This past Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine featured an article about a group of folks who are coming together to discuss how to fix the food children eat at school. This group, known as the Let’s Talk About Food, is a diverse group of practitioners from various organizations such as Project Bread, Cooking Matters, and the Greater Boston Food Bank as well as chefs and pediatritians and folks from school food service, management consulting, marketing, media and business sectors.
The article highlights BPS Food and Nutrition Services Director Michael Peck and the success of Boston Public Schools universal-free breakfast program as an example of how school food can greatly impact what kids are eating each day.
Together this group has come up with a few ideas about how they might be able to fix school food:
“One thought is to build a regional commissary for school food — a stand-alone facility where workers would produce fresh food daily for schools in Greater Boston. Because many of our local school kitchens have only a heat-and-serve capacity, we could use the commissary to replace (or augment) the processed and frozen food we in many cases buy from out-of-state vendors.
“Our second strategy focuses on the school food service workers. They’re nearly as important to our children as the teachers in their classrooms, but some people don’t treat them that way. And because many of the dedicated folks who work at schools come to the job with little culinary training, we are thinking through the feasibility of an on- or off-site culinary program. A commissary could do double duty as a professional development center, or school districts could partner with local culinary schools.”
This innovative group aims to make a difference in what kids are eating every day, and they are starting with an idea and seeing where it goes!
To view the full article written by Louisa Kasdon and Jody Adams, check out the Boston Globe website.
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