Do Seattle Public Elementary Schools Serve Real Food?

If you haven't already seen "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" show on ABC, I'd really recommend checking it out (you can watch the first two shows on Hulu here). In the show, Oliver attempts to change the eating habits of the most obese city in the United States - Huntington, West Virginia. Oliver, who's from Britain, is famous for re-vamping the British school lunch system and, since the kids there ate crap, and the kids here eat crap, and because kids who eat crap tend to grow up into adults who eat crap, the show focuses mainly on Oliver's attempts to re-vamp Huntington's school lunch program, which is filled to the brim with crap. At Huntington, they serve frozen pizza for breakfast. Lunch is chicken nuggets with a side of goop. Then the kids gulp it all down with florescent pink milk.

The visuals of these kids eating all this crap is enough to make anyone's stomach turn, because if you grow up not knowing what good food actually tastes like, how can you not get fat and end up with diabetes? The show got me wondering: what kind of meals are we serving kids in Seattle public schools? Is it real food, or does it just sound like real food? You'd think Seattle - home to farmer's markets, co-ops, and plenty of upscale restaurants that make a point about serving only farm-fresh food - would have enough people concerned about food to not serve our kids total crap.

Tonight, I took a look at the Seattle Public School's "Nutrition Services" website. There, I found a page that listed all the food given to Seattle Public Elementary Schools this month. A lot of it looks potentially yummy and healthy (fajita chicken, beef teriyaki, penne marinara) but a lot also looks dubious (chicken "drummies," fish "nuggets," mozzarella cheese breadsticks). Who ever heard of breadsticks for lunch? And where is this food coming from? What is its shelf life?

There's a part of the website labeled "nutritional analysis" with a bunch of dead links. However, I was able to find nutritional info on March's lunches. It's what you'd expect - hot dogs bad, salad good - but I couldn't find any information on suppliers, sources, or anything like that. On a good note, it looks like a lot of these meals contain a range of healthy sides, like baby carrots, grapes, even jicama salads - which is definitely a step above Huntington's pizza with a side of roll and corn syrup. Grapes are usually born on vines and carrots - last time I checked- can't be created in a laboratory (although I'm sure there are some rogue GMO carrots running around out there).

Even though I have a better sense of what kids are eating in Seattle schools, it would be interesting, and important, to hear a Seattle Public School official explain where this food is from and how it's prepared. Does the food just sound appetizing (the way school lunches always sound appetizing)? Or is it the real un-frozen, un-fucked around with food we need to be feeding our kids? In the next few days, I plan on tracking down someone and seeing if I can find an answer...