What it takes to get more quality ingredients in school lunches
As Austin-area parents and students are getting back-toschool supplies in order, local school districts are preparing menus, placing orders and preparing staff for another school year of feeding thousands of elementary, middle and high school students.
The Austin Independent School District provides more than 73,000 meals every day, but they serve only about a third of the students at breakfast and only about half at lunch.
From having packed countless ham sandwiches and bags of chips for myself as a kid, I know that a hot meal made from whole ingredients is better than the granola bars and cheese sticks that constituted many of my own elementary and middle school meals. But not every parent in the Austin school district is as big a fan of the food as I am (my kids eat breakfast and lunch at school every day). I’ve heard from plenty of you who have said that you’d let your kids eat the school lunch if they served organic produce or grass-fed beef.
Austin school district food services director Anneliese Tanner has heard that argument a lot. In a 2017 profile, she explained that the district has more buying power when it serves more students, so the more students who buy school lunch, the better quality food it can serve everyone.
So, what would it take for Austin to be able to make those changes to the menu? Ahead of this school year, Tanner crunched the numbers to figure out how many students would have to start eating the school lunch to serve grassfed beef, organic produce and organic milk. Here’s what she found:
■ If every student not currently eating school lunch made the choice to do so once a week, all beef served in the district could be grass-fed.
■ If every student not currently eating lunch ate school it twice a week, the district could serve entirely organic produce.
■ If students who aren’t eating school lunch now ate it three times a week, the district could serve organic milk at every meal.
It’s worth noting that about 45 percent of the ingredients used in the Austin school dis-