Teriyaki Beef Dippers School Lunch Recipe

Teriyaki beef dippers have replaced mystery-meat casserole, but getting children to eat nutritious meals is still a daily lesson. With thousands filing into lunchrooms around the Cape, school meals are an important component of a child's daily intake.

Things have changed since the last time most of us stood in line at the cafeteria with our plastic trays, clutching school-issued sporks. (Remember, the plastic spoons with pointy edges?) Gone are the mystery meat casseroles, gray green beans and wafer-thin hamburgers.

Today, there is chef salad, ziti with meat sauce and teriyaki beef dippers.

"I remember when I went to school and the school lunches weren't half as good as they are now," says Tina McKenna, mother of three children at Marstons Mills East Elementary School. "It was like a mess hall lunch."

Today's menu offerings are a far cry from school lunches of yesteryear. But as obesity, and with it obesity-related illness like type II diabetes and heart disease, rises in America's youth, some parents are questioning the nutritional value of their children's school lunches.

McKenna's two boys, 10 and 7, buy lunch in the cafeteria once a week, choosing from among favorites like pizza, cheeseburgers, ziti and tacos.

"They love it. God forbid if I forget that they are buying (lunch) that day," McKenna says.

Caloric concerns

But like many parents, McKenna has concerns about the nutritional content of the meals her children eat away from home. "The calories and fat grams would keep me back from them not buying it everyday," she says. "It's my only concern."

So how do school lunches stack up nutritionally?

Menus for school meals (both breakfast and lunch) must meet standards set by the United States Food and Drug Administration (USDA). While the values for individual meals vary a little day to day, the per-meal target values averaged over the week conform to government standards for a wide range of nutritional needs, including calories, fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, calcium, fiber and iron, says Peg Dowd, food service manager for the Barnstable schools. Barnstable is the Cape's largest school system with 6,229 students. Sodhexo records show about 3,200 of them eat at school each day.

Dowd says the target value for a meal served to an elementary student must be 618 calories, contain 255.9 milligrams of calcium and derive no more than 30 percent of its calories from fat, less than 10 percent of that from saturated fats.

Crafting a diverse but balanced menu for children can be challenging, weighing higher calorie meals offered one day against lower calorie meals the next. Because nutrition is balanced over the week, children are probably better off eating a week's worth of school lunches - if they eat everything put in front of them.

When Dowd and her staff create menus for Barnstable students, the meal plans are run through a USDA-approved software known as NutriKids, which helps to balance meals over the course of the week.

"The bean burrito will balance the cheeseburger from the day before," Dowd says.

Monthly meetings are held to review menus and make adjustments so kitchen managers can respond quickly to changes in kid preference, weeding out the duds in favor of what students will actually eat.

"My philosophy is that they should eat something," Dowd says.

Feeding the finicky

As parents, we all know what our kids are supposed to eat. The challenge lies in getting them to actually eat it, particularly the kindergarten-to-fourth-grade set.

"The big key with elementary kids is that they need to recognize a food before they eat it," says Dowd of her younger diners. "This is why the casseroles are pretty much out."

Dowd and her team approach this thorny problem from a number of fronts.

"You've got to play the game," Dowd says of her younger, naturally pickier charges. "Kids are tough. They'll eat corn and green beans and broccoli. Those are the three key veggies that kids will eat."

In an ongoing effort to get students to actually eat vegetables, Dowd offered tiny carrot sticks in little packets. "They took them because they liked the packaging."

The Barnstable school system now offers a variety of low-fat milk including 2 percent, skim and low-fat flavored milks which have become very popular with both primar secondary students.

There are a number of strategies for decreasing fat and calories in Barnstable school lunches. Popular fried foods like French fries and chicken nuggets are baked, slicing fat and calories nearly in half. The schools now use lower fat meats and cheeses in sandwiches and other meals. Pretzels or tortilla chips stand in for higher fat munchies like potato chips with lunches. Salads are on the menu every day at both elementar secondary schools.

