When you think about school lunches, you might think about the horribly cardboard pizza, the fries that have seen better days, and a few sad looking wilted pieces of lettuce. The food service folks in the Atlanta Public Schools are working to breathe new lunches (and new life) into the program to improve nutrition and taste.
The farm to school program was introduced as a 4-year effort designed to help students in the Atlanta schools experience *real* food. The kids are being served food from all over the state, locally sourced, and not frozen in a factory. This is dramatically changing the face of lunches.
One huge change has been the creation of a salad bar with all of the popular fresh fruits and vegetables upon it. There is also more of an effort to go with baked over fried foods, something quite pleasing to the calorie counters out there.
As the program has been going on for a little while, “We now have students who came to us after this program started who have never had a dessert in school. They don’t remember the days of foods with non-nutritious calories.” This from Marilyn Hughes, the director of Atlanta Public School’s nutrition since 2003.
Read more about this program from the original article posted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Do you believe that other school systems are going to be removing their commercial deep fryers out of the kitchen and switching to salad bars?
Special thanks to Dan Foy on Flickr for the Creative Commons use of his photo.
