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Lunch Lessons School Cafeteria Manager Tries to Get Students to Make Healthy Choices

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

At Southeast Middle School's lunch counter, a row of chef salads sits next to the day's plentiful main courses: cheese pizza and chicken sandwiches.

The students generally pass up the fresh salads for the more popular - and more fattening - pizza or chicken sandwiches, but Melissa Parrino, the cafeteria's longtime manager, knows if she can lure her young customers to occasionally pick up a salad, she has a potential convert.

"When we first started seven years ago, it was maybe 20 a day. Each year it has increased," said Parrino, a trained dietitian and former Southeast Middle student. "Now it's about 40 or 50 a day" of the large salads loaded with cheese and ham.

Each salad she sells is a small victory in Parrino's battle to persuade children to make more healthy dietary choices. It's a fight she's very successful waging with her own three children, but she struggles with her public school family.

For some of Parrino's customers, particularly the teenage girls, the salads help them lose or control their weight.

She knows a girl who has lost more than 5 percent of her weight by eating salads. Such behavior is important as schools confront more and more childhood obesity. The state estimates that one in three Louisiana schoolchildren is overweight.

But several students interviewed by The Advocate said they choose the salads because they taste better than the other cafeteria meals. They especially like the homemade low-fat ranch and herbal vinaigrette dressings they slather on top.

"I don't know what's so good about it," said Dentavius Wright, an eighth-grader. "It's just great."

Occasionally he has to explain his choice to friends.

"They think it's because I'm on a diet," he said, which he says he's not.

Losing the war

Parrino's small salad victories hint at the role school cafeterias can play in improving the diets of schoolchildren.

If she could make her regular fare as nutritious and tasty as her salads, she knows she could have a much bigger impact on children's nutrition.

"I would have a lot less pre-prepared things," she said. "I would have more skilled cooks. We would cook a meal that was more than just breaded chicken patties."

She would need, however, to be able to buy more fresh ingredients. Currently, she stocks canned and prepared food that arrives free, courtesy of the federal government, such as ground beef, chicken, dried milk and various canned fruits and vegetables.

To eliminate excess fat and to limit labor costs, the school system pays to have the meat reprocessed and sent back as patties.

For a while last year, Parrino was even getting free fresh fruit, but it didn't last.

She has some success by taking foods with which local children are less familiar and slipping them into foods that they like, such as desserts. But not everything. Not prunes.

"They are so hard to disguise. I chop them up and put them in pies," she said. "They hate that."

Serving salads is a Parrino initiative and it means more work for her. The salads tie up staff with extra prep time and involve a fair amount of paperwork. Consequently, many local school cafeterias don't bother, she said.

In a perfect world, Parrino said, she would install a salad bar. It would cost too much for her to have staff to maintain it - children can be pretty messy - but she thinks it would be a hit.

"I'd love to do like they do at Jason's Deli," she said. "If I could have those great big olives, and great big spinach leaves, I would."

Parrino did as much at The Dunham School, where two of her children attend. When her second oldest daughter began there three years ago, Parrino was surprised to see that the school did not have an in-house lunch program. So when she learned that the school was interested in the concept, she worked with the school and other health professionals to develop a lunch program there, complete with a salad bar.

A question of money

One reason Parrino can't run a more healthful lunch program for the public school system, not surprisingly, goes back to money.

The school system spends about $3.50 per lunch served and $1.75 per breakfast; however, it charges no more than $1.70 for lunch and breakfast is free, said Gail Johnson, assistant Superintendent for Auxiliary Services. Parrino controls only her food costs where she can spend no more than 67 cents a meal.

"You might be able to find a few things on the kids menu (for those prices)," said Tom Weatherly, vice president for the Louisiana Restaurant Association. "Not many restaurateurs would want to live on those margins."

Weatherly said he understands Parrino's situation. The greater proportion of its budget a restaurant spends on food and labor costs, generally the higher the quality and nutritional value, but also the higher the price, he said.

Like most school districts, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system achieves its low meal costs by paying its starting food servers as little as $6 an hour and by relying mostly on the foods provided free by the federal government.

During the past several years, Johnson and her staff have earned much praise for improved efficiency and cost-saving, along the way building a surplus that has dwindled only recently.

Before those moves, cafeterias varied widely in quality and selection. Now, they all prepare food from a standardized menu, which also incidentally saves money by allowing for bulk purchasing.

The menus were developed six years ago by the state, and about half the school districts have adopted them. The items were tested at schools across the state to make sure children would actually eat them. So, in with the breakfast pizza and chicken nuggets, and out with white beans on rice and roast beef and gravy.

The items also were developed to meet minimum federal dietary standards. They don't exceed benchmarks for calories, proteins, minerals, total fat and saturated fat. They include less salt and fat than school lunches used to.

In East Baton Rouge Parish, the school system adds some nutritious touches. The portion sizes are carefully controlled. Packets of milk have vitamin C added. No food is fried. Meat items are half ground beef, half turkey. Hot dogs are made with turkey. Sandwiches are topped with low-fat cheese. Chicken patties are made with only white meat.

