The School Lunch Problem

I just read an article in Time magazine about school lunches in France. Apparently, even in preschool, children are served a mandatory multi-course meal every day, which consists of an appetizer, main course protein (often with some lovely sauce, if the menu examples are any indication of the norm) with vegetables, a salad, cheese course, and dessert which is usually fresh fruit. Apparently, the school menu varies every day for six weeks. And it comes printed to parents, with menu suggests for dinners that will complement the nutritional intake of lunch. It's no wonder the French eat a balanced diet, the article concludes: their children learn that food is important, worth savoring, and deliciously varied, even before they can cut their own chicken cordon bleu.

Flash to my own childhood. Remember back in the day, when ketchup counted as a vegetable in our school lunches? There was only one choice: you either had the hot lunch or didn't, and its contents consisted primarily of soggy pizza and tater tots.

Flash to my children's childhoods: the school lunch plan includes a daily fruit and vegetable bar, there are three lunch choices (one vegetarian) available on every single day, and the choices consist primarily of...Domino's pizza and tater tots.

My son begs to be allowed to buy lunch, largely because kids get to use a pre-paid card which seems cool, and so we spent some time perusing the choices to pick a day. After staring at a one-month menu on which the choices were macaroni and cheese plus a bread stick; pancakes with a side of potato; chicken nuggets with smiley fries; hot dog; or Domino's pizza, we finally settled on a compromise: he can buy lunch once a month, anything he likes. The rest of the time, we'll continue packing his lunch.

He has remembered this deal only twice since we made it three months ago -- and when I quizzed him about it recently, he told me that he didn't know anything about the fruit and vegetable bar and had never seen it. Clearly, he is so fixated on his slice of pizza heaven that the notion of fruits (and he's a kid who loves fruit) slips right past him.

It is a sad commentary, I think, on the state of school lunches that we relegate the fruit and vegetables to the sidelines on the optional bar (at least in our district), rather than making them a required part of every tray, and that the menu items are all starch and simple carbs and processed protein. And even though I know that there are limited funds available and millions of kids who rely on school lunches (and breakfasts) each day, it seems like it really ought to be possible to cook healthy, good-tasting foods that aren't simply dumped out of a package and onto a tray.

I want my kids eating healthy foods and a variety of foods, not just high-salt, processed, "heat and serve" foods. I want them to learn how to make healthy choices about what to eat and how to balance their own meals. I want them to think, really think, about what they put into their mouths and how it will affect their bodies, so that they understand why I tell them they can't have candy for breakfast or sugary goodies in their lunch every day. I want them to know that when they eat foods that are good for their bodies, they are also feeding their minds.

And, I want all that healthy eating to taste good and be fun. I do realize that there is no point in drumming into them the value of vegetables, if all I serve them is mushy cooked carrots or over-cooked spinach. That just teaches them that healthy food tastes gross, which I think is pretty likely to reinforce the desire for the junk that tastes good.

The situation reminds me a little of the boyfriend of a friend of mine in high school. We were all over at my friend's house one night for dinner, and the boy asked how he could help with the cooking. She handed him some potatoes. "You can peel these," she said. He looked confused. "But I thought we were having mashed potatoes," he replied. "Yeees," she said slowly. "Where do you think mashed potatoes come from?" He looked a little sheepish. "I've only ever had them from a box," he replied.

To my mind, this is the main problem with school lunches these days. We aren't willing (able?) to invest enough money or creative energy into them to come up with really healthy options that actually taste good for kids, and so our well-intentioned attempts at healthy end up missing the mark. Either we serve them overcooked canned vegetables (as at our preschool), or we make the fresh stuff optional so that they can skip it. And in the process, we are teaching them precisely nothing (in school at least) about what real food looks and tastes like.

I'm no Jamie Oliver, capable of bringing this problem to national attention and proving that healthier, tastier options could be available for the very same money, if only a more creative system were in place for ordering the ingredients and getting them cooked up. Oh, how I wish I could do such a thing. But I think that already being a famous chef might have given him a leg-up on that school lunch project he undertook in England.

So, I'm left instead with the one-family solution: teach this stuff to my kids, and wish that I were French, with great recipes for creative vegetable preparation at the tips of my well-groomed fingers.

I don't have any problem being the one who does this for my kids. I enjoy talking with them about food, helping my son plan what he will pack in his lunch, and grocery shopping with them so that we can learn about healthy choices.

