Question
Estrella Creates
This decade I will begin a chain of independent schools. Nutrition and our midday meal hour will be an important part of our curriculum. Do you have any suggestions for “must reads?”
Answer
This is actually fantastic because actually I have a big history in school food. I used to work for Whole kids Foundation where I helped train Food Service professionals to be able to go back to scratch cooking from more processed food. So it's something that I really take dearly and as you know a passion of mine for certain if you're looking for Reeds, you know, there are a lot of different books out there. One of my favorites is probably the labor of lunch. And let's buy I think it's Jennifer guard. I will put a link up for that as well too. So. That's probably one of the best reads that I would say for it, but quite honestly, there are a lot of other things that I would do besides just reading books to be able to start into that. Now, you know, depending on the type of Independent Schools, you're going to be doing if they're going to be something, you know, that's following more traditional curriculum or if they're going to be a Montessori program or something like that. It really depends on the the style that you want to do. So there are a lot of big players out there in school food and that might be where you want to get a start talking about that. There are some great theories about kids serving themselves. So doing like a family style lunches. In fact the edible schoolyard experimented with that quite a bit. Having basically carts the kids could roll out and they would have larger dishes, you know filled up to be able to have the portions that the kids all needed for them and they had a proper scoop. So when they scooped out the portion it would be the exact portion that they had to meet according to the USDA guidelines. And it really, you know, created a sense of community in those and let's a very kind of Montessori style, but it was used in a public school setting as well. Something else you might want to look at is the school nutrition Association the school nutrition nutrition Association has a lot of information on there. It's actually probably the leading source for food service in the United States at least. And there's a lot of information that you can actually get by either being a member. We're going to one of their many conferences around the country. I used to go to these very regularly. It was a speaker many of them as well. Just talking about going back to to scratch cooking as well. But they have a lot of literature. They have tons of meetings. They have lots of connections to be able to meet as well. Now they're also some other fun players out there in the field too. So Daniel Gusty who used to be one of the Michelin starts chefs at NoMa. Copenhagen has a school food program called Brigade. That's a pretty cool where he's basically trying to bring higher and food and more less processed food to schools as well. But you also might want to check out things like the chef in Foundation whole kids Foundation. There are some great organizations out there around school food and some kind of, you know markers to be able to get you on your start. So reading is great. But really talking to the people their experts on the field is probably the best way to be able to start looking at nutrition and looking at that mid daily that midday meal program. There are a lot of ways you can work education into that too from school Gardens to actually doing some cooking experiments and classrooms, too.
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