What’s the choice?

As parents, we’re often told to give our children choices. This will offer kids a sense of power and provide them with the notion that they are capable, independent people able to make good decisions on their own. Attempting to employ this technique when my boys were younger, I would often find myself offering them a choice between what I wanted them to do and something horrible. Say, “Well, daaaarling, if you don’t like dinner, you can make a choice to sit here and eat like a civilized person with the rest of the family or you can choose to go upstairs to your bedroom and be all by yourself while the rest of us enjoy ourselves (and, oh yeah, no dessert).”

I’m not sure that was what the parenting experts meant, but it worked for a while.

I was thinking about it this week when a YouTube video made by high school students in Toronto complaining about the provincial ban on junk food in cafeterias made the rounds.

The gist of the student’s argument—told using a KONY2012-inspired style—was that because of the new “healthier” offerings in the caf, most of the kids are leaving school grounds to eat lunch. School boards, they said, are losing money, and kids are still eating junk. The narrator argued that since adults are always talking about how kids need opportunities to make good choices—why not give high school students a choice in what they eat?

How school lunch can change the world

This is part two in a week-long conversation with Jeannie Marshall, author of the brilliant Outside the Box: Why Our Children Need Real Food, Not Food Products.

For those of you who missed yesterday’s installment, the book is part manifesto, part family story.  It’s about the disappearance of “real food,” as the title suggests, but more than anything, it’s about the value of  “food culture” in ensuring a healthy and sustainable food system for kids and adults alike. Jeannie’s easy-to-read style and chilling, clear-eyed marshalling of the facts makes it a standout among books about food and children.

Today, how Italian kids learn to love spinach and stinging nettles because of their school lunch. (For more on Italian school lunch, check out my interview with two Roman schoolchildren here.)

Check back all week for more from Jeannie Marshall and Outside the Box.

Q: In your book, you suggest that school lunch could be the factor that can change a food culture for the better. Tell me how you imagine this might work in Canada (or elsewhere).

Jeannie Marshall: School lunch is an amazing, though mostly squandered, opportunity. Children exert such an incredible influence over each other’s tastes, and that influence can be harnessed for the good of their health if children are allowed to eat a communal meal at school. There are destructive things going on in Italy at the moment in terms of food and children because of the influence of the food industry. But one thing that still works in most of the country is the school lunch program.

My son Nico is now going to a different school than the one I describe in Outside the Box, but the lunch is still set up in mostly the same way. He sits with his classmates and his teacher at a table set with placemats, napkins and cutlery. The teacher facilitates a group conversation and gently corrects their table manners while they eat. Just looking at the menu for today I can tell you that Nico and his classmates are eating pasta with tomatoes and basil for their first course, and then they will have a frittata with a green salad for a second course and pears for desert. The food is all organic and mostly local. The important thing here is that there is one menu. There are no choices, though the school will make exceptions for children with genuine allergies (but there are few).

Slow food in schools

At my son’s school, lunch is eaten in a mad dash to recess. When we are resignedly (and with more than a touch of irritation) cleaning out his lunch box of half eaten sandwiches or barely touched pasta and browned apples, he says (pre-emptively), “But I diiiiidn’t have tiiiiiime….”

The lunchroom, frankly, isn’t conducive to eating slowly—or eating at all. It’s a gym the rest of the day—a place for running and throwing and playing. And the reality is, they don’t have a lot of time before they’re shuffled out the door.

Photograph of a typical Canadian lunch from What's for Lunch? copyright Yvonne Duivenvoorden

I was thinking about this the other day when someone asked me about what kind of research had been done on the benefits of slow food (in the broader sense rather than the Slow Food Movement) in schools. The idea of slowing down, enjoying your food, having conversations around the table, taking pleasure in the meal is about as far from the average Canadian lunchroom as Pluto from the Sun.

But there are some schools—Canadian and otherwise—working to change all that.

Kids can change the food system

I’ve written about FoodShare here many times before. But when it comes to kids and food in Canada, they are true leaders, getting out in front of the issue of school meals and, especially in the last two years, food literacy. As executive director Debbie Field says in this new short video about their work, social change happens when kids get engaged by an idea. Changing children’s eating habits and attitudes will help change the food system.

I couldn’t agree more. My favourite part of writing What’s for Lunch? was talking to and reading about kids who’d taken action around their school food. (Read more stories about kids taking charge here, here and here.)  FoodShare imagines a time when not only will we have a universal school nutrition program, no Canadian child will graduate from high school without having had food education as part of the curriculum.

