Food for Thought

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.  Ms. Debby has her own farm where she raises goats, chickens and horses.  If you want to get more info. about her farm visit her blog at: www.pleasantplacesfarm.blogspot.com/

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!

More Salad, Please!

 We've opened the salad bar to students in grades 3-8 and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.  On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, students have the option of a tossed salad of mixed greens, carrots, cabbage and tomatoes along with favorite toppings and dressings.  Most of these older students take advantage of  the salad bar, many even returning for seconds!  Since most American children get far too few daily servings of fruit and veggies, we are encouraged to see our students voluntarily eating more greens.

January

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

August

Welcome back to school!  I hope everyone had a good, safe summer and that you are ready to get back into the school routine.   I want to take this opportunity to share with you  a few changes taking place in our nutrition program this year.  First, I would like to introduce a new nutrition team member, Ms. Penny Grubbs, who will be  in charge of maintaining a clean environment.  As you may have noticed, we always do extremely well on our health inspections, and Ms. Penny will be seeing to it that we continue to earn those high marks and maintain high standards when it comes to the cleanliness of the kitchen and dining commons.  Please be sure and welcome Penny .

Secondly, there have been important changes in school lunch nutrition requirements  this year.  School nutrition programs across the state will be working hard  to trim menus of excess fat while offering foods that meet the dietary guidelines for protein, vitamin A, vitamin C and other nutrients.    Fortunately, because The Learning Center! Nutrition program has been emphasizing healthy eating from the beginning, we were already meeting or exceeding most of those requirements.   Our menus required only a little "tweaking" with the exception that I had to figure out how to ADD some calories to get us up to that requirement.  So probably the most noticeable change you will see in the lunch program will be that there will sometimes be more items per meal than last year.  Students will be happy to know that we have added some fruit-based desserts, puddings and yogurt to the lunch menus on an occasional basis. And we plan to again offer the salad bar at least 3 times a week.

 We will, of course, continue our emphasis on sustainability this year which means we will compost.  Ms. Emily has some great plans for involving the students in the science of compost making.   Be sure and drop by the Dining Commons and have a look at the informational bulletin board she will be putting together. We will also continue to save the leftover milk to feed the chickens which lay the eggs we eat. 

 Weekly menus will be distributed in paper form and also will be posted on the website.  If you have questions about the nutritional content of any meal,  don't hesitate to ask.  We will be able to provide you with a nutrient analysis for each meal upon request.  And if your child has special dietary requirements and plans to eat school meals, please drop by and fill out a form so we can have a record of that. 

 Looking Forward to a Healthy School Year,

 Ms. Debby