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Food for Thought |
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TLC! Nutrition Opts for Sustainable Solutions This is the page where Ms. Debby, our chef, updates and generally keeps us informed about personal, school-wide and national "news" and ideas regarding health and nutrition.
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August 2009
Secondly, thanks to a stimulus grant,
we were able to make two significant improvements in our
kitchen equipment.
The one you will see is a brand
new cold bar.
You will notice that have
rearranged the serving line to accommodate
this extension.
The new unit is due to arrive
early September.
Initially, it will simply allow
us more room from which to serve cold foods on certain days.
Eventually, as we are able to
add staff, we hope to be able to offer a daily choice
between cold and hot lunches.
The other significant
improvement, which you probably won’t see, is that we have
been able to replace our old water heater with new, very
energy-efficient, on-demand type water heaters that are
sized to meet the needs of our growing school.
Our biggest challenge is, of course,
that of constricting budgets.
Let me assure you that we will
not be cutting the quality or variety of our lunches.
We at The Learning Center! are
strongly committed to feeding students highly nutritious and
good-tasting foods.
That being said, we do have cut
somewhere, so we will not be offering a free salad bar to
our students in grades 3-8 as we have been able to do in
past years.
We will, however, be
incorporating more salad-based meals into the menu,
especially during warmer months.
Our snack offerings have changed
a little and prices have been adjusted, but on some items
they were actually adjusted down.
On a more personal note, I am sure many of
you are facing challenges of your own.
Worries about
economy, the threat of new viruses,
and our individual
personal difficulties create stress.
We wrestle with these issues in our
minds, but it is important to remember that stress also affects
our bodies.
The good news is that there are
simple things you can do that will help protect your body from
the effects of stress and also strengthen your immune system.
The bad news is that these simple
things sometimes feel counter-intuitive when we are under extra
stress.
First of all, you and your family
should get plenty of rest.
You need 7-8 hours.
Children, and some types of adults,
need even a little more than that.
Secondly, when under stress, your
body is cranking out a lot of adrenalin, the “fight or flight”
hormone, which
needs to be “burned off” through
exercise.
Do what you like–walk (briskly),
run, swim, hike, dance–but do it consistently and to an
appropriate level of intensity, and I promise you will feel
better.
And finally, and you knew this was
coming, eat well.
It is a big temptation to try to cut
spending at the grocery store by cutting food quality.
Don’t.
It is false economy.
Buy quality food, fresh and local
when possible, and cut your portions.
You’ll be healthier and wealthier in
the long run.
Foodservice Manager The Learning Center!
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Conservation Every day, every school cafeteria produces a small mountain of garbage, all of it destined to take up space in a landfill...but The Learning Center! is not "every school". An investigation of our garbage sorting and dish bussing area in the Dining Commons reveals how we are different. Visitors often ask, "What are all those buckets and bins about anyway?" Well, they are all about sustainability: keeping some of that garbage out of the landfill and finding alternative uses instead. First of all, our students and staff eat off real plates with real cutlery which is, of course, washed and reused. This cuts down significantly on paper waste. All students and staff return their used plates to the correct bussing bins...with surprisingly few accidents. (The very youngest students do get help with this). Listen up, and you will daily hear the question asked, "Can you compost this?" Students sort out compostable garbage into the red bucket. Fruit and veggies, bread and a few other things go into the bucket. No meat, please, because as Ms. Mary Jo says, "If it's meat, the worms won't eat." The school maintains a compost bed where the contents of the red bucket are dumped daily and covered with straw or hay. Plans are to turn the compost bed into a planting bed and grow something that can be brought back into the kitchen for food, perhaps melons or pumpkins. And then there is the milk bucket. Milk dumped into a trash can is heavy and messy. Milk dumped into the little white milk bucket is apparently great fun. Students, especially our younger ones, seem to take much pleasure in emptying their leftover milk into the bucket. The milk itself, usually a gallon and half a day, is taken to Ms. Debby's farm where it feeds some of the animals. Plans are underway to purchase more chickens, feed them the waste milk and return the resulting eggs to the school. Now that's a sustainable solution!
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Warm cinnamon oatmeal, crispy brown bacon or sausage, fluffy biscuits, buttery scrambled eggs, creamy, fruity yogurt...these are some of the appetizing and wholesome breakfast foods available to your child each and every school day beginning at 7:30 in our Dining Commons. Want to know the best part? It's free. Because we know your mornings are busy, and because we believe in the benefits of a good breakfast, all of our students eat this first meal of the day free of charge. Our balanced breakfasts always include a protein, a bread or cereal, a fruit or juice and low-fat milk.
Make it a point to discuss the
importance of starting the day with a healthy, balanced
breakfast with your child, and be sure to set a good
example too! After all, we don't ever outgrow the need
for good nutrition.
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I resolve to…eat healthier foods…drink more water…exercise regularly. Any of these resolutions sound familiar? I hope so. The beginning of a new year is a great time for us to evaluate and improve our personal health habits. But while you are at it, have you evaluated the health habits of your family as a whole? How about your children, those little ones that don’t yet have the wisdom to make the best food choices on their own? I encourage you to make a few healthy resolutions on their behalf as well, and to help you get started, I am sharing this link to an article called Taking the ‘Icky’ Out of Picky Eaters. It’s a bit lengthy and you probably won’t agree with every suggestion, but I hope you can take a few minutes to at least skim it and glean some healthy ideas for the new year. One of my resolutions for my family this year is to make healthy foods more accessible and thus easier to choose. For example, I am prepping a large Ziploc bag of salad at the beginning of every week so that a salad becomes an easy option. In addition, I will be trying to keep more fresh fruit and vegetables on hand and prepped for snacking. I have also resolved not to have my health habits thwarted by perfectionism. I need to remember that a little change in the right direction is better than none at all. Exercising each day would be best for me, but if I suddenly realize it is Wednesday and I haven’t exercised at all that week, I will remind myself that a few days is better than none. I will try not fall prey to the “Well, I’ll start Monday” trap. And when it comes to food choices, for example, yes, fresh fruits and vegetables are best for me and my family, but prepared fruit cups (packed in water) are still fruit and better than skipping the fruit or vegetable completely. In the realm of nutrition, little changes and choices do add up. Since it has been awhile since I have posted, let me share with you a couple of news items from the TLC! Kitchen: Ø Our nutrition program underwent two scheduled state-level Child Nutrition Reviews this fall, and passed both with high praise from our evaluators. They commented that our program was well managed and the food was tasty and nutritious. Ø Earlier this year, we added some very important people to our nutrition staff, our “student chefs”. These four older students have volunteered 30 minutes each a couple of times a week to help in the kitchen. I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have Matthew, Courtney, Jessica and Stephen, come in and fix snacks, chop veggies, scramble eggs and just generally do what needs doing. They are such an asset. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Ms. Debby |
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