At 7 a.m., blurry-eyed food service workers were arriving at Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s central kitchen to prepare the daily lunch shipment. The central kitchen in Watsonville is surrounded on all sides by agricultural land — lush green lettuce fields butting up against the parking lot, orange orchards across the street and shaded rows of raspberries and blackberries on the opposite corner.
Inside the central kitchen, however, were stacked trays of chicken burgers awaiting their journey through the plastic wrapping machine before being loaded onto a delivery truck and shipped to various schools where they are heated and served. The food service workers, dressed in aprons and hair nets, moved to the steady chug of the packaging machine as they stood in assembly line fashion, removing frozen patties from their boxes, sandwiching them between two buns and placing them along a conveyer belt where they are wrapped in shiny plastic to preserve them for the trip to local schools.
While cooking used to be done in the kitchen years ago, all the food served today requires minimal preparation; Frozen entrees are paired with fresh produce and sides like dehydrated beans and mashed potatoes. Kitchen manager Paula Barajas said the switch is mainly due to funding, where the district no longer has the money to pay for the labor required to cook. During the year, the district employs 32 food service staff, which don’t have capacity to produce thousands of lunches a day, she said.
“I could never, even with that amount of people, put out that amount of lunches if we had to start cooking them,” Barajas said.
The kitchen churns out about 4,000 lunches a day during the summer compared to the 5,000 to 6,000 in the regular school year. Another 3,000 are delivered during the year directly to schools that have their own storage and refrigeration facilities. The district uses the packaging machine twice a week while the food comes frozen and prepackaged the other days.
The chicken patties for this particular meal were trucked from Kings Delight, a processor of USDA commodity foods based in Gainesville, Georgia. The semi-whole wheat buns came from Wonder Bread, which Barajas believes are baked in Southern California. Additionally, baby carrots, milk and fruit from a Watsonville-based company, Coast Produce, are delivered site to site to accompany packaged entrees.
Unlike the regular school year, breakfast and lunch are free for all students and even community members 18 and under who live nearby. Schools that meet a certain free-and-reduced lunch threshold are subsidized through the federal Seamless Summer Feeding Program and the district picks up the tab for the higher income schools so they’re not left out.
While some criticize the prepackaged food served by the district, it’s different than what meets the eye, says Barajas.
“Our hamburgers are not what you would find at McDonalds,” Barajas said. “They have to meet certain fat requirements and so do our chicken burgers. We are using semi-whole wheat buns and things like that. So when people see a corn dog on our menu, they’re thinking ‘oh my God, that’s terrible,’ but it’s not deep fat fried, it has some whole grain corn meal in it. We’re using a chicken or a turkey dog. So we’re trying to be as healthy as we can in those areas.”
Sometimes healthy alternatives backfire, though, because kids often won’t eat what their not used to, Barajas says.
“They’re so used to having other types of food,” she said. “[Wheat buns] looks too healthy to them. They’re used to seeing chicken on wheat buns, but nobody out there has a hamburger on a wheat bun so it’s foreign. Some of the kids will take the bun off, throw it away and just eat the hamburger.”
She has also noticed that fruit consumption increases when it’s sliced and more accessible to students. The district bought an apple sectioner for a volunteer at Alianza Charter School who stands at the end of the food line to slice apples. This simple preparation makes a big difference, says Barajas, but it requires an extra person which is not in the district’s budget.
Along with financial constraints which have limited access to fresh food, both Barajas and Food Services Director Nicole Meschi cite nutrition education as another missing link in encouraging kids to consume more fruits, vegetables and healthier menu items.
Stay tuned to hear about some of the nutrition education programs bringing farm fresh produce into the classroom at Pajaro Valley and other school districts in Santa Cruz County as reporting on Sustainable School: What’s for Lunch? continues.
