School lunch, long derided by kids and nutritionists alike, isn't what it used to be.
In St. Paul students are getting winter squash, corn on the cob and apples from local farmers. In Minneapolis corn dogs are off the menu and whole chicken breasts are on. This fall, Minneapolis high schools will serve pizza only every other day, and french fries are history.
"The kids complained, of course," said Rosemary Dederichs, head of food service for Minneapolis public schools. "But fruit and vegetable consumption has skyrocketed."
School cafeterias have become the frontline of the war on child obesity, and battle stories were featured at a two-day conference in Minneapolis this week. The event was sponsored by the Grains for Health Foundation, a St. Paul group that promotes grain consumption, and inspired by a set of federal recommendations that could soon require many schools to offer meals with less salt, more fruits and vegetables, and 50 percent whole-grain products.
"It's a big shift," said Lisa Harnack, a University of Minnesota nutritionist who served on the Institute of Medicine committee that made the new recommendations to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The driving question of this week's conference, which drew experts from around the country, was how the heck they're going to get the kids to eat whole-wheat pizza.
In part, said Bill Dietz, a childhood obesity expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's a marketing problem.
"Consumers equate health with poor taste," he said.
But, Dietz added, national attention to the childhood obesity epidemic creates an opportunity "that we cannot afford to ignore" to change the health of a whole generation.
Several experts from the food processing industry said they are already developing products that are more than 50 percent whole grain. They admitted that whole-grain products are harder to make, well, palatable and tend to have a more bitter taste and a shorter shelf life.
Nevertheless, they are dreaming up new ways to fool kids into thinking they are eating something unhealthy -- such as white whole wheat, which seems like a contradiction in terms. It's a type of wheat with a white or white-ish hull. When processed into a hamburger bun or pizza crust, it's not brown but sort of white.
That's one of the many tricks of the trade called "masking."
There's some debate, however, among school food service professionals about whether that's the right thing to do with kids.
Kristy Obbink, the head of food service for the public schools in Portland, Ore., said she thinks it's a mistake.
"We don't do stealth nutrition," she said.
Taking risks
Part of Obbink's job is educating kids about lifelong health habits -- and that includes understanding that whole grains are brown.
Sometimes she's had to pay a price for that.
The Portland school system, which now buys 34 percent of its products from local farmers and producers, tried whole-wheat tortillas for burritos a couple of times, but each time consumption dropped. The schools finally went back to white, she said. Next year, they will try whole-wheat pizza crusts.
Making such changes in the menu presents a big risk for in-school food services. They generally operate like little businesses within the school system. Often, as in Portland and Minneapolis, the food services get no food budget from the school board. It has to survive on the money from the USDA to provide free and reduced price meals -- about $2.68 per lunch -- and from the pockets of students. As a result, maintaining participation among students is key to their financial health.
"Are we nervous?" she told the audience. "Yes. Will it drop? Yes. Will it come back up? Maybe."
So sometimes compromises have to be made. In Portland, Obbink said, she wanted to find a way to provide local produce during the winter. She contracted with a processing company to can black cherries from a local farmer.
"The kids hated them," she said. She bent her no-dessert rule and served up cherry cobbler.
"They loved it," she said with a resigned shrug.
Josephine Marcotty • 612-673-7394