School cafeteria serves popular, healthy lunches
Published Thursday October 29th, 2009
TORONTO - The future of school lunches is happening now at the Good Food Cafe.
Take a recent Friday. Lunch plates were piled with spinach-ricotta manicotti or grilled vegetable wraps, vegan caesar salad, raw veggies, hummus, an organic pear and pineapple chunks. Colourful plastic glasses were filled with white milk.
The two-month-old cafe in Toronto's west end feeds Grade 7 and 8 students of le College francais Campus Brockton. It's being run by FoodShare as a pilot project to create a school cafeteria model for Canada. More than 250 students from across the city got a peek at the cafe in mid-October when they spent World Food Day at FoodShare's Recipe for Change From Field to Table conference.
"The argument is still that kids won't eat healthy food and so they must have unhealthy food in cafeterias," says Debbie Field, executive director of the non-profit organization that finds creative solutions to food and hunger issues.
That's nonsense. Kitchen manager Alvin Rebick's student customers adore his fish and chips (baked grouper, oven-roasted potatoes and homemade tartar sauce). They love his macaroni with three cheeses and eat the veggies on the side without complaint.
Field is thrilled by the Good Food Cafe's creative menu. She doesn't want kids to equate "good for you" with "untasty."
She wants healthy meals to look and taste good to compete with the burgers, fries and pizza that so transfix students from Grade 7 to 12.
The cafe exists due to a serendipitous series of events. FoodShare rents space in an enormous former school on Croatia Street. The burgeoning College francais, based at Carlton and Jarvis streets, needed to move its 150 Grade 7 and 8 students to a new space this September and wound up in the same building.
Since middle-school students aren't allowed to leave at lunch, vice-principal Sebastien Fontaine was considering simply creating a lunchroom for his public French school. When parents Robert Stork and Mirela Luca suggested he approach FoodShare to run a healthy cafeteria, the idea for the cafe was born and quickly approved.
In June, 75 Grade 7 students (now in Grade 8) visited for a menu tasting with Rebick. (FoodShare is big on "democratic input.") Students have since vetoed a trial veggie burger and black bean flautas, and will speak out if the oven-roasted fries come out too mushy.
One item that FoodShare won't budge on, however, is liquids. Water is free and milk is 50 cents (chocolate milk is a twice-a-week treat). Juice is considered one step up from pop, and neither is sold.
The cafe launched in September with about 20 customers. As of mid-October, about 60 people (including a few teachers) are buying meals.
Meal prices are another work in progress. Main meals (such as the manicotti and salad) are competitively priced with other school cafeterias at $4. That gets kids a hot meal with salad, or a salad with a sandwich/wrap or soup. Raw veggies, hummus and fruit are free. Dessert is 25 cents.
Rebick isn't averse to desserts (such as Chocolate Zucchini Bread) that are stuffed with flaxseeds, oats, bran, zucchini and pears.
"We trying to get away from the things that people are hooked on, like grease and salt and carbohydrates," Rebick tells the students who tour the cafe during the Oct. 16 World Food Day conference.
Mindful that students come from across the city, some are from families with limited food budgets, FoodShare is working on ways to make subsidized meals "invisible" through a debit card system.
It's about to boost local sourcing, and to encourage farmers/growers to visit the students or vice versa, bringing food into the curriculum.
Another challenge is how to make eating in the cafeteria "cool." FoodShare originally translated the Good Food Cafe into the stuffy Cafe Bonne Alimentaire. Fontaine renamed it Cafe a la Bonne Bouffe (bouffe is slang for food.)
Grade 8 student Marcus Gwyn-Neumann reports that the food is better at the cafe than at the cafeteria at le College francais on Jarvis Street where he ate last year. He and his fellow students have noticed that the food tastes good and is healthy.
But as Grade 8 student Alice Lambert points out, they're a captive audience. "The older grades, they go out for lunch," she notes.
There are dreams of getting students to help prepare meals as part of the curriculum, mindful that most school cafeterias are run by unionized companies. "I don't think it has to be kids taking away jobs from union workers," stresses Field.
The ultimate goal, she says, is "replicable, scalable solutions." If the Good Food Cafe model works, FoodShare can create a manual that can be embraced and adapted by schools across Canada.
FoodShare's other school-based initiatives include gardens, salad bars and breakfast/snack/morning meal programs. It just launched Recipe for Change, a campaign to make food literacy a requirement for Grade 12 graduation in Ontario.
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