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The Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, where I am director of food
services, is building a central kitchen, which will eventually cook upwards of
20,000 meals per day for our students, faculty and staff. These scratch-cooked meals will be made from fresh whole ingredients, with a priority on locally
sourced food. We’re going to be
partnering with local farmers, producers and ranchers, and we plan to procure a
significant portion of our food from these partners. Sounds like a recipe for amazing
school food – every school food advocate’s dream – and yet this dream keeps me
up at night. I’m not sleeping, wondering how we can do all this, make the most
delicious, nutritious food possible, and keep our children healthy and safe.
One of the things keeping me up is Chipotle and the media
storm around the foodborne illness outbreaks plaguing this restaurant chain. I
respect Chipotle’s values, and its founder cares deeply about “real” food. Yet the company has been investigated by both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention for the illnesses its restaurants have served up to customers. Here’s a company that has made sourcing local and fresh ingredients
a priority, a company that cooks from scratch, a company that prides itself on “sourcing
the very best ingredients and … preparing them by hand.” Yet Chipotle finds itself in the
unenviable situation of having made people sick, seeing its stock value plummet
and facing a crisis of trust with its customers. This company, whose values
are similar to many of mine, a restaurant chain that I often recommend to
students as fast food that is leagues above the rest, this company that hasn’t
been able to keep their customers safe, is the reason I’m not sleeping at
night.
To be clear, I believe Chipotle will come out of this
situation a better company, with better food handling procedures in place. As
stated on their website, they now have a “Focus on Food Safety.” But if
Chipotle, with all of its money, systems and procurement policies couldn’t
assure food safety, what’s a food service director like myself to do? In the
school food world we lack money, training, facilities and often procurement
protocols and policies. In school food, with often little more than $1 to spend
per meal, payroll budgets that often do not allow for adequate staff training
and equipment that is often ancient at best – the answer to food safety concerns
has been "heat and serve," processed food.
During my 17-year tenure in school food, my
mantra has always been that we need to segue from processed food towards meals cooked from scratch, made from fresh, whole ingredients, with a priority on
local procurement. That mantra has been the cornerstone of our central kitchen
plan. The design, the menu and recipes, our training and our food safety
protocols will all be based on that idea. Yet as I lay awake at night and think
about Chipotle’s struggles, I wonder how we’re going to succeed. Here’s what I have
come to believe.
I know that we all want healthy, delicious food for all of
our children. I believe that it should be every child’s birthright in this
country to have access to healthy, delicious food in school and to never go
hungry. To make that happen, we as a
nation need to place a higher priority on school food – and for that matter our
food system in general. We’re in an election year, and I’ve yet to hear any
candidate in any debate even mention the word food, other than a passing remark
on the obligatory “local” food stops that they make on the campaign trail.
To ensure fresh, delicious, local, healthy food in schools,
we need more money for the food, more money for training, more money for
equipment and resources to help support it all. We as a nation spend
approximately $3 on a school lunch, half as much as a burrito at Chipotle, and
much less than a typical adult beverage. So it’s no wonder that school food
tends to consist of highly processed, "heat and serve" meals.
We need to demand that our elected officials –
those currently in power and those soon to be elected – make healthy food, and
especially healthy school food, a priority. We need to allocate more money to
school food, staff training and equipment, and support school food
professionals all across the country who are working tirelessly to bring
healthy scratch-cooked meals to our children. We need a food system based on
fresh-cooked, whole food, and a system that gives us the tools to ensure its
safety. These are all lessons we should
learn from Chipotle. If we take these lessons to heart, we can ensure we have the
best possible food for our children – and maybe, just maybe, I’ll start
sleeping at night.
