Local organic lunch program struggles with diversity

By Danielle Chemtob

We’ve all been there: tray in hand, you move slowly through the line at your school cafeteria. When you finally reach the food, your stomach growls ravenously as you realize you are finally able to satisfy the hunger that had been gnawing at your stomach since fourth period algebra. But then, a hand shovels a scoop of unidentifiable glop onto your tray, and just like that you feel your hunger disappear. It’s taco Tuesday, but the beans look like a brown soupy mush, the shells are soggy, and the tacos are filled with questionable looking meat.

Fortunately, that mystery meat may be gone forever, as schools have recently been changing the way they serve school lunches, with federal nutrition standards passed in 2010 requiring school lunch programs to serve more whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and low-fat dairy products. In Marin County, however, many schools are now aiming to serve food that is organic as well as healthy. Good Earth, a natural foods store located in Fairfax, runs a school lunch program that does just that, and provides organic lunches for 14 schools in Marin.

Although Good Earth’s program is unique in that it provides organic school lunches, Good Earth co-owner Al Baylacq says it presents challenges.

“Our considerable struggle, or considerable hurdle on a daily basis is keeping food hot and good tasting, over the period of once its cooked and before the kids get to eat it,” Baylacq said. “And so there’s many hours in between those things.”

Baylacq says another challenge that the school lunch program poses is diversity.

“Our ability to keep it interesting and fresh feeling, not fresh food because everything is fresh, but the feeling of what the kids are gonna eat every day, every week, to keep that changing all the time we struggle with that because of our ability to cook the volume of food that we do,” Baylacq said.

Good Earth provides on average 1500 lunches a day, all of which are made from scratch the same morning.

“We start out at like 5am every morning, cook it from scratch, finish it, pack it, hold it in hot boxes, and then transport it,” Baylacq said. “It gets to the school and maybe sits for a half hour, sometimes 45 minutes to an hour, in the hot boxes, before it gets pulled out and served at lunch time. We know there are about 15 different recipes on a weekly basis that we can do all that really well. And where its hard for us again is to keep it unique.”

Baylacq says the solution is for schools to cook their students’ lunches in their own kitchens.

“The answer to the problem is schools reverting back to having their own kitchens and their own kitchen staff producing their own food for their own kids right there at the school,” Baylacq said.