The deterioration of the great American diet is a pretty grim story. The statistics on children's eating habits are even worse. Generally, children and adolescents eat too much fat, saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium and too few fruits, vegetables and calcium.

According to a 1993 study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 41 percent of high school students in the United States ate no veggies and 42 percent ate no fruit. Other CDC studies found many adolescent females do not get the recommended daily intake of calcium.

In addition, many children decide what to eat with little or no adult supervision. The average American kid takes in 20 hours of TV per week, often eating in front of the tube, a behavior correlated with obesity.

Feeding the future

Kids are tough to feed, most parents will tell you, but training good eaters is well worth the effort - paying dividends long into adulthood. Eating patterns developed in childhood have long-range impacts on adult health.

Inadequate calcium intake during childhood and adolescence can increase the risk of osteoporosis in women. Poor eating habits in kids are implicated in the eventual development of coronary artery disease, hypertension, cancer and stroke in the grown ups they are to become. 'Adult' diseases like type II diabetes and heart disease, both of which are linked to obesity, are showing up more frequently in childhood and adolescence.

With more than half of the kids in the United States eating at least one of their three major meals in school, one place to teach smart eating is in the school lunchroom.

The Centers for Disease Control has issued recommendations to schools aimed at re-educating kids and their families about healthy food choices.

"It's more than providing healthy food," Dowd says of Barnstable's school lunch program. "It's education, too."

Nutritional education programs in the Barnstable school system target both elementar secondary students. The School Stars program provides teachers with resources to help their students make the right choices about food. Monthly menus sent home with students reach out to parents, providing tips on smart eating for a healthy weight that parents can use for home meal planning.

The Barnstable school lunch team reaches out to high school students in different ways.

"It's very difficult, to change a high school kid's mind," says Dowd. Adolescents are notorious junk-food junkies and in an environment, which is filled with nutritionally empty foods, the task of promoting healthy eating habits can be daunting. Dowd concedes that you can't force nutrition down a teenager's throat.

"We're going to try to educate them and see if they can make smart choices on their own."

While private vending machines hawking soda and candy still lurk in the high school, Dowd hopes that providing solid nutrition education and information along with healthy alternatives will help teens make better choices.

Eating at home

Because kids are still eating most of their meals at home, parents play the defining role in shaping their children's eating behavior.

Stacey Zito, mother of three whose two girls attend Marstons Mills East Elementary, recognizes how difficult this can be. When the monthly menu arrives home in her daughters' backpacks, she sits down with her oldest, Nicole, to look at the choices together.

"I really feel that it is now up to her to choose. She understands what she likes and she understands the nutritional value of different choices.," she says.

Zito concedes that kids will be kids and though you may hope they eat the fruit cocktail cup, they may very well end up swapping for their neighbor's cookies. "You do not have the control over what your kids choose (for school lunch), so you still have to offer all the nutritious foods at home."

When her girls arrive home from school they have fruits or veggies and dip available to munch on. A great believer in education, Zito has involved her children in the family meal planning since they were toddlers, taking them to the grocery store and talking about the food they were purchasing and why.

"I can only hope to instill that it's important to eat a balanced meal, but when you send them into school they'll still make their own choices," she says. "When they understand their choices better, I think overall that they will make better choices."

Nicole Zito, a fourth-grader at Marstons Mills East Elementary, looks forward to getting school lunches.

"I like macaroni and cheese the best," she says. "I try new things and sometimes it's good, like tacos. If there's cookies or ice cream I'd get that."

Barnstable students, like Nicole are offered a choice of three entr?es as well as a number of side dishes at each meal. As menus are worked and reworked to be both nutritious and appetizing, there is one constant for today's kids and their parents. Somewhere behind the school lunch counter, there is a tray of colorful Jell-O cups, each with a tiny island of whipped cream dancing on its gelatinous surface.

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Source: https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/lifestyle/food/2003/10/29/school-lunch/50935193007/

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