area parents are pushing for healthier school lunches

One Seacoast middle school lunch menu lists hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets and, once a week, pizza. While these entrees are sometimes supplemented with celery sticks or peas and carrots, some parents and educators want to see more healthy food delivered to schools fresh from local farms.

The Dining Facility Council in Dover has been meeting every two months for about two years to improve school lunches and increase student wellness through healthier eating. One member, Amy Winans, hopes to make a difference before her young children enroll in school.

“It takes time,” she said. “It’s also ingenuity, getting people to think outside of the box.”

Eventually, she’d like to see a strong Farm to School program, as well as gardens at the schools, working in collaboration with local farmers.

Winans acknowledges that making changes will require collaboration with food service employees, teachers, school nurses, parents and school board members. The group is seeking grants to help make it happen.

So far, many area schools have made improvements, removing Frialators from kitchens and soda from vending machines.

The group has divided into subcommittees that are working with dietetic interns from the University of New Hampshire to tackle another list of goals next semester. Winans is a lecturer in the department of hospitality management at UNH.

“I love food,” she said, adding that it’s not just the taste, but nutrition and sustainability that she cares about. She said upcoming generations are at a disadvantage because there is so much processed or prepared food being served to them. Students will perform better in school if they eat better, she said.

Goals for next semester include introducing a nutrient dense recipe from scratch that can be used in all schools; incorporating more whole grains in current recipes and menus; adding fresh fruits and vegetables and making them visible to students; and using dietetic software to track nutritional information for recipes and flag foods that contain trans fats in an effort to eliminate them.

In area elementary schools, the Dining Facility Council plans to conduct cooking demos and a tasting in each cafeteria, focusing on fresh and local ingredients and introducing a fresh fruit and vegetable table. In the middle and high schools, they want to market healthy foods to students and create posters to hang in the cafeterias, as well as a labeling system with nutritional informational for each dish.
Pat Laska, nutrition director for the Portsmouth School District, said most school food comes from an annually awarded contract with a major wholesale supplier. But, the district does participate in the Farm to School program and gets some local produce. She said that can be difficult, though, because schools have to abide by strict health and safety regulations.

Laska would like to see more organic foods in public schools but says they are expensive. The same goes for making meals from scratch, since the cost of labor already makes up about 55 percent of the food services budget. “We have to watch every penny that we spend,” she said.

Laska said some schools in other parts of the country now grow their own produce, but they charge more for meals and still struggle to break even. “It takes a community commitment for that kind of effort,” she said.

A wellness committee based in Portsmouth has begun introducing students at the Little Harbor School to different healthy food items at the salad bar during lunch. Recently, it was fresh spinach. Kids who try the food are awarded with a sticker.

The New Hampshire Farm to School Program started in 2003 as a pilot program to introduce local apples and cider into schools. Within three years, more than half of the schools in the state were purchasing the items for their cafeterias. Most of the schools now order local apples and cider directly through their distributors, while some purchase directly from farmers. Seacoast farms include Apple Annie in Brentwood and Applecrest Farm Orchard in Hampton Falls.

In 2006, a new pilot program called the Get Smart Eat Local 10-District project began to help build and strengthen direct farm-to-cafeteria relationships and introduce new local foods in the schools. This effort focuses on one wholesale grower and 10 school districts, or 27 schools, in Rockingham and Strafford counties.

Currently, the effort is being expanded with a fresh fruit and vegetable program to develop new connections between schools, produce distributors and area wholesale vegetable growers. Targeted schools receive grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on the student body having at least 50 percent eligibility for free and reduced rate lunch programs.