CHEFS CHOW DOWN – In their new chef’s hats and jackets, students at the School Lunch Boot Camp, representing 10 school districts, enjoy a multi-course meal they prepared themselves near the end of their weeklong course where they learned cooking from scratch and kitchen management skills. (Photo by Beverly Corbell)
MONTROSE – The lunchroom lady is gone. The stereotypical version of a food service worker serving unpalatable food to lines of students in the school lunchroom is being replaced with a professional staff, down to chef’s hats and white jackets in Montrose schools.
More importantly, the food has changed too. Tater tots and chicken nuggets are gone from Montrose school menus starting this fall, and the district has scaled back using processed foods in favor of more fresh, local products.
From now on all breads and rolls will be made from scratch with whole-wheat flour, and more fresh vegetables and meats will replace processed foods like chicken nuggets.
The change in school diets has been in the works for more than a year now, beginning with healthier and more local food being served in a few schools last year, and culminated last week with a “culinary boot camp” at Montrose High for school dietary staff.
About 24 school dietary professionals, from 10 school districts and all in crisp new chef’s uniforms, went through the weeklong course, one of only four in the state. All four were coordinated by LiveWell Colorado, which helped to pass a new state law that is “anticipated to ultimately make it easier for schools to secure healthy local foods,” according to a news release.
The boot camps receive major funding from the Colorado Health Foundation, and through a $400,000 federal stimulus grant awarded to the Colorado Department of Health and Environment. LiveWell Colorado provided additional funding.
School districts participating in the Montrose boot camp came from Custer, Eagle, Garfield and Routt counties, as well as schools from Mancos, Monte Vista, Norwood and Platt Valley.
The culinary boot camps are offered free of charge to any school district with at least 40 percent of the student population on free-and-reduced-price lunch programs. In Montrose County, 50 percent of students qualify.
Lunchroom chefs were taught food system history, food safety and sanitation, culinary math, basic knife skills, menu planning, time management and foundational cooking techniques related to proteins, grains, legumes, vegetables, sauces, and baked items.
At an open house last week media were invited to share a meal prepared using the new techniques and ingredients.
The Culinary Boot Camp is a led by Cook for America, founded by Chefs Andrea Martin and Kate Adamick, who created the boot camp idea.
Both were in Montrose last week, and Adamick said she has been coming to Montrose schools to help them get their program up and going for more than a year.
“Change takes time, in part because of the way the federal government supplies (food to schools) under the commodity program,” she said.
Adamick is a pioneer in changing schools’ food practices, and wrote a series of articles on the school-food revolution for the Atlantic Magazine.
In an April 5 article in the Atlantic, Adamick wrote that she is doing the same thing as Food Network host Chef Jamie Oliver in trying to revolutionize school lunchrooms across America.
Adamick is working on a documentary film, too, she said, but “with fewer cameras and ‘made-for-TV’ theatrics” than Oliver uses.
Still, Oliver has done the country a great service, Adamick said, and she was surprised at some negative comments about his TV reality show on school food by some of her contemporaries.
“Those of us who are truly concerned about the welfare of America’s children, health care system, and food supply should be grateful that long-awaited and much-needed attention to what has become at best a national embarrassment, and at worst a national crisis, has finally arrived. The revolution will be televised.”
The menu was tasty and vast on the last day of boot camp, when the chefs and nutritionists served Aspen power bars, potatoes au gratin, butternut macaroni and cheese, Olathe pinto beans, enchilada casserole, lentils with turkey sausage, steamed broccoli, teriyaki pork, brown rice, herb roasted chicken, teriyaki chicken, and spice-rubbed barbecue chicken. Drinks were peach lemonade and ginger-flavored water.
Connie Haptonstall, on the culinary staff at Johnson Elementary, said the week was very educational, particularly scratch baking and efficiency skills, and how using local raw products can save school districts money.
“Instead of taking local chickens and sending them to Tyson to make chicken nuggets, the chickens come straight to us and saves millions,” she said.
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