Quick Facts:
Healthier school meals improves student test scores
Eating healthier school meals can lead to life-long healthy food choices.
Serving poor quality school meals can inadvertently exacerbate pre-existing equity issues
Scratch cooking programs do not cost more than programs with no scratch-cooking.
More than one-quarter (29%) of school districts in California serve at least some organic / pesticide-free foods.
Around one-third of school districts in California cook fresh meals for their students, while only 16% report that they do little-to-no scratch cooking.
Scratch cooking increases Average Daily Participation (ADP) in school meal programs between 3 - 16% (9% average) and increases generated revenue.
Why are Healthy School Meals Important?
School meals are critical to student health and well-being, especially for low-income students. Research shows that receiving free or reduced-price school lunches have the potential to reduce food insecurity, obesity rates, and poor health, and eating a healthy diet can increase academic performance. Students who participate in school breakfast programs, for example, have improved attendance, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement as well as decreased tardiness.
Improvements in student behavior are especially noticeable when free meals are provided to all students within a school district. One study found that free school meals resulted in out-of-school suspension rates falling by about 15% for elementary students and 6% for middle school students. These reductions were even larger for elementary school students in counties with high rates of food insecurity.
The benefits from school meals don’t stop at the end of the school year: they can have lasting impacts on long-term learning. For example, a study looking at the effects of school lunch participation on adult outcomes found that healthy school meals were associated with long-term educational attainment for men and women.
Not All School Meals Are Equal Despite following USDA Nutrition Standards for School Meals, many districts fall short of providing healthy, high-quality meals for students. Most school meals rely on ultra-processed meat and starches, with entrees that are high in sugar and low in fiber. This is especially problematic for young children who are still developing their palates, as it lays the groundwork for unhealthy food preferences later in life.
Higher quality school meals is also important for academic performance. This study, for example, showed that increasing how “healthy” school lunches are also raises student test scores.
Importance of Modeling Food Choices School children get up to half the food they need each day at school, which makes schools an important place for learning healthy eating habits. School is a place where students not only learn math and reading, but also social norms and eating habits. During school meals, children are developing the scaffolding for the dietary patterns that will shape their food selection for the rest of their lives. If schools serve them cinnamon rolls and corndogs every day, that is the groundwork for what they are likely to eat as they enter adulthood.
School Meals and Equity
Not all families have the ability to pack a healthy school lunch every day for their children, so students from lower income households end up bearing a disproportionate brunt of the negative impacts from poor dietary options in cafeterias. While free school meals have the opportunity to reduce food insecurity, low quality food can inadvertently exacerbate inequalities that exist in our community.
School Can Meals Alleviate Food Insecurity. Over 50% of students in Redwood City Public Schools come from low-income or food-insecure households, and school meals can dramatically improve food security. One study found that school breakfast availability reduces low food security and very low food security among elementary school children. For school lunch, participation is associated with a 14% reduction in the risk of food insufficiency among households with at least one child receiving a free or reduced-price school lunch.
What’s Happening in Redwood City?
Unfortunately, despite participation in the universal meal program, RCSD’s school meals have had some unfortunate unintended consequences. Through partnerships and direct conversations with parents and students from Redwood City’s BIPOC communities, we have heard:
Some parents of students who rely on school meals say their kids sometimes do not eat all day because the food is of such low quality.
The current food offerings have been exacerbating cultural disparities, as they only highlight traditional "American" fare. There is an opportunity to use school meals to bridge cultural gaps by cooking delicious, fresh meals that showcase food from the diversity of Redwood City student cultures.
The low food quality has resulted in school meals becoming a class signifier: those who eat school meals are viewed as "lower class," leading to students not being willing to eat school meals because it's "uncool." This is also an opportunity for change: if meals were of higher quality more parents would have their students eat them, thus reducing the stigma surrounding school meal participation. This is more common in grades 6-8
Some parents were frustrated because they felt like the burden of "healthy meal" education was entirely placed on them, and that they are blamed when their children develop unhealthy eating habits and/or health consequences associated with food, despite being offered unhealthy options at school (and being surrounded by friends making the same unhealthy choices at school).
There is a general attitude that families from low-income households (which is often code for our Latinx community) should be thankful for school meals, but without recognition that many of our families value fresh ingredients and that delicious meals play an important role in our heritage.
What are other Schools Doing?
Redwood City doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to improving school meals. Many other districts in California have dramatically transformed their school offerings, leading to healthier, fresher options for students. Here are just a few of the districts that have improved their school meals.
Vacaville Vacaville has tackled challenges posed by the pandemic and continued to improve their scratch-based cooking program, hiring a chef and upgrading another of its kitchens to support their menu program. Like Redwood City, Vacaville does not have a central kitchen, and serves its 13,000 students out of several kitchen sites. Vacaville has forged relationships with local farms, improved menu nutrition goals such as limiting sugars, and increased scratch-cooking in their district. Because of this improved meal quality they have seen increased school meal participation. Menu items include dishes such as tri-tip sandwiches with housemade barbecue sauce and citrus slaw on a brioche bun, ribs with broccoli and roasted potatoes, roasted vegetable and hummus wraps, Asian meatballs over rice, and chile con carne with tortilla chips.