As times have changed, the menu has as well. The system no longer serves doughnuts at breakfast, and this year has stopped selling whole milk.

The menus do allow Parrino to make a limited number of substitutions and additions. But for any changes, she's got to figure out how to pay for them and she has to find the time to prepare them.

Nadine Mann, director of child nutrition for East Baton Rouge Parish, said the school system tries to balance what's good for children with what they will eat.

"Our menus are really based on what they like," she said.

Children's consumer choices have a big effect on modern school cafeterias. If Parrino can't persuade a child to take three of the five menu options she has each day, the federal government won't reimburse her for that meal. Federal money covers about two-thirds of Parrino's costs.

In a similar vein, if her daily participation drops below 300 students - it's currently about 700, or about 90 percent of the students - under school system rules, Southeast Middle's kitchen would close and meals would be prepared elsewhere and shipped to the school. This has happened at many smaller schools.

But, as any parent knows, letting children pick what they want will not produce a satisfactory result - from the adult perspective, that is.

As children go through Parrino's lunch line, they can be very choosy. Some fruits, such as slices of canned peaches, are snapped up. But vegetables, such as boiled canned peas, can be a hard sell.

Some children can't be sold at all.

"There are those kids who no matter what you serve, it's not as good as mommy's cooking," Parrino said.

Home cooking

The constraints that limit Parrino at her work kitchen don't limit her at home.

She insists on cooking for her family most nights. Over the years, she has cut back on the butter that used to saturate her dishes.

A peek in her refrigerator reveals a host of fresh fruits and vegetables. She buys diet cola these days, not the Cokes she used to purchase. She does stock pizza rolls - "I try to keep that to a minimum because they would eat that all the time," she said.

Her children know what's coming because they help pick it out.

"We encourage the kids to come grocery shopping with us," she said. "I want to know what they want to eat."

At a recent dinner, she served a venison stew prepared in a Crock- Pot. It was full of herbs and potatoes, and accompanied by a fresh and varied garden salad. Many of the ingredients came straight from the herb garden she's cultivated for the past 15 years.

She also bakes her own bread, though on this day she forgot to serve the spinach bread she had labored over.

Dinners are usually a family affair. On this night, her parents, who live on the same street, stopped by. Her oldest daughter, who attends LSU, also fought Baton Rouge traffic to eat a home-cooked meal.

Her youngest son, John, 14, once a fast-food lover, is also likely to be in the kitchen.

She said he started cooking when he was 5 years old. He saw her preparing a salad and told her, "I think I can do that," and started chopping with her.

"Actually, he is more adept peeling potatoes with a knife than I am; he loves that," Parrino said. "He loves to grill. I have to watch him. He makes great spaghetti. He made ravioli last night."

Her children's maturity about food is clear to her friends.

"People comment to us that they love to have our kids come to their house, because they like real food," she said.

The Parrino home often has visitors.

"Not a lot of my friends' moms are cooks," her daughter, Katie, said. "A lot of my friends will come here."

Getting children to eat healthy is a balancing act. If Parrino pushes healthful food without giving children something they like, it can backfire. She has a friend, a dietician, who keeps only health food in the house.

"She does not have anything in her house like potato chips. I feel sorry for the kids, because they go to people's houses and they gorge," she said.

Changing mission

The federal government originally began subsidizing school lunches to combat widespread hunger among children. The logic was simple: A hungry child is not likely to do well in school.

In arresting hunger, the school lunches, and more recently breakfasts, have done what they were supposed to do: They are the only reliable meals many children eat each week.

At the same time, the nation's epidemic of childhood obesity is putting pressure on school lunchrooms to help solve this crisis.

Poverty exacerbates this problem as well. Beside irregular meals, children living in poverty are increasingly eating fast food and prepackaged food high in saturated fats. The adults at home often know little of what constitutes a proper diet and they pass this incomplete knowledge on to their children, often to their detriment.

By fall 2006, school systems, as a requirement of the federal food money they get, are being compelled to implement wellness programs to get children to learn more about nutrition and to exercise more.

Baton Rouge is planning to test a program at eight schools this school year, but the federal government has thus far put up no new money to finance a wellness program. School officials are seeking grants instead.

In a study at one inner-city Baton Rouge middle school last year, 37 percent of the children were considered significantly overweight. East Baton Rouge Parish nurses are measuring obesity in all the children in the school system.

Parrino has seen the changes in her decades in public schools. When she can, she will teach lessons on nutrition. In years past, she's taught about the science of the diet.

The students she sees every day have so much to learn about food and what to eat.

But the opportunities for these lessons grow fewer and fewer as standardized tests dominate students' and teachers' time, she said.

"We are so geared to passing these tests," she lamented.

Nevertheless, Parrino, in addition to her day job, is serving as the wellness coordinator for the child nutrition program.

She knows she's got an uphill battle.

Beside better food choices, students and parents need more nutritional training and students need to exercise more.

She hopes the debate about childhood obesity will prod changes, but it won't be easy.

"I am afraid the die is cast," she said with regret. "Until we make a conscious effort to change the process, the exposure, of this generation. ... I think the die is cast."

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

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