Some Answers To Frequently Asked Questions, Frequently Made Requests, and Frequently Offered Suggestions:

My approach to kids and food is to provide as many choices as possible, choices which are all reasonable and nutritious, and then let them decide what they want. I cannot think of a single food that every child will want to eat.(Except perhaps chicken nuggets which seem to have frighteningly universal appeal.) With Lower School children, we spend more time managing their choices—“perhaps you don’t need a bagel, and garlic bread, and pita bread, why don’t you try some salad?” As the kids get older, we let them start making their own decisions. Much to the children’s chagrin, we very rarely serve dessert. When we finally got rid of the cakes and cookies and ice cream which we used to serve, replacing them with the six or seven different kinds fruit every day, along with a variety of dried fruits, the kids were furious. One irate boy, tray in hand, approached me and demanded to know why we got rid of “the good stuff.” I looked at his lunch: a salad, a bagel, a bowl of grapes and an apple. “That’s why,” I responded.

Hannah hates raw carrots. Cooked ones are okay, but not raw. A vegetarian, she loves the salad bar, but didn’t like our mixed greens because we put shaved carrots in with the lettuces for color. When I learned of Hannah’s feelings about carrots, we stopped adding them to the lettuce. Now we have raw carrots on the salad bar, next to the lettuces but not mixed in. Kimberly likes hummus and pita; and, it turns out, so do a lot of other kids. So now we have that every day. With over a thousand kids to feed, it’s hard to cater to individual tastes, but we try to as much possible. I always want to hear suggestions and requests. We always need new ideas and want to give the kids what they want, except for the aforementioned cookies and ice cream, and chicken nuggets every day. We have space for thirty-six items on our salad and sandwich bars, so we appreciate any and all thoughts. If there is something one kids likes, odds are there are twenty other kids who’d like it also. Same for the hot food and the soups.

I was interested to see, when I visited another school to learn about its lunch program, that they serve no bread products at lunch: no bagels, no pita, no sliced bread. They feature a “sandwich of the day” –a wrap, a Cuban sandwich, an Asian summer roll, for instance—but do not have any thing for making sandwiches, nor any bagels. This approach seemed a little extreme. What seemed even more extreme, Draconian even, was when kids came back for second helpings of the starch available that day, brown rice, they were not allowed any until they had eaten a second helping of the vegetable, broccoli, first. I operate under the assumption that not every child will want to eat the hot entrée on a given day; some may just want to make themselves a sandwich. Or they may want just a bagel. Some kids have a bagel every day. For reasons unknown to me, many children, who at a younger age will eat almost anything, get to seventh grade and are satisfied only by bagels. By ninth grade most of them are back to eating a wide variety of foods, but in seventh and eight grades…bagels. I don’t know if this is fashion or craving, but it is perennial.

First, make sure the shool nurse is aware of any food issues your child may have. I receive a list each year fom the nurse letting me know which kids have allergies, but feel free to contact me with any specific questions you may have. We do not use nuts of any kind in the Lower School kitchen but we do have individually-wrapped portions of peanut butter available for Middle and High Schoolers. As someone with a food allergy, I feel it is very important for kids to learn to manage what they can and cannot eat, and by Middle School they are old enough to do so. We can usually substitute items--rice noodles instead of wheat, for instance-- for a child with an allergy. We cook almost exclusively with either canola or olive oil, and we do not puchase products containing trans fats. We do not own a deep fryer and prepare most of our food from scratch, as low in fat as possible.