Nevada Joint Union High School District Nevada Joint Union High School District worked with the non-profit Sierra Harvest to launch the Foothills Fresh School Lunch program in 2017. This program is a partnership amongst the two school districts and Sierra Harvest to provide a healthy, scratch-cooked meal for K-8th grade students featuring minimal packaging and fresh ingredients. After implementing school meal transformation, Nevada Joint Union High School District saw participation in school meals double, and meal program profits increased 300% thereby busting the myth that schools cannot afford to serve kids real, scratched cooked meals.
Berkeley Unified School District Berkeley Unified School District serves freshly-prepared meals using locally-grown food and to educates children in kitchen, garden and academic classrooms about their food choices and the impact those choices have on their health, the community and the environment. They serve hormone and antibiotic-free milk, almost all of their food is made from scratch, they include organic ingredients, vegetarian options are offered daily, and the majority of their food is purchased locally. Menu offerings include such items as lemon chicken on a toasted sub, BBQ chicken of tofu with buttermilk potato salad, and oven fried chicken or tofu with mashed potatoes.
Novato Unified School District With a grant from the Lifetime Foundation, Novato Unified School District has been able to focus on organic ingredients, low or no-sugar snacks, and “speed scratch” entrees that are fresh and unprocessed. They started by reducing high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats and eliminating highly processed foods, and expanded to include culinary lesson plans and courses, and are currently eliminating seven ingredients of concern from the district’s menus (trans fats and hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, hormones and antibiotics, processed and artificial sweeteners, artificial colors and flavors, artificial preservatives and bleached flour).
Napa Valley Unified School District With nearly half of their District’s students qualifying for free or reduced lunch and many students from food-insecure families, Napa Valley Unified School District worked with parent advocates to transform the meals available to their students. The district moved away from a contractor-run meal program toward a food service program that was managed from within the District and not reliant on packaged, pre-cooked meals shipped to the District from a third-party provider. Their menus include vegetarian choices, more fresh produce, and many of the meals are now made from scratch. Menu items inlcude: fish tacos made with fish from the Monterey Bay; chicken pozole from poultry raised without antibiotics and hormones; hamburgers made with organic beef from local cattle raised without antibiotics and hormones; roasted sweet potato wedges; and organic white 1% milk from a local dairy.
Sausalito Marin City School District Working with Conscious Kitchen, Sausalito Marin City School District transitioned from a heat-and-serve, pre-packaged, processed school food service to scratch-cooked meals prepared with fresh, local, organic, seasonal, and nutritious ingredients. The all-organic program is accompanied by an interdisciplinary garden, nutrition and culinary curriculum that promotes food literacy and environmental education.
West Contra Costa Unified School District With 70% of students who live below the poverty line, West Contra Costa Unified School District wanted to improve school meal options for their students, so they launched a pilot program to transition food service at two public elementary schools in their district, Peres and Madera Elementary Schools, as a first step in their district. Meals at these schools were organic, scratch-cooked, and local.
Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District The Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District has been creating original, scratch-cooked recipes that make use of fresh, local food, thanks to funding from the Taste of CA Challenge Grant by the California Department of Education. For example, they cook a Calimex bowl with local Brentwood corn, roasted and seasoned with cilantro and panela cheese. They engage students in taste testing before offering the entree as part of the school menu.
Note that all these school districts are district-run rather than contractor-run. Many of them had to make the first step of bringing direction of their school meal program back under the district before enacting additional school meal improvements.
Will my Kids Eat “Healthy” Meals?
Some parents worry that if schools don't serve food that kids want to eat (such as high-sugar or ultra-processed foods), kids won't take advantage of school meals, or that scratch-cooked meals will be too expensive. However, studies show that the implementation of healthy menus and scratch cooking result in steady or increased participation in school lunch programs - and stable or rising revenue! This increase is especially dramatic when students are engaged through farm-to-school programs, meal-related nutrition lesson plans, taste-tests of new menu items, school garden produce is integrated into a salad bar, etc. (eg. see this and this). USDA did an assessment back in 2015 showing that serving lunches of higher nutritional quality was associated with higher school lunch participation rates, but not with higher costs per lunch. This study shows that if students understand that the food they're eating is healthy, the participation increases even more.
Kids get used to healthier food. Parents are often surprised by the change in their kids’ diets when schools switch over to healthier meals. When Berkeley implemented the Edible Schoolyard program, students became more interested in fruits and vegetables, even with they had little interest in these healthy options prior to the school meal changes. Many parents reported that their students would request vegetables for dinner that they previously wouldn’t even try. This is because children’s palates are highly adaptable, and over time they adapt to healthier options. For example, most school districts don’t show a large decline in milk consumption after removing chocolate milk from school cafeterias. Also, studies have found that even when there is an initial dip in school lunch participation, over time, students get used to healthier school lunch menus.