The Great Big Crunch, FoodShare’s annual apple love-in to promote healthy, local eating is coming up March 8th. Schools and teachers can sign up and access great resource material here.

What’s for lunch in France?

Whenever anyone sees the proofs of What’s for Lunch?, my upcoming book on how schoolchildren eat around the world (not a huge focus group, I admit, since the book hasn’t been published yet, but significant enough), they always say they wish they lived in France.

The French school lunch in the book is, indeed, delicious looking.

From What's for Lunch? Photograph copyright Yvonne Duivenvoorden

Maybe it’s the presentation: real cutlery, real plates. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a four-course balanced meal. Maybe it’s the cheese.

But the kids in France definitely have it made with school lunch. (The Italians don’t do too badly, either.)

A big part of the fact that French schoolchildren have such a well-conceived meal at school is the emphasis on food as culture in French society. Where else is “taste” such a celebrated sense?

Karen Le Billon knows this intimately. A Canadian author and teacher now based in Vancouver, her book, French Kids Eat Everything, is coming out this spring.

When she and her family moved to France (to her husband’s hometown) a couple of years ago,  she was forced, she writes, to “question some of her most basic assumptions about food and parenting. Gradually, she [began] to see the wisdom in a simple set of rules that govern French food education.”

Note the combination of food and education. Not words we see in such close proximity very much here at home.

In advance of the book’s publication, Le Billon is blogging regularly about French school lunches in various towns around the country. Seems last week in Nice, in the south of France (a town I, incidentally, consider the birthplace of my own love of food), the children were eating as well as ever. Here’s the menu according to Le Billon:

“Monday…

Celery salad with vinaigrette dressing
Fresh salmon filet, with ciboulette sauce
Organic rice
Cheese: Coulommiers
Dessert: Vanilla ice-cream.”

With meals like that I guess it’s no surprise that French children have some of the lowest rates of obesity in Europe. I’ll take the salmon filet, s’il vous plaît.

The protein question

I’ve written before about my 12-year-old son who decided he’d become a vegetarian when he was 8. You have to hand it to the kid: he’s never wavered. Not for a pepperoni pizza, not for fresh smallmouth bass caught by his dad, not for gummy bears or marshmallows made with gelatin.

Luckily, he’s willing to try new things and genuinely likes beans and most vegetables. He’s even becoming interested in cooking—thanks, in large part, to the fact that his middle school has mandatory classes in cooking and baking, a rarity these days.

Lunch in a bowl: vegetarian soup for all reasons

And his decision has definitely had a huge impact on our family’s eating habits. The rest of us now eat meat only occasionally (maybe once a week), and rarely cook it at home. For the record, I don’t think everyone has to go veg, though, as most people have heard, there is growing evidence showing a plant-based diet is better for your health—not to mention the environment.

But all this growing awareness about eating less meat doesn’t stop everyone (and I mean everyone) from asking us worriedly how we get our growing (and athletic) child to eat enough protein. From now on, I will offer my standard “did you know broccoli is a great protein source?” and send them directly to Michele Simon’s scathing article: Protein propaganda: it’s what’s for dinner in Grist.

Simon points to the powerful meat lobby and its stranglehold on our collective food conscience. She argues: “One way to distract attention away from heart attacks and colon cancer is to conflate the idea of meat with a nutrient that we do in fact need: protein.”

Grist is doing an entire series called Protein Angst trying to break down the rhetoric about this incredibly controversial subject. I’ll definitely be watching it.

School lunch rules

The big news in lunch this week was the USDA released its new standards for school meals. Pizza will still be considered a vegetable and the french fry lobby maintained its hold on the list of acceptable foods (and still isn’t happy that “the potato is being downplayed,” reports the New York Times), but according to observers like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, these new standards are the best ever, representing “one of the most important advancements in nutrition in decades.”

New nutrition standards: does that mean no more Frito pie?

The USA will now join countries around the world that offer healthy guidelines for school meals.

Salt will be limited, no trans fats allowed, kids will be offered a wider variety of fruits and veg, milk will be low fat and whole grains are prioritized. School lunch providers will get an additional six cents per school lunch in order to achieve these new standards. (USA Today offers a few more details here.)

It’s about time.

But the fight for healthy school lunches is not over. The new standards will be phased in over time, there will no doubt be food companies looking for ways to cut costs, and the amount provided per meal may simply not be enough in the first place. Vigilance is necessary.

Check out Bettina Elias Siegel‘s always excellent analysis at The Lunch Tray for more on the Good, Bad and Ugly of the new standards. I also thought Mrs. Q., of Fed Up with School Lunch fame, did a nice job expressing how parents can help improve school lunch in her babble.com column.

