DEL.ICIO.USLovett School serves more locally grown cafeteria food
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The students ravenously grabbed plates of food off the conveyor belt in the cafeteria at the Lovett School.
Most reached for hot dogs, a lunch staple. But what makes meals at this Atlanta private school unique are the sides: coleslaw, vegetable soup, Vidalia onion casserole and other offerings made with ingredients from farms in Georgia and the Southeast.
LOUIE FAVORITE/lfavorite@ajc.com
Meredith Statler, food services director at the Lovett School, shows some of the places where food comes from.
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Darrell Pledger making onion soup with Vidalia onions in the Lovett dining hall kitchen.
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In the dining hall, first-grader Julia O’Gorman has made her selections.
MAKING THE GRADE
These recipes from the Lovett School show how to make local produce attractive to students, so they eat their veggies:
Lovett Homemade Coleslaw Salad
Squash Casserole
Vidalia Onion Casserole
Zucchini-Pineapple Bread
The school changed its food ordering practices this year to use more farm-fresh and seasonal items from the region. At the same time, the school is reducing its reliance on frozen fruits and vegetables as well as produce from far-flung areas. The change is part of the school’s long-standing sustainability efforts and reflects a national trend to buy local.
Buying local helps the environment by cutting back on fuel and transportation, said Meredith Statler, the school’s food services director. Reduced travel time allows the school to get fresher food that is more nutritious, she said.
Those are noble reasons, but many Lovett students said what matters most is that the food tastes better. Take the apples. They used to come from out west, and recently were purchased from the Mercier Orchards in Blue Ridge.
“They taste better this year,” said first-grader Julia O’Gorman, 6. “They are sweet. And they are crispier. My taste buds are happy.”
The trend in K-12 schools started in California and has spread to Florida and many school districts in the Northeast, according to the national School Nutrition Association.
Locally, few schools have adopted the goal as much as Lovett. Discussions are taking place in Atlanta Public Schools and at the Westminster Schools, another private school in Atlanta, said Erin Croom, who oversees Georgia’s Farm to School program, which encourages schools to purchase locally as much as possible.
“We’re getting more phone calls and we’re seeing more interest,” she said. “Buying local will be easier for some schools than others.”
Cost can be an issue. Statler increased her food budget by about 10 percent this school year to cover any additional costs. Few public schools could afford to do the same.
Observers also say it would be a challenge for local and regional farms to provide the volume of food that some public school lunch programs need.
Statler works with the school’s provider, Phoenix Wholesale Foodservice, to purchase food for the nearly 1,650 students who buy lunch daily. She gets weekly order forms listing what will be available and where the orders will come from.
The school gets deliveries about twice a week. Coolers and pantries contain boxes from farms in Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. Some items can’t be purchased locally, such as bananas, which come from Guatemala. Others, like oranges, come from California until the Florida crops are ready.
Statler won’t know until the end of the school year if extra money was spent or how much of the produce was local.
“The students are our first customer and we want them to be happy,” Statler said. “But I want the students to be thinking about where their food comes from.”
Some students, including sophomore Ashley Dalton, like that the school is supporting farmers in the region. Most focused on the improved quality of the food. Aviya Payne, another sophomore, said salad greens and cucumbers are fresher, crisper and have more vibrant colors.
“Even the potatoes taste better,” Aviya, 15, said as she munched on a baked potato. “Nothing tastes plasticky or overly chewy. The potatoes are softer and they just have more flavor.”
Some of Statler’s experiments work better than others. She’s been trying meatless menus once a week, but the change hasn’t won over everyone.
“It’s good they’re trying to go healthy but sometimes I’m just really hungry and I need my meat,”said freshman Drew Brown, 14.
But Drew, who was reluctant to stop eating his vegetable soup, admitted to liking the increased variety of food.
“Everything tastes fresh and you don’t have any of that metal taste you get from canned stuff,” he said. “As long as it tastes good, I’m going to eat it.”