Quick Take
With the number of Santa Cruz County students getting at least one meal per day on campus way up since the pandemic, staff members from kitchens at five local school districts participated recently in a weeklong training program on how to incorporate more from-scratch foods into their menus. New funding is making it easier for schools to pursue more healthy options, but logistical challenges include time for training and preparation, and having adequate staff.
Two weeks before the students at Live Oak’s Del Mar Elementary School returned from summer break, the kitchen was already humming with activity as cooks from five Santa Cruz County school districts chopped, blanched and baked their way through a five-days-long training. The goal: to teach and empower staff, who collectively will provide around 15,000 meals daily at more than 50 local schools, to provide more foods made from scratch.
This is the first time local districts participated in Culinary Skills for School Meals, a national training program created and led by Cathy Powers, a registered dietitian and former educator at the Culinary Institute of America. The culinary boot camp covered techniques such as knife skills and using different kinds of kitchen equipment, and demonstrated recipes that included whole foods. The end results need to meet strict government requirements and were aimed at pleasing a difficult audience – kids.
More children than ever are eating at least one meal a day at school thanks to California’s groundbreaking Universal Meals Program, which requires schools to provide a nutritious breakfast and lunch for free to all children at public and charter schools in kindergarten through 12th grade, regardless of financial situation. Launched during the pandemic and made permanent during the 2022-23 school year, it opened school meals to hundreds more Santa Cruz County students and millions statewide.
The new wave of participation has created a surge of interest and funding to create appealing and nutritious meal programs for the county’s youngest residents. But logistical challenges including staffing and time can make implementing new menu items difficult, schools say.
Ultimately, schools are aiming to decrease the amount of salt and sugar in their meal programs by lowering reliance on prepackaged foods. “When you’re buying a prepackaged item, it’s not that they’re not healthy. They have to meet school requirements. They have whole grains. But there’s still a processed element to it, so they’re a little bit higher in salts and sugars, and so we really want to try to reduce that,” said Amy Hedrick-Farr, director of food service for the Santa Cruz City Schools district.
Participating in the training program was a collaborative effort among multiple local districts. Altogether, 24 nutrition staff from five Santa Cruz County school districts attended: Live Oak, Santa Cruz City Schools, San Lorenzo Valley Unified, Soquel Union Elementary and Pajaro Valley Unified.
“The ultimate goal also is that we always want to do what’s best for our kids. We want to put good food in our children. Good food makes them grow and learn,” said Hedrick-Farr. Receiving additional government funding as the result of Universal Meals and increased participation makes it easier to invest in students’ health, she said: “It’s really changed how we look at our school food and where we can put our dollars. It’s been huge for us.”
But unlike a normal restaurant that can change its menu frequently, schools have limitations.
“Time is the scarcest resource,” said Jessie Cuttriss, food service supervisor at SCCS. “Our secondary kitchens are doing possibly 200 breakfast and then 200 lunches a couple hours later. When you think of scratch-cooking every element, it seems impossible to make that transition all at once. Just learning how to slowly start structuring your time to include these elements is going to be the most helpful thing.”
The time it takes to test and flesh out new recipes is a barrier for many programs, said Amanda Timar, child nutrition services supervisor at Soquel Union Elementary School District. One of the benefits of this training is that all of the recipes have already been tested and meet government guidelines. “It lowers the bar of entry of scratch cooking, because a lot of that hard work has already been done,” she said.
All of the participating schools already prepare at least some foods from scratch, and participating in live demonstrations allowed them to visualize how different cooking skills and dishes could be incorporated in their kitchens. Some changes might seem small, like blanching broccoli, which partially cooks it before chilling it in ice water. But the process gives vegetables a bright green color and makes them sweeter, making them more appealing to kids. Participants also learned how to make overnight oats with oatmeal and applesauce, which students can customize with healthy toppings, and ranch salad dressing using Greek yogurt and herbs instead of mayonnaise and a flavor packet.
“Drumsticks from raw chicken are something that they were kind of scared about before, but they saw how easy it was, and they’re like, we could definitely do this,” said director Alisia Munoz-Rojas of her nutrition staff at San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District. Her team also has access to lettuce grown with aquaponics at the district’s high school, and learned how to wash and store it through the training. In the future, the district will be able to rely less on pre-chopped salad. “Baby steps,” said Munoz-Rojas.
While school breakfast and lunch menus are already set for the first two months of the school year, which starts this week in many local districts, new dishes might begin appearing on menus as soon as October.
All of the districts distribute food to multiple campuses from a central kitchen within the district. Cooking food at one site and transporting it to another comes with its own set of challenges, said Carlos Olivares, operation supervisor at Pajaro Valley Unified School District. His district’s central kitchen on Green Valley Road in Watsonville makes around 5,000 meals daily for 16 area schools. At this training, he focused on picking up efficiency strategies and ideas for making food look and taste more appealing to students.
“For 16 elementary sites, we need to figure out how to create the recipe, cool it down properly, packaging it so it can be heated up, deliver it, and heat it up again. During that process, it has to keep its flavor. It’s got to look good,” said Olivares.
The training created a space where schools could learn those kinds of strategies from each other, and collaborate on solutions, said participants. And by learning how to create healthier foods for the students, the hope is that nutrition staff will feel empowered and enjoy the process, too.
“When they get to make something that they’ve put their heart into, they really become passionate about it,” said Hedrick-Farr from SCCS. “And when they can see a kid actually eat it and enjoy it with a smile on their face, or say, ‘This is really good,’ it makes them so happy, and it encourages them to do more.”
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