Incidentally, Mrs. Q. posted an interesting piece about lunch ladies. Seems the staff of Chicago school cafeterias were actually asked what they think about school lunch. More evidence of their makeover, methinks.

Lunch lady makeover

For years, in movies and books, the lunch lady was a symbol of all that was wrong with school (and school lunch). They were the kids’ version of the Russian character in almost every North American movie from the 1950s to 1990s—shorthand for villain.  (Now you know someone’s bad in an adult movie if they smoke cigarettes.)

A (very) quick search uncovered book titles ranging from Killer Lunch Lady to Revenge of the Lunch Ladies to Attack of the Mutant Lunch Lady and Help! I’m Trapped in my Lunch Lady’s Body.

Those poor lunch ladies couldn’t get a break—as if they were solely responsible for the nasty food served in so many school cafeterias.

Now that school lunch is being reclaimed—not least by the self-proclaimed “Renegade Lunch Lady” herself, Ann Cooper—the ladies of the lunchroom are faring slightly better in the world of pop culture.

Take the Fly Guy series, one of my 7-year-old son’s favourites.

These hilarious and  easy-to-read books follow a pair of googly-eyed friends, one a boy (Buzz), the other a fly (Fly Guy). Fly Guy loves garbage soup, piles of dirt, smelly mops and dirty dishes, and the pair have many icky adventures over the 10 books in the series. In Super Fly Guy, our little hero finds happiness in the lunchroom.

At first, it seems like the lunch lady hates him, but the good woman is swayed by his intelligence and feeds him chicken bones and fish heads in sour milk (served with a straw). Her boss, however, isn’t pleased that she’s entertaining flies in the lunchroom and fires her. Everyone is sad since the lunch lady was actually a good cook!

There’s also a graphic novel series for older readers about a superhero Lunch Lady—”serving justice and serving lunch”!—by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. Named 3rd and 4th Grade books of the year in 2010 and 2011 at the Children’s Choice Awards, the series is reportedly being made into a live action movie with Amy Poehler. This lunch lady fights cyborg substitutes, evil authors and swamp monsters using only her wits, food gadgets (a banana boomerang, a lunch tray laptop) and floods of sloppy joe mix.

From super villain to superhero, the ladies who (make) lunch have truly had a makeover. Now if school lunch itself could only get the same super treatment…

Nourish

nourishlife.org

Nourish: Food + Community is a brilliant and beautifully produced education initiative that includes films, curriculum ideas and activities, information as well as a place for learning about other schools and communities that are taking charge of what they eat and grow. Created by WorldLink, Nourish’s curriculum element was developed by the Center for Ecoliteracy. This is an incredible package and much of it is available free.

School garden inspiration

Guest post by Nick Saul, The Stop Community Food Centre

When it comes to school gardens, The Edible Schoolyard gets all the attention.

And after my trip to California this past week to take part in the American Community Food Security Coalition conference, including a tour of Alice Waters’ brainchild, I can say it definitely lives up to the hype. The grounds are beautiful and interesting, with an integrated garden and kitchen, chickens, a bake oven and what looks like ample resources.But we also made a pitstop in Oakland at a place called the Cleveland School. It’s a school that serves a very diverse community and doesn’t have the star power of a celebrity chef behind it, but they’ve managed to create quite an amazing little oasis on a relatively small amount of land.

The story we were told on our tour is that at her job interview a teacher told the principal that the yard was really, well, ugly. The principal shrugged and said, whaddaya want to do about it?

The answer was this amazing outdoor classroom. With the help of parents, kids, teachers as well as interns from AmeriCorps and Berkeley’s Center for Ecoliteracy, they now have a program that includes science and math as well as health and sustainable living. Kids enjoy regular taste testings and garden-related festivals—including Vegetable Soup Day, Harvest Festival and Little Red Hen Day. The gardens are mostly tended after school but teachers spend quite a bit of time outdoors with their students. During the summer, Family Farmers are provided with a training session and take care of the plot.

I was especially struck by the quantity and quality of the signage they have all over the schoolyard. It is fun and informative and makes sense of the garden for both outsiders and the kids who read/see them everyday.

I was also intrigued by the sun clock painted on the pavement. Sun clocks are human sundials, which use a person’s own shadow to tell the time. (There’s a company in the U.K. that will do all the complex measurements required to set it up for your school’s longitude and latitude.) I imagine that the kids love trying it out, and there are also tons of teaching applications.

But the best part to me is that this whole project started out so simply and has become such a big part of the school. A very inspiring place.