But that doesn't change the fact that my job would be easier if school lunches weren't so alluringly devoid of nutrition and full of fat and processed sugars. And it doesn't change the fact that the epidemic of obesity in this country (I just heard that Philadelphia's motive for considering a tax on soda is that 54% of the children and 64% of the adults in that city are overweight or obese!) could certainly be better addressed if we were more French about our school meals. If our students had an hour, a sit down meal, and fresh produce every day at lunch, just think how much they would learn, without even trying, about the value of slow tasteful eating.

Short, Heartfelt Letters: Technology Edition

Dear Steve Jobs,

The magnetic port for the power cord on my MacBook Pro is brilliant for preventing the kind of cord strain that frayed two cords on my last computer. Less than brilliant is its placement. If one wants to use the computer atop a lap (not inconceivable, given that it is marketed as laptop), and one sits cross-legged to achieve lap, then one's left knee is in the precisely perfect spot to dislodge the ingeniously-easy-to-dislodge magnetic connection.

Since a left knee removal seems impractical for all of your myriad users, might I suggest a power cord port at the back of the computer rather than at the side?

Sincerely,
I thought Macs were supposed to be perfect

* * * * *

Dear Toyota,

You aren't the only ones whose floor mats can mess with the pedals at a driver's feet. I have a Subaru, and my floor mat periodically creeps up to a place where it snags my clutch as I'm letting it out.

I, however, have not needed to sue Subaru over this, or even to demand a recall of said vehicle. Instead, I occasionally take a moment, once I have parked the car, and slide the floor mat back down to its proper place and reattach it to the pin that exists to keep it where it belongs. The reattaching is quite tricky, which means that the detaching only seems to happen about once every two or three years. I can live with 2 minutes of hassle that infrequently.

Perhaps you could take a lesson from Subaru, and install a little gizmo to hold the mat in place. It wouldn't do anything to fix your rogue accelerator problems (which, really, are unconscionable), but it would be one less completely manageable headache to deal with.

And it would have the merit of implying to your consumers that you assume they are intelligent enough to reposition a floor mat that gets out of place.

Bonus all around!

Sincerely,
My Subaru may not be perfect, but it sure is safe

* * * * *

Dear Toaster Oven,

In the interests of honestly, I propose you just drop the word "toaster" completely from your name. You are a Mini Oven. I don't expect my normal-sized oven to make good toast, though it's scary good at drying out bread if I need dry bread for something. And I have realized after nine years of torture with you, "Toaster" Oven, that I should not expect toast from you either.

You are great for cooking breaded fish fillets or melting the cheese on a wee homemade pizza. You work wonders in the frozen waffle reheating department.

But toast?

TEN MINUTES for a slice of toast? And even then, it's only evenly browned on one side, not both, and the bread in the middle is nearly as dry as the Sahara.

My $2 Goodwill toaster that I owned in graduate school did a better job making toast (in 30 seconds) than your fancy $100 wedding gift registry self ever did.

I'm sorry to say that I think I may have to throw you over for a good old-fashioned actual toaster that actually toasts.

Sincerely,
I miss my quick and easy breakfasts

Cooking: Family Style

Desperately grasping around for an activity that would resuscitate my children from their whining malaise, I suggested that we make ravioli for dinner a few weeks ago. Much to my surprise, it was a total hit! From the first stirring of the flour with the egg, through the rolling of the pasta, to the filling and cutting and cooking, to the blissful eating, the kids and I spent an extremely enjoyable evening. And if you read that post about the end of sanity that is the end of Winter Break, you know that was no small feat but rather a miracle of tremendous proportion.

It was so much fun that I have not one single picture of the process. All we did was cook and laugh and generally remember how much we like each other. And eat. Oh, did we eat. If you are in need of something warm and sustaining -- in both the food and activity lines -- you could do far worse than to make the following.

First, make the pasta. For 1 lb. homemade pasta, you will need:
2 cups flour
1 pinch salt
3 eggs
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 Tablespoon water (or more depending on how dry your flour is)

Stir together flour and salt. Make a well in flour and add eggs, oil and water. Stir until it begins to stick together, then knead thoroughly until the dough moves from sticky to silky smooth and stretchy. (If it is too dry, add a few drops of water at a time, until it is the right consistency.) Leave the dough ball to rest, covered, on the counter while you prepare the filling.

