The Controversy Behind School Lunches, and the Truth

By: Julia Hedelman

I walked into my school cafeteria, my stomach grumbling, eager to shove a hot slice of pizza into my mouth. At last I had my salad, fruit, and pizza sitting on a plate in front of me ready to be eaten. For the first nine years of my life in elementary school, I was served delicious meals from the local natural foods store called Good Earth. Thanks to Al Baylacq—co-owner of Good Earth—and his team, many kids have been as lucky as I was for the food options at school.

Every week, 7,500 lunches are delivered to fourteen different schools throughout Marin. Al started the school lunch program a few years ago, providing organic and nutritious meals to students across Marin. He states, “organic foods, school gardens, basic nutrition, curriculum and physical activity for our children are all important to me. I want every school in Marin to be involved.”

Although Al has created a unique, healthy, and cost-effective program, there is a catch. “Our considerable struggle on a daily basis is keeping the food hot and good tasting. Over the period of once it is cooked and before they [the kids] it eat. So there is many hours between those two things,” he states. The reason Al decided to create this lunch program is because he wanted to steer parents and their children away from the really cheap and unhealthy food that the schools are providing and give them a healthier option. But Al has realized that, “there is a difference between enjoying pizza 10 minutes out of the oven versus an hour out of the oven. Those are two different experiences.”

There is a decision to be made here: either fried chicken with beans that look like a sloppy mush, or a cheese pizza that tastes slightly cold made with whole grains, locally grown tomatoes and locally farmed cheese that. Personally, I would choose the pizza over the fried chicken any day.

But Al has been faced with another challenge: keeping the food menu unique. “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,” says Al.

Lastly, the preparation and effort put into these meals, may be too much for the Good Earth to handle as their lunch program expands. Al explains, “we start out at five in the morning, cook it from scratch and finish it, pack it, hold it, in hot boxes, and then transport it. Then it gets to the school and maybe sits for another half hour to forty-five minutes in the hot boxes before it gets pulled out and served at lunch time.”

With so many conflicts with delivering food, Al has realized that his program is not the solution to solving healthier, fresh, and diverse meals to kids at school. But instead, “the answer to the problem is school’s reverting back to having their own kitchens, and their own kitchen staff producing their own food for their own kids right at their own school, that is the answer right there…”