It's a no brainer.
Good food and kids go together naturally and the Grand Traverse Area Catholic Schools want the synergy to be part of their daily lunch menu. Launching the Life Balance Initiative this fall, the 1,100-student system serving grades K-12 has for the last eight days offered lunches featuring whole grains, organic and locally-grown food.
Funding from various sources, including the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, got the program going this fall. The kitchens at St. Francis High School were renovated to accommodate cooking or preparing food for all schools in the system.
"It is one of the very few times when you can say this definitely is good for kids without debate,” said Mike Buell, superintendent of the system. "Having kids eat healthy foods and fighting childhood obesity is one of those few win-wins.”
Gone is the term cafeteria featuring institutional tables; instead students will eat at round tables with real silverware in dining rooms with more natural lighting. Among food changes, milk cartons have been replaced with hormone-free milk students drink from glasses and pizza now has whole wheat crust and healthier sauce and cheese. Chicken nuggets are now chicken and French fries have become homemade potatoes.
Vending machines at the schools now offer healthy options — no more soft drinks — and future plans include modifying concession options at sporting events, starting with basketball season. In addition, program leaders are considering canning and preserving produce next summer for use throughout the following school year.
"People are really excited and I found that they were really wanting change,” said Brigid Wilson, the coordinator of the program and a parent of two students in the system. "We're really getting away from high fructose corn syrup and we're not serving anything with partially hydrogenated oils — we're going back to making things from scratch.”
Moving their lunch program in-house this fall — they had contracted with the Traverse City Area Public Schools for 12 years — and designing the initiative since last spring, the lunch menus are just the beginning. Wilson noted that students in grades K-9 will have baseline measurements in height, weight, blood pressure and body mass index measured and tracked for the next five years. A researcher from Central Michigan University is helping the school system set up a program to track the data properly.
Life Balance Initiative organizers acknowledge that its overall goal of improving a student's health will take more than one meal a day during the school year. The program will also create the school dining room as an extension of the classroom, where students will learn about, for example, portion sizes and how to read nutritional labels. Table top facts that are age appropriate will also be posted.
"We're hoping that through education we can change the lives of families,” said Wilson, noting the program will highlight the extensive educational offerings available at Munson Medical Center. "We're really kind of reeducating children, turning them on to vegetables they've never heard of, opening their minds.”
"The hope is long term to get the students in the kitchen where they can get some hands-on culinary skills,” she added.
The Life Balance Initiative founders ironically located via the Internet their most valuable resource, Beth Collins, right here in Traverse City. The long-time chef owns Local Plates LLC and is a nationally recognized expert on revamping lunch programs at schools.
Joining the endeavor in March, Collins has helped guide the process from the beginning, working to create a program that will not only change the children but the community.
"You can't just change the food, you really have to educate the kids, the families and the community,” said Collins. "We started with the food program but we're doing strategic planning next week to talk about how to pull all the pieces together.”