Top Chef DC Taking on School Food: But Why the Extra Cash?

By Mark Bishop, Deputy Director

It's hard not to get excited when you see an issue you care about get elevated in the media, so you can imagine how I felt when I heard that Top Chef is taking on childhood obesity and specifically school food.

But what happens when the media portrayal elevates information that's just wrong?

According to ObamaFoodOrama, the chefs competing to create a "healthy, kid-friendly meal" in a local school kitchen will be doing so on a budget:

Chefs can only spend $2.68 per child, which is the reimbursement rate schools receive for each child who is eligible for free lunch under the federal program.

I'm glad to see the chefs have a budget, but I have to object to the amount.

Sure, schools get reimbursements of $2.68 for each free meal they serve, but that's not close to the amount that school food directors have available for ingredients for each meal. As we've discussed before on this blog, that $2.68 has to cover the cost of overhead, labor, administrative costs, maintenance, cleaning, transportation. . . the list goes on. When it comes to spending on ingredients, the amount that most food service directors have to work with is less than a dollar. (In large urban districts, it's generally closer to $0.70.)

Unless Top Chef is going to have its competitors get into the details of covering overhead and systems costs, it's only fair to give them the same funding the schools are able to spend on ingredients.

Every year, we engage with teams of students at the Cooking up Change healthy cooking contest. We challenge them to create a healthy school meal on a dollar's worth of food ingredients, and they come up with some creative and healthy stuff. Yes, they all wish they had more to spend, but that's the challenge that schools deal with everyday. If you can do this, or this or this with a limited budget and ingredients, imagine if you had an extra 50 cents, or even a dollar.

Getting that extra dollar per meal for school food could require an extra $20 billion per year of funding in the Child Nutrition Act. And in one fell swoop, Bravo gave schools an extra $1.70.

Chef Ann Cooper was right on the money when said on the Slow Cook:

Perhaps instead of restaurant chefs trying to cook a meal for $2.68, we should have 'Lunch Ladies' competing to showcase what’s actually possible when we cook fresh food from scratch for our kids. After that, let’s give the professional chefs the USDA commodity food to deal with.

With this show, Bravo has a real opportunity to raise awareness of the significant funding problems in our school food system. So maybe this reality show could be just a little more real.

And the reality is that right now, Congress has an opportunity to do something about that problem. The Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization and both the House and Senate have introduced legislation with proposed funding that falls short of making healthy school food -- and kids' health -- a priority. Take a moment to raise your voice and urge Congress to provide adequate funds for healthy meals.

Comments

[Ed Bruske]

nice follow-up

[Dana Woldow]

Damn right! And they should make the Top Chefs cook on the same kind of old, creaky, outdated equipment that so many of our schools must use, thanks to the govt. $$$ for equipment drying up 20 years ago.