Students from 25 schools decorated over 2,000 paper plates with poems, splashes of paint, Chinese characters, illustrations of dancing fruit and vegetables–all heartfelt cries for better food in schools.

Lena Brook, a parent at Grattan Elementary and founder of the SF School Food Coalition <sfschoolfood.org> , organized the effort, and yesterday Brook brought all the plates to Jose Ortega Elementary School where the children’s art was handed over to Nancy Pelosi’s deputy district director Melanie Nutter at a special assembly.

The assembly kicked off with Jose Ortega P.E. teacher Michael Gomez leading the audience — some 260 kids, including my own daughter who attends the school — in jumping jacks, making the point that exercise is an important part of being healthy.

“Every one jump as high as you can,” Gomez called out.

The gymnasium seemed to be filled with giant frogs as the kids leaped high into the air.

Jose Ortega students Shania Dubose and Guenne Sarmient want to see fresher foods in S.F. public schools.

With a fresh head of lettuce and a loaf of organic bread in their hands, fifth graders Shania Dubose and Guenne Sarmient got up on stage and made their case for better food at school. “As members of the student body council we think the school should serve healthier food that kids want to eat,” one of them said.

And the Jose Ortega nutritionist Megan Blanton made a speech, “The food choices you make now will help you set a pattern for life-long healthy habits,” she said.

Next, Brook made a presentation and explained that she organized the Paper Plate Campaign because The Child Nutrition Act is moving through reauthorization in the coming weeks and months. The funding for school meals programs is allocated through the Child Nutrition Act. This is how San Francisco pays for the over $5 million meals served to the city’s public school children every year.

SFUSD’s food is provided by Chicago-based Preferred Meal Systems <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?blogid=46&entry_id=50855> , and while it meets the USDA standards and is considered “healthy,” it’s a far cry from the fresh-tasting meals that many students, parents and administrators would like to be served in local schools.

“By creating a strong and well-funded Child Nutrition Act, Congress has the power to give school districts and food service directors the resources they desperately need to improve school meals,” Brook said. “First and foremost, we ask that reimbursement levels be increased by at least $1 per child in order to improve food quality. Second, it is crucial that the 2010 Child Nutrition Act improve access to school food for more children by increasing reimbursement levels in high cost areas and revising income eligibility requirements to reflect the widely differing costs of living throughout the country.”

Currently, the Federal Government reimburses the district up to $2.70 per meal for those who qualify for free or reduced lunch–roughly more than half of all students in the SFUSD qualify. Unfortunately, only $1.75 of that money is actually spent on food. The remainder is used to fund operational expenses.

The assembly ended with Nutter accepting the bags brimming with paper plates and a board showing off 15 especially creative ones. “I will hang this in Pelosi’s office and she will see it when she’s back here in April,” Nutter said.

“Although it is a tough fiscal environment for all issues in Congress, the Speaker will continue to work with her colleagues to move the Child Nutritional Reauthorization Act soon since improving children’s health is one of the Speaker’s top priorities,” Nutter added. “I will make sure the Speaker knows of my visit here today and will relay your messages about the Child Nutrition Act to her.”

His wish for this prize is “… for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

Here is a link to the video of his acceptance speech, where he speaks eloquently about the damage that obesity is doing to our youth and to the crucial importance of transforming school food environments. There is even a great visual about sugar-laden milk in schools.

Check it out below:

The first, Fed Up: School Lunch Project, is a personal account of an Illinois teacher’s experiences as she eats school lunch on a daily basis in 2010. The year is still young but already, her chronicles are compelling, and the photos very worthwhile to peruse.

American Lunch Room is another blog dedicated to the visual representation of schools meals. Though this is also a relatively new effort, started in summer 2009, it is building an important archive of both unappetizing and pleasing school lunches. No submissions of SFUSD are on the site as of yet but the lone California representative – a Berkeley lunch of chicken tacos – does look delicious.

SFUSD, like most other Districts in the country, is working hard on the user end to ensure that our kids are not sickened by tainted meat. This is too much responsibility for school districts to bear. The NSLP cannot continue to be a dumping ground for the meat industry’s dregs. With reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act upon us, there needs to public pressure to improve standards nationwide. And most importantly, increased budgets for higher quality meat when it is served.

My colleague Charles Margulis at the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland recently posted this piece on the Generation Green blog. If you are as compelled – and grossed out – by his excellent summation of all that is wrong with beef these days, read the rest here:

Hamburger Helper? Slime, Ammonia and Cow Shit

In our ongoing series “There’s WHAT in My Food?”, we submit for your reading pleasure (though probably not while you’re eating) our comments on a stunning New York Times investigation that exposed how an ammonia-treated beef filler used in 50% of the nation’s ground beef (possibly up to 80%, according to one industry source) has repeatedly been found contaminated with deadly e. coli and salmonella, despite claims that the ammonia-bathed product would actually eliminate the harmful bacteria.

Meat maker Beef Products Inc (BPI) created a product the beef industry loves. Prior to BPI’s innovation, the slimiest, nastiest slaughterhouse scraps were used primarily for pet food (while the fatty bits were rendered for various oil-based food and non-food products). But in the late 1990’s, BPI began experimenting with ways to take these dirty, feces-stained scraps and turn them into, well, dirty, feces-contaminated burger filler…

http://generationgreen.org/?p=661

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Today’s SF Chronicle (and sfgate.com) brought attention to the fact that SFUSD has been cited for serious violations of the National School Lunch Program, enough so that federal reimbursement has been withheld for six months. From where I sit, this is a sympton of a decades long decline in investment in this program, in combination with what appear to arcane and arbitrary rules put forth by the program architects at the USDA. I am hoping that when inspectors return to our schools this fall, they will find us back in compliance and reinstate reimbursements. And that this experience sparks the much needed culture change around food at SFUSD.

You can find the article here.

What do you think? What can parents do to help?

Keep spreading the word and supporting the teachers, principals and garden coordinators who are making idea a reality!

We are planning to collect the decorated plates during the week of November 9th. Stay tuned for more details.

The following schools are working on Paper Plates for Pelosi:

Buena Vista; Monroe; Rooftop; Grattan; Flynn; Sunset; RL Stevenson; Ulloa; Francis Scott Key; Commodore Sloat; Fairmount; Jefferson; McKinley; Sunnyside; Creative Arts Charter; Miraloma; Claremont; Argonne; John Yehall Chin;