The Lost Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me about Why Children Need Real Food by Marshall Jeannie

Author:Marshall, Jeannie [Marshall, Jeannie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807033005
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-01-14T06:00:00+00:00

Good Role Models

There are now numerous—too numerous to ignore—successful models for feeding children a healthy school lunch. School gardens themselves have become extremely fashionable. A school nowadays seems a little dowdy, a little out of touch, if it doesn’t have at least a few bean stalks growing from a pot or a few herbs in the windows of classrooms.

Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard, Debbie Field’s Good Food Café, and the Bendale school farm show that children and young adults will actually eat good, healthy food as long as the emphasis is on the good. The college students making their film demonstrate that it’s a crime not to give children and young people who want to eat better food the option to do so. Young children are quite open to eating nutritious lunches if they are involved in the process in some way, such as helping to grow or cook the food where possible, or having some say on the menus. The rest are details—annoying, pain-in-the-neck details like teaching the staff to cook rather than fry, creating proper kitchen facilities, and that sort of thing.

The cost is an issue, though FoodShare’s French school experiment managed to stay within the same budgets that schools with standard industrial-fare school cafeterias use. There are good ways of cutting costs, from growing some of the food to limiting the meal options. Personally, I like the Italian school method where there is one meal and everyone eats it. It reinforces the sense of community and cuts back on food waste.

A school lunch program really ought to be designed with the students’ best interests in mind. Currently, it is designed for the benefit of the food industry both from the money the industry makes selling its food in schools and in the way that a processed, junk-food lunch shapes children’s tastes.

Of course, if I’m going to mull over the merits of a good school lunch, I have to think about Jamie Oliver. I have to admit (though I would never admit it to an Italian) that I frequently use, along with Marcella Hazan’s books, Jamie Oliver’s cookbook Jamie’s Italy when trying to decide what to make for dinner. His recipes are very Italian; he hasn’t twisted them into a strange English-Italian hybrid. But I also like his offhand manner, the way he says to pour a “glug” of olive oil into the pan instead of two tablespoons. Italians glug their olive oil; they don’t measure it with a spoon. When Oliver went to America’s most overweight city, Huntington, West Virginia, to see what he could do about its school lunches, as part of his TV series, I had to watch.

His goal was to wean the school from its dependence on processed foods and give the kids real food cooked from scratch. He didn’t remake the menu so much as change the ingredients. Instead of allowing the cafeteria to make macaroni and cheese with powdered or canned cheese, he assigned someone the job of grating real cheese. Instead of reheating chicken nuggets, he made barbecued chicken with his own homemade barbecue sauce.

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