Fewer french fries, more veggie burgers
New US rules spur schools to change the way they eat
It's a bad start to the school year for oversized chocolate chip cookies and Little Debbie snack cakes. Waltham and Marlborough school officials are banning them in an effort to improve student health.
The Northborough-Southborough Regional School District wants teachers to stop using food for celebration or rewards, while the Tahanto Regional Middle/High School, which covers Boylston and Berlin, is discouraging the use of food in fund-raisers.
This won't be the Pepsi generation. Soda machines are off limits until after 3 p.m. in some districts, like Wayland, or banned altogether in others, like Hopkinton. Natick school officials are talking about limiting caffeine. Greasy chips and chocolate bars are already an endangered species, with raisins and baked chips replacing them in school vending machines just about everywhere.
The new back-to-school buzzword is wellness, as districts implement policies to conform with new federal guidelines.
For some districts, it's more about scaling back than eliminating treats.
``We didn't want to say we were never serving french fries again," said Ashland's superintendent, Richard Hoffman.
``We'll sell french fries but we won't serve them every day."
Other systems, like Maynard, are focusing on providing students fresh fruit year-round and on making sure they have a full 20 minutes to eat lunch.
One local system has a running head start when it comes to the school food challenge. Last year, Hudson hired an executive chef -- a job that in both name and responsibility stands apart from the typical food service manager.
Chris Perdue does all the unglamorous work of running a high school kitchen for 1,040 students -- ordering foods in bulk, pinching pennies to stick to the state and federal reimbursements of $2.50 per meal, and overseeing a staff of cooks and cashiers.
But he treats his job as if he were running a prestigious restaurant kitchen. That means gourmet pizza instead of sloppy joes, and chicken Marsala instead of mystery meat.
As he sees it, the students, teachers, and administrators are clients, and his job is to please them -- within the limits of his budget and nutrition guidelines.
Perdue is also a special-events manager -- be it a welcome-to-school barbecue for nervous eighth-graders, a Portuguese-themed lunch, or a semiformal dance (he was in the corner in white coat and toque, slicing meat at the carving station at last year's gala). He even set up a custom pasta bar for parents at a girls' basketball game.
A Framingham native who ran the kitchen of an assisted living center in Newton before coming to Hudson, Perdue has increased the high school salad bar from 10 items to more than 30, brought in a machine that makes slush drinks (100 percent juice, 165 calories, no fat), and instituted a daily vegetarian hot lunch option, such as hearty shepherd's pie made with veggie burgers.
This year, he's pioneering a program offering nutritious dinners for students and teachers who stay late working on extracurricular projects.
Why take on all that extra work when school is already over for the day? After feeding them healthy lunches, Perdue doesn't want his clients bingeing on greasy take-out when they go home. ``It's not healthy," he said.
The school system -- which pays Perdue a salary comparable to that of a veteran teacher -- was looking for major changes when its food service manager of 21 years retired.
``When you have the smells of good food cooking it feels like home," said Superintendent Sheldon Berman, who said he wanted a warm and nurturing cafeteria environment for his students. ``To feed them awful food is antithetical to that concept."
Perdue says students who eat better, learn more. ``A kid who is not eating lunch is not going to be paying attention in class," he said. He welcomes calls from parents of students with health concerns. He is compiling nutritional information for every school menu item so parents know what's safe for their diabetic or allergic child to eat.
He sees a big part of his job as outside of the kitchen. For example, he cochairs the district's Wellness Committee with Jeanne Cohen, director of health services.
``Kids spend a lot of time at school these days and it has an impact on their health," Cohen said. School food, long known for being loaded with fat and carbohydrates, simply had to change, she said. ``For the first time we're looking at a generation that will be less healthy than the ones that came before it."
Fitness, too is getting more attention. Along with regular PE offerings, Hudson High students can take advantage of electives like yoga. ``The students can tune out the stress of the day and leave refreshed. It teaches a focus which transfers to every aspect of life, particularly academics," Cohen said.
Globe correspondents Jennifer Rosinski and Mallary Jean Tenore contributed to this report. Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com. 