The World of Chef Jorge
It's a daunting task: Make New York City's school lunches healthful--and fun to eat
Collazo has also instituted two days of intensive culinary training for the army of school cooks, many of whom have worked in the system for years but have never been exposed to the finer points of nutrition, taste, and presentation: "They're excited to learn, and it makes them feel good about what they're doing."
Cafeteria sales are up, but still fewer than 50 percent of high school students eat school lunches. The salad bars in high schools have been Collazo's single most successful innovation, but there is still a stigma to school food, he says. To teenagers, the idea that school lunches are subsidized by the government means school food is somehow "welfare food." "I'm convinced that's one reason we sell so much yogurt; it's branded." So he's now asking his suppliers to package some food as they would for retail sale, to reduce stigma.
The majority of school kitchens in New York and elsewhere don't cook from scratch; they reheat prepared foods. "When I came every piece of chicken and fish was breaded, or fried, or had some coating on it," he says. "I asked why not a plain chicken breast or a plain piece of fish that we could put a good, low-fat cacciatore or guisado sauce on, and then reheat?" The answer: Neither the sauces nor the plain entrees were available.
To remedy the situation, he has been testing sauces and meeting with food companies for months. The plain entrees and healthy sauces may be available by next year. "We serve 860,000 school meals a day in New York. We're using our buying power to force change among food manufacturers, and we continue to set the pace."
If he succeeds, the rest of the nation will most likely not be far behind.
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