Chicago school worker reveals self as school cafeteria food blogger
By NANCI HELLMICH October 5, 2011 11:32AM
Updated: October 6, 2011 9:22PM
A Chicago school worker ate and secretly photographed school lunch meals for a year and blogged about how bad they were, developing a following of thousands of people along the way. This week, she is revealing her identity for the first time — Sarah Wu, 34, a speech pathologist in Chicago’s public schools — and releasing her new book, Fed Up With Lunch (Chronicle Books, $22.95). “With the blog, I really wanted a public record of these meals that I couldn’t believe were being served to kids,” she says. “I thought the book would reach a wider audience.” It all started one day when Wu didn’t have time to pack her own lunch and bought a school lunch instead — was a hot dog encased in soggy dough, which came with six tater tots, a Jell-O cup and chocolate milk. “I thought to myself, ‘I cannot believe this is the food that the kids are eating,’ ” says Wu. She was working in a large elementary school where more than 90 percent of the kids qualified for free and reduced lunches. “Many of my students were coming from poverty,” says Wu, who has a 3-year-old son. “Their families were living paycheck to paycheck. Many of my students relied on school lunch for their best meal of the day.” In all, she says she ate 162 school lunches in a year. The Chicago Public Schools responded to Wu’s book with a written statement saying school officials are “committed to the health and wellness of our students” and have “increased . . .. choices of fruits and vegetables, as well as whole grains, and eliminated deep-fat frying.” Wu says the meals at Haugan Elementary School in Chicago — where she ate the lunches but no longer works — were brought in by a food-service management company, not cooked by the cafeteria staff. “This is not about the lunch ladies who are doing the best job they can,” Wu says. “This is about a nationwide nutrition crisis. These are American kids. They need the best food we can give them.” Wu is drawing attention to one of the hottest topics in child nutrition: the quality — or lack thereof —of school lunches. Many consumer advocates, parents and others have been fighting for years for healthier school meals in part because of the current childhood obesity epidemic: A third of children in the United States are overweight or obese. Almost 32 million kids eat the school lunch every day. Some schools prepare their meals on the premises; some in central kitchens. Other districts use food service companies. The federal government is developing new nutrition standards for foods served in schools, but the question for now remains: How healthy are school meals? “Out of 100,000 schools in the U.S., there are thousands of schools that are working hard to improve the nutrition quality of school meals, but the majority aren’t there yet,” says Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The overwhelming majority of schools are struggling to serve healthier meals with enough fruits, vegetables and whole grains and moderate in sodium, saturated fat and sugar — meals that kids will like and enjoy.” Things are slowly improving Dayle Hayes, a registered dietitian in Billings, Mont., who consults about school lunches around the country, says there have been some “revolutionary changes” in meals the past few years. Some schools are serving pizza made with whole-grain crust and low-fat cheese, baking whole-grain rolls and using local produce or foods from school gardens, she says. Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, agrees. “We have seen a tremendous change in the cafeterias in what they are offering and what they are promoting.” Wu’s story is “one snapshot in one school across the country,” Pratt-Heavner says, and parents need to find out what’s happening in their own children’s schools.
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