By Young Soo Yang

For many Americans, the subject of school cafeteria food conjures up images of rubbery pizza, dry hamburgers, pastas drowned in processed tomato sauce and a host of mystery meat entrées.

The meat wasn’t the only thing that was a mystery. While always suspect, the source and quality of those food products have come under public scrutiny in recent years.

The popularity of the Food Network and the explosion of lifestyle television programs have created a public awareness and demand for healthy, eco-friendly options for the items we put on our plate. This media focus and the rise of celebrity chefs have helped drive concepts such as farm-to-table and seasonal cooking.

Reality shows like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution have also shined an uncomfortable spotlight on the food public schools around the country serve their students.

The quest for healthier school lunches is not new. Chatham-born Alice Waters, the grand dame of the organic food movement, has been promoting locally-grown, sustainable food ingredients for decades. Waters is also credited for establishing the Edible Schoolyard Project. It’s a school lunch reform program that aims to provide universal access to healthy, organic foods by creating school vegetable gardens.

Terra Meierdierck, a Research Associate at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), has helped implement the Edible Schoolyard concept to schools here in New Jersey.

Meierdierck has a background in K-12 education. Before working at NJIT, she used to perform waste audits at K-12 and higher ed schools. Through those audits, she got an up-close look at what was being served to the students. At one school, she recalls a prepackaged breakfast that consisted mostly of sugar — cinnamon crunch toast, grammy bear cookies and apple juice. And lunch was essentially peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread, a meal that consisted mostly of hydrogenated oils, sugar and high fructose corn syrup. After consuming a meal like that, students are not in the best frame of mind to learn, says Meierdierck.

“The foods that students consume affect their productivity in the classroom and how they learn,” Meierdierck said. “So you tend to have students come back in from lunch and they’re completely distracted or … they have a lot of energy at first and then they burn out very quickly.”

At NJIT, Meierdierck’s research centers on improving education through the built-in-environment. She has worked with several K-12 schools in integrating school gardens and composting programs that teach kids about growing and using locally-sourced food and help improve the school lunch menu at the same time.

Not surprisingly, getting schools to change their ways is no easy feat. The first school Meierdierck worked with to set up a composting and garden program was in Perth Amboy where she had the support of teachers and the then superintendent. But according to Meierdierck, Perth Amboy was the exception rather than the norm. When it comes to tinkering with school lunches, Meierdierck says she often comes up against roadblocks such as school administrations and food service contractors. Bureaucracy and liability issues add another layer of obstacles to implementing change.

“It’s not only the administration, it’s also the food service provider because they go out for contract and they have a bid and they might have a contract for five years with a given provider. And that provider has their own procurement policies that they usually work with and some of them are very opposed to working with local farmers, purchasing local foods,” Meierdierck said. “Their concern is if a student gets sick or something like that.”

Another challenge relates to food preparation. Because most of the purchased foods come pre-cut and prepackaged, Meierdierck says many schools are not accustomed or equipped to prepare food on-site.

“They don’t necessarily have a full kitchen to be able to do so. And that’s a major challenge,” she said. “They say ‘we don’t have the staff, we don’t have the resources to do that,’ so it’s just not possible.”

Outside of the schools, the support she gets from parents is mixed. While some are very excited about the program, she admits that in some school districts, it’s a struggle getting her message through, especially with parents of English Language Learners.

“The issue there … is communication with the parents,” Meierdierck said. “And in some of the school districts, unfortunately like Newark, some of the parents are so busy sometimes working two jobs, they’re kind of not as involved as maybe as they would want to be.”

Meierdierck admits that the higher cost of organic foods gives more affluent communities an advantage over poorer school districts when it comes to instilling healthy eating habits in kids.

“In communities where there is a higher socioeconomic status, the parents have more education and they also have the resources to purchase healthier foods at home,” she said. “So that also reinforces what you’re trying to teach in the classrooms.”

While purchasing organic costs more incrementally because products tend to have a shorter shelf life, Meierdierck says it’s possible for schools to work out some agreement with local farmers on certain items so that there isn’t as much of an incremental cost.

Agriculture has always played an important role in New Jersey’s economy. Meierdierck says the state’s climate zone is ideal for growing leafy greens, some lettuces and herbs all year round.

“Beets, carrots, kale will grow year round,” she said. “Tomatoes — sometimes it depends on whether there’s a summer program at the school or not.”

The vegetables grown in the school garden then find their way onto the school lunch menu, providing more organic and vegetarian options that are sustainable and friendly to the environment.

“Like a parsley pesto, fresh salads, apple for lunch. Rutgers Prep does a vegetarian option every single day. They did a lentil dish that was 100 percent local,” Meierdierck said. “Rutgers Prep purchases everything local and they have zero waste. They’re really a good model.”

She believes that the food habits developed at these model schools will spill over into the home and instill healthy eating habits in the future, with students preferring to eat more wholesome foods rather than the processed, sugary foods found in many school cafeterias. According to Meierdierck, the feedback she gets from students at these schools is largely positive.

“They are liking it. We even had students eat raw beet salad,” she said. “So students, I think, are trying new things that they’ve never tried before and they’re really enjoying working and also tasting the foods that they helped to grow.”

Meierdierck has seen first hand the positive effect that a garden-composting program has on participating students. For instance at Kittatinny School, a regional high school in North Jersey, Meierdierck says the sense of ownership and pride is evident when they see the results of their labor.

“You would see the students that were involved with the environmental club tell the other students ‘that’s not waste, that’s compost — that’s valuable,'” she said. “The most valuable lesson is when the students learn so much that they’re able to educate the other students and create that buzz.”

Through cultivating a garden and creating compost to put back into the garden, Meierdierck says students begin to understand the cradle to cradle cycle of food — where it comes from and how to limit waste. And that’s when a paradigm shift occurs, says Meierdierck.