For filling
1/2 lb. ground sausage
1 small onion, chopped fine
1 cup mushrooms, chopped small
2/3 cup ricotta cheese
olive oil and butter (approximately 1 t. each)

Cook onions in olive oil and butter slowly, so that they begin to caramelize. In a separate pan, cook sausage until nearly cooked through. Drain grease, and then add sausage to onions. Add mushrooms, and cook another 1-2 minutes or until mushrooms have released all their water. Put ricotta cheese into a bowl, and then stir in sausage mixture until mixed thoroughly.

Cut dough into four equal sections, and roll out one quarter in pasta machine. (I have a simple hand-crank machine like the one at right. It works beautifully.) For best results, start on size 1, roll the dough, fold it in half, and roll it again. Repeat at least three times on size 1. Then repeat at least two more times on size 2. Roll once more on size 2 WITHOUT folding pasta in half first, and then begin rolling through successive sizes without folding. The thickness of 6 is nice for ravioli.)

Place the long stretchy sheet of pasta on a clean counter. Dallop blobs of filling along the sheet at regular intervals, adjusting their size based on your preference for small or homestyle (read: giant) ravioli.

Roll out a second quarter of the pasta in the same way, place it over the first sheet, and then use a pastry/ravioli cutter/sealer to cut and seal the tasty tidbits. (Save any pasta scraps you cut away from edges; they can be rerolled to make more ravioli.)

Repeat with the second half of the dough. This will make about 35-40 large ravioli (way larger than the ones at left), enough to feed a hungry family of 5 or 6 depending on what else you are serving.

Boil a large pot of salted water. Fresh pasta cooks in about 2-3 minutes. The ravioli will cook best if not too crowded in the pot, so do them in batches. Serve drizzled with your favorite red sauce. Talk about your favorite part of your day over dinner.

The whole process reminded me of several important things.

First, how much I adore homemade pasta. We really MUST make it more often, especially since long noodles or small shapes like butterflies are so much quicker even than filled pastas. And the taste can't be beat.

Second, how satisfying it can be to share something you love with your children. Not just the eating, but the cooking. They loved cranking the pasta, learning about gluten and how it makes pasta stretchy, stirring the sausage as it cooked, using the ravioli cutter. The whole thing was an adventure for them.

And third, how much better a family "game" is than trying to tackle the chore of cooking dinner alone while trying to keep my bickering children from bonking each other over the head.

Happy cooking!

If Four-Year-Olds Wrote the Dictionary...

...it would be a lot slimmer as a volume to heft around. But the words and definitions would also be way more interesting.

Armpets: the best place to tickle a kid

A-robotics: exercise that makes you huff and puff and sweat

Baker: the big thing outside on the porch that we use to cook hot dogs

Damage: a bad word that we don't say [go ahead, say it in a swear-word voice; it makes a great substitute swear]

Driver: what you steer with in the car

Handcups: the metal bracelets policemen use to defeat bad guys

Hooker: the curved thing sticking out of the wall, where we hang up the kitchen towels

Iceberg: slim points of ice hanging down from the roof

Meadow: when you get stuck, frozen, on a merry-go-round, and you can't get off

Padawen: a series of things in a regular, alternating order

Plugger: the small rubber nub Daddy pokes in his ears at bedtime

Robert: a person who steals money

Sculpture: a purse that you put around your neck too

Speeches: the guys with stars upon thars (or not)

Slam-dump: the coolest baskeball move ever, and one that is really really hard to do

Tippy nubbles: the things contained by a bra

Verse: a verb, deriving from the word versus, meaning "to fight or engage in a contest" -- example: "Mama, want me to verse you in tennis?"

* * * * *
On the other hand, if I wrote the dictionary...

well, the words would be normal, but the darn thing would be nowhere near finished yet.

Somehow, this semester is getting away from me. It might be the double class I'm teaching, or it might be the three conference papers I'm writing, or it might be the fact that for the first time I am carting children to regularly-scheduled activities (one each per week), or it might be all the other projects that I have not learned to say "no" to, or it might be just the bad timing of having lots of deadlines coming up at once. But whatever it is, one thing is clear: there's not a whole lot of free time in my life these days.

So, please take this as my apology for not visiting your little corners of the internet universe. And as my reassurance that there is nothing seriously wrong here at Chez Time that a whole lot more time wouldn't fix.

Since there are 25 posts I've started and never finished sitting in my drafts folder, you'd think I might post something more often than once every two weeks, but there it is. If I have to choose between fixing up an old post and eating a chocolate chip cookie, the cookie wins.

Here's hoping spring breathes new life into my insane schedule.

So: tell me your latest good news. What's making you smile these days?