School lunch in Berlin

There’s been a lot of chatter (okay, Tweeting) lately on Twitter about school lunches in the US and around the world thanks to a few different blogs that have posted pictures of them (why does everyone use those horrible divided trays??). Go to this one, which is purely recreational and checks out lunches from Japan to India to France and a bunch of places in between, and I defy you to not scroll down through the entire series of photos in order to satisfy your curiosity. At this one you can learn about the horror that is pizza flavored stuffed beef mini bites alongside a lot of really interesting and useful information about school lunch policy and legislation in the US. (Big thanks to Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore for both of these. I don’t know her, but I love her blog).

School lunch is, of course, of special interest to me because of The Cheese-Hater who is, if not an unhealthy eater, definitely an eccentric one. He went to school for the first time when we arrived in Berlin last summer, and I confess, I was thrilled to learn that lunch would provided for even the two and three year-olds at his kindergarten (preschool here). The very idea of not having to negotiate that meal with him five times a week, to not even have to think about what to pack for him, made me jump for joy. I’m all for outsourcing. And then, when he started, it got even better.

School lunch here, it turns out, does not involve trays or choices of any kind. There is a menu for each day, which is never chicken nuggets or pizza or french fries, and it’s served to the kids in their classrooms. You eat or you don’t. (I have nothing against the above-noted foods on occasion, but I don’t think they belong in school as a daily offering.) Even more amazing, this meal, which may be fish with lemon sauce, goulash (not a Cheese-Hater favorite), or schnitzel, all with sides of rice or potatoes and vegetables, is served on china plates with real silverware (stainless steelware, but you get my point), paper napkins and water glasses included. The teachers set the table each day, then serve the food, and when the children are all done eating, they’re called up two by two to scrape their plates into the leftovers bucket and clear their places. And then they all brush their teeth.

I love the preschool The Cheese Hater will be going to next year in New York, but I already know I’m going to have to pack his lunch for him every night. Still, I’m wondering if I can start some kind of grass roots post-lunch tooth brushing campaign without seeming like the biggest pain in the ass ever.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

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Local food hits the big time

There’s a mind-boggling article in today’s New York Times about big corporations’ attempt to appeal to consumers by going “local.” Among the efforts is Frito-Lay’s new ad campaign, which will feature some of the “local” farmers who grow some of the 2 billion pounds of potatoes they use to make chips every year. “We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” one of them says in his ad. “It’s a pretty good fit.” Hmm…..

Overall, the article is a fascinating look into the issue from both sides. Needless to say, I agree with Jessica Prentice, the food writer who invented the term “locavore”, who says: “The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems. Large corporations peddling junk food are the exact opposite of what this is about.”

On the other hand, you have to admire the insane marketing savvy (as even Michael Pollan does in the article) of someone like the guy who has correctly identified, and is now exploiting, the very issue that sent me to the kitchen and the fields for book research: What are we supposed to be eating? We’re constantly being told to eat local and organic, but unless you live in California, it’s not really possible to do that all the time. “The problem is there is absolutely no way we can have local produce within 100 miles of every person in America, so the question is how do we take it to that next level,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst known as the Supermarket Guru who ConAgra recently hired to work on its Hunt’s tomatoes promotion.

As cynical as the whole thing is, though, I also agree with Prentice’s closing thought: “You know the locavore phenomenon is having an impact when the corporations begin co-opting it.”

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Fishy chips?

The other night when I was putting The Cheese-Hater to bed, I read him a book called Room on the Broom that contains a scene in which a dragon threatens to eat a witch and bellows (meaning I bellow, because if I try to just read it in a normal tone of voice The Cheese-Hater makes me go back for a do-over):

“I am a dragon, as mean as can be,
And I’m planning to have WITCH
AND CHIPS for my tea!”

Once we had gotten past this tense moment in the narrative (the witch, in case you’re worried, prevails–but if he’d managed to eat her, would she count as local food?), The Cheese-Hater turned to me with utmost seriousness:

“Mama?” he said. “Yes?” I answered, bracing for a question about fire-breathing dragons and whether or not they eat little boys. “I like chips.”

That’s my boy!

As it happened, I already had chips on the brain because earlier in the day I’d read an item about how Frito-Lay is planning to introduce a fully compostable bag for Sun Chips by Earth Day 2010. As they put it, “You eat the chips. The earth eats the bag. And we all live in a cleaner world.”

Of course, compostable bags don’t make Sun Chips any less mass-produced or Frito-Lay any less of a gigantic corporation. Still, given the reality that we all find ourselves in gas stations and airports and other places needing a snack with nothing available except such items–does this decision make you more likely to go for the Sun Chips as opposed to something else?

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Healthy versus happy?

I check in fairly often with Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog on the New York Times website, which, according to its author, is about “everything parenting-related, including homework, friends, sex, bullying, baby sitters and the work-family balance.” As such, it’s a great place to get some perspective on one’s own parenting mania. The kind of mania that leads one to flee to the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant and work there for free in order to try to negate the perils of living with a Cheese-Hater. And then write a book about it.

So I was very interested in an item Belkin posted last week discussing the conclusions of a study about “the relationship between how much fast food (defined as French fries, pizza and hamburgers) and soft drinks (defined as beverages containing sugar)…children consumed and their psychological health.” Basically, she explains, the “central finding was that while children who ate more of the above were more likely to be overweight, they were also less likely to report being unhappy.”

And then she poses the eight million dollar question: “So what are parents supposed to do with this information?”

Now, because the Cheese-Hater refused to even go near a piece of pizza or a plate of french fries until well after the age when most children are eating them with glee, and because he has never been tempted by a hamburger to this date, we haven’t had this particular worry as parents. (Yes, I stand before you as a mother who has actually, on occasion, begged her child to PLEASE EAT A FRENCH FRY. Who’d have thunk it possible?).

Nevertheless it, as Belkin’s post goes on to do, brings up an issue that is central to Eating for Beginners as well as to my life, which is the issue of balance. After all my work in fields and barns and on a fishing boat and at applewood, I know that yes, I love good organic, small-producer grown food, and I try to eat it, and feed it to The Cheese-Hater, as often as is possible. However, I also love cookies, many of which are neither organic nor local nor in any possible way shape or form good for me. They are also part of the fabric of my life; Proust and his madeleine had nothing on me when it comes to cookies and memories.

So sure, parenting is about making sure teeth are brushed and milk is growth-hormone-free and sheets are reasonably clean. But for me, it’s also about the pure pleasure of feeding these sweets to The Cheese-Hater and watching him grin with delight. He’s happy, and so am I.

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Why I wrote Eating for Beginners (the book)

Here’s a frightening (if somewhat funny in an unbelievable kind of way) quote from a really interesting article in yesterday’s Washington Post about how giant food corporations are now trying to market their highly processed junk food as “simple” and “real” (example: Haagen-Daz’s new “Five” line, as in five ingredients only, which is what their ice cream has anyway). It comes from a spokesperson for Frito-Lay.

“It’s anecdotal, but we’ve had people tell us that they didn’t know there were potatoes in potato chips,” Gonzalez said…”People forget corn chips come from corn.”

*Full disclosure: I adore potato chips.

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