California Thursdays Aims to Change the State's School Lunches
Photo:kergatyphoto/Flickr/Creative Commons License
Back in May, Oakland Unified School District, with the help of the Center for Ecoliteracy, introduced the concept of California Thursdays, where the district provides one meal a month made of California-grown ingredients to their students. The idea worked so well, they quickly started doing it once a week. And that idea worked so well that this Thursday the program is being rolled out to 15 other school districts throughout the state, representing over 190 million meals a year. L.A. Unified is one of the districts.
To find out more, I interviewed Adam Kesselman, the program director of the California Thursdays program.
What's the plan after Thursday's big rollout?
Adam Kesselman: We're going to add a new cohort in the spring. They'll start their California Thursdays on the week of Earth Day in April of 2015. We don't know how many school districts that will be yet. We think we'll add another 15, but it just depends. I think what we learn from this rollout will influence what we do in the spring, but there's already interest in joining the second cohort.
California's a big state. How local do school districts try to get when creating their menus?
Adam: One thing we want to do is create pretty broad guidelines for this program, and then allow districts to implement however it works best for their district. A school could implement a state-wide strategy, but they could also superimpose their own local procurement initiatives upon that. In the case of L.A., they are looking at California Thursdays for a vehicle for their Good Food Policy which sources within a 200 mile radius and focuses on animal welfare, workers rights, nutrition, things like that. In the case of Oakland Unified, they're trying to source from 100 miles. Some schools define "local" as 50 miles. But we're really trying to push that broad vision of California. Odds are that within 50 miles of San Diego you're not going to find enough chicken to feed San Diego Unified.
Within the state of California, there are also a lot of different kinds of farms, ranging from organic independent farms to massive factory farms. Is that taken into consideration when developing menus?
Adam: We want to focus on California first, and we really want school districts to look at their supply chain and apply their approach to serving fresh food and finding the best producers they can. That's a complex issue. But I think that buying within California increases a school's ability to know where their products are coming from. They can go there, they can visit. And I like to think that people are sourcing the best quality products for their kids that they can.
Does each school district come up with their own dishes?
Adam: Part of the materials we supply are sample recipes that meet the regulations for the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and the USDA guidelines for Reimbursable Meals. However, every district has a different ethnic diversity, and that comes into play for the taste and preference of each district. Some of the districts are using recipes we have provided, other districts are using their own popular dishes, and maybe substituting one item that was previously not made in California. And the power of that small step can really start to push the needle with school lunches.
Did you taste test the recipes with kids?
Adam: Absolutely. The recipes we provided were kid-tested at Oakland Unified. We had peer-to-peer taste testing, so we had students interviewing students after they tasted a dish, and they'd rate it for flavor, or what they would change about it, so we could work on making it more appealing. We really tried to work with the recipes that were most popular during these taste tests. So, for example, one of the dishes that was very popular and it's being served in a couple of districts in our network was a pasta with chorizo and greens. The recipe uses kale, but people have substituted other greens. Another dish that was popular was kung pao chicken, and that features red peppers. We tried to really create ethnically-diverse meals that kids liked.
