0920_September Comstock's Magazine September 2020 | Page 56

FOOD
The Central Kitchen will feature a
large bakery, a temperature-controlled
meat-processing room, a produceprocessing
room and 15,000 square feet
of office space, says Diana Flores, director
of Nutrition Services for the district.
It’s the next big step in locally overhauling
a behemoth of a federal program
with strict regulations, a tight budget
and a lack of infrastructure.
The district’s efforts to transform
school lunch began more than 10 years
ago with a question, Flores says: Was the
district serious about wanting better food
for its children? That led
to restructuring its operating
model to accommodate
greater control
and better nutrition while
still working within the
confines of the federally
funded National School
Lunch Program.
The lunch program,
established in 1946
under President Harry S.
Truman to provide nutritious,
low-cost meals
to students, expanded
under the U.S. Department
of Agriculture in
the 1960s as a means to
provide farmers with
a market for surplus
crops they couldn’t sell.
Then it grew even larger,
becoming deeply rooted
with big food processors
like Tyson Foods and
Don Lee Farms. Today, school lunch is big
business, costing $13.8 billion annually,
and serving nearly 30 million students a
day and almost 5 billion meals annually
nationwide, according to the USDA.
SCUSD’s Nutrition Services serves
43,000 meals a day during the normal
school year, with 80 percent of its
47,900 students qualifying for free or
reduced-price meals, says Flores. In a
school district with a population that
experiences high food insecurity, food
deserts and obesity rates for middle
schoolers nearly double the U.S. average
of 18.5 percent, according to Lucile Packard
Foundation for Children’s Health.
Nutrition in school matters.
And demand for meals skyrocketed
when SCUSD closed schools on March
16 in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The USDA quickly shifted to the
Summer Food Service Program, which
allows anyone 18 and under a free meal
regardless of need or where they attend
school. By mid-June, two months after
schools closed, SCUSD had served 2
million meals (breakfast and lunch).
For comparison, the district served
84,641 meals in the summer of 2019.
“We’re building a (central) kitchen,
and we don’t necessarily want
processed products. We want to cook
it ourselves. If we were to receive a
check, we would go out and bid and
get the best price for all our products.
If we want to buy local, we could. If
we want to buy California, we could.”
DIANA FLORES
DIRECTOR OF NUTRITION SERVICES,
SACRAMENTO CITY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT
“We know all too well that these
meals are some of the only meals (students
are going) to get during the day,”
says Kelsey Nederveld, a nutrition specialist
with SCUSD.
Nationwide, serving nutritious food
children liked became significantly
more challenging when the USDA
radically altered school nutrition programs
in the 1980s, designating them as
self-funded programs, cutting off direct
access to a district’s general fund to
cover operating expenses. Budgets for
nutrition programs became dependent
upon reimbursement from the USDA
(and the state when funds were available)
for meals served. To align with
the change in funding, school kitchens
shrank, modeling a heat-and-serve capacity
without the space or equipment
to perform basic functions, such as
washing and preparing fresh produce or
assembling sandwiches.
Lobbying for funding changes
That’s where the USDA’s federal commodity
program, Foods in Schools,
comes in. Each district is allotted an
allowance to purchase food through the
USDA’s program, based
on the number of meals
served the previous
year, says Flores. SCUSD
received a credit of $1.9
million for the 2019-20
school year, approximately
17 percent of the
$8 million to $9 million it
spends on food each year.
While the program
offers fresh and processed
proteins, grains,
produce and fruits,
most districts use their
allowance to purchase
animal proteins because
they’re expensive, says
Flores. Without the
space to store or cook
with raw ingredients,
most districts are limited
to purchasing processed
and frozen items,
like chicken nuggets and
hamburger patties that can be heated
and served, she explains.
But Flores says SCUSD can purchase
differently and wants cash in lieu
of commodity dollars. In 2008, under
Flores’ supervision, her department
began converting a 50,000-square-foot
district warehouse for food storage.
With grant funds, she directed the
installation of commercial refrigeration
and freezer systems — both large
enough to house several semitrucks
worth of food — and she grew her fleet
of refrigerated food trucks from two to
11. That meant she could cut out food
56 comstocksmag.com | September 2020