School food that's both healthy and tasty?

Ivana Kadija held out a crumpled orange wrapper that previously held a Smucker’s Uncrustables grilled cheese sandwich and pointed to the lengthy list of ingredients with unease.

“What our kids are eating today is not the things we were eating as children,” said Kadija, a Charlottesville resident and a member of a recently formed advocacy group trying to improve what the city’s students are eating at school.

The C’ville School Food Initiative — an informal body that hopes to shepherd a community discussion and showcase what the city schools are already doing — is one of the latest manifestations of growing attention from city schools, residents and parents on improving the quality of food provided in the schools.

“I would love nothing more than for my children to eat at the school. I hate making lunch. … I am so over it,” said Kadija, who has one child at Clark Elementary and another at Walker Upper Elementary.

“A basic human need is to have decent nutrition,” she added. “How we expect our kids to perform better when we have devalued our food to this degree is fascinating to me. You need to have healthy children in order for them to perform better.”

City schools dietician Alicia Cost said the division has worked for years to get more local and more healthful food into the schools, but acknowledges that things have picked up recently.

“I think the timing’s right,” Cost said, adding that she thinks more people have been willing to listen and help with getting better food choices into Charlottesville schools.

Just since last year, when ground was broken on the Buford Middle School garden, the city schools began working with the Local Food Hub nonprofit to get local produce inside the schools, and nutrition services hired Charlottesville Cooking School Owner Martha Stafford to test new recipes, to name a few things.

Apart from that, the C’ville School Food Initiative started to get organized, a few city schools are participating in the federal Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and the School Community Nutrition Committee was formed by the division to address what was going on nutritionally in the city’s nine schools. Last week was also Farm to School week, where schools partnered with the food hub to get a new fresh dish into the schools daily.

“What we need to think about now is how to build on that,” said School Board member Guian McKee, who as a board candidate earlier this year discussed good student nutrition as being key for student success.

Members of the schools food advocacy group say they think the schools are making good progress on getting fresher, less-processed food inside their walls. Apart from the aforementioned initiatives, Kadija said Clark Elementary also cut down chocolate milk availability to once a week last year to reduce sugar intake.

Integrating a large volume of fresher and local foods into the city’s food offerings is not a quick process, largely because of the number of factors nutrition services has to worry about — including food and labor costs, popularity of the dish among students and federal and state nutritional parameters.

“The city schools face a lot of constraints. There needs to be a really well thought-out plan,” said Wendy Philleo, a member of the city food initiative who has a child at Clark. “I don’t think anybody thinks it’s going to be easy, but there’s certainly a swelling of parents who care about it.”

Cost said the schools have a $1.7 million budget for all food services, and the schools spend 80 to 95 cents per meal depending on what is being served that day. Besides needing to be financially responsible in a time of budget crunches, there is one overarching concept that must hold true if the schools incorporate new, healthier things: The children have to eat it.

“If they’re not coming in and picking up that meal, then we’re not making any money,” Cost said, noting that some of the schools’ most popular items are pizza and chicken nuggets. “We’re actually like a small business within the school division.”

Having recently brought Stafford on, the schools are taste-testing a flagship recipe of a black bean and rice taco, and so far tasters have given the item a thumbs up. While introducing a new dish for children can be laborious, others say instituting gradual change will ensure its long-term viability.

“I think the beauty of it is, it’s slow, it’s thoughtful, it’s going to be well managed and it’s going to stick,” said Linda Winecoff, program coordinator of the Buford Schoolyard Garden project. “It’s not a fad.”

School initiative members say they are not interested in formal mandates or numerical goals for how much “healthy” food the students should be eating. But they think the city schools need a more far-reaching plan that gets beyond lunch lines and delves into instruction, instilling good eating habits in the classroom and getting students to help prepare healthy foods.

“It’s a matter of curriculum and getting this across the board,” said Kristen Suokko, who has two children at Burnley-Moran Elementary.

“We really believe in the connection between what children put into their bodies and their ability to achieve in school. And people forget that,” Suokko said. “It’s not just some kids, it’s all kids. All kids have the right to have access to this kind of food. If we are feeding them in the schools, we need to be feeding them the best that we can.”