Polly ate lunch at a District 150 school recently. Actual menu: breadsticks with marinara sauce. Oh, and unidentifiable “fruit.” You know, when I was in school, lo these many years ago, we used to make fun of the food (which I recall was more or less like a TV dinner), but we were never served anything as austere as breadsticks with marinara sauce.
I looked up the District 150 menu, and it appears Polly could have opted for the Turkey Ranch Pita Pocket, but wasn’t it the bread wrap that was suspected to be responsible for all the illnesses lately? Can’t blame Polly for opting for the lesser of two evils.
You know, if I fed my kids breadsticks and sauce and they were going to the hospital with food poisoning every few weeks, how long do you think it would be before DCFS paid me a visit? And possibly the police?
I’m generally in favor of preserving historic buildings if at all possible, and I’ve been critical of District 150’s plans to tear down eleven schools and build six more. But I swear I would personally swing the sledgehammer into as many buildings as they want to level if it would give the district enough money to provide these children a decent meal.
And that means, one way or another, District 150 needs to dump Aramark (NYSE: RMK), the sooner the better. Aramark says on their website (which, incidentally, touts their brand-new, 53,000-square-foot “Innovation Center”), “We understand the impact of good nutrition on student performance, and have been helping the K-12 market increase student productivity through high quality food service programs.” If breadsticks with marinara sauce is “high quality,” I’d hate to see what they consider “low quality.”
Oliver Twist ate better.
Don’t like the menu? Yeah, good luck trying to serve what Chef Kevin might offer up. Kids like bread sticks !
Regarding the recent food poisoning incident. The ‘official’ diagnosis was to blame the tortilla’s for having too many ‘preservatives’ in them. Medical professionals interiewed by local TV networks called Bullshit !. It ain’t the preservatives…. and so the whole thing got whitewashed.
The Health Dept. has it’s official ruling. Blame the supplier for too many preservatives. Nevermind that local medical folks said that it would take a heck of lot more of the stuff to get you sick than would fit in a tortilla and that the symptoms would be different.
Aramark gets to blame the supplier rather than own up. There are other tortilla suppliers.
Local hospitals get to collect more revenue from insurance companies. More sick folks is more $$ in the bank.
District 150 gets to dodge a contract headache, and blames the supplier.
The students get a disliked food item removed from the menu. Come on, only a 100 or so kids get sick out of many hundreds more, that isn’t exactly a hit for a food item is it?
Everyone Wins !! Right?
My instincts tell me something ain’t right with the Health Department.
Actually, my neice has “second lunch” which means the second choice, Turkey Ranch Wrap, was no longer available. I’m told that Option B usually is gone (even if ordered the previous day) by the time her class gets to the cafeteria. Anyway, I would have eaten my shoe before sampling any Aramark poultry products.
Kids may LIKE breadsticks Mahkno (although not these ones- I promise you- they were really more like breadlike logs) but they don’t qualify as an entree.
Don’t blame the building for the food. Putting up expensive (and probably ugly and user-unfriendly) new buildings won’t change a thing at the food service. And it certainly won’t effect any changes at the Health Dept. (isn’t that the same heath dept. that some years back let a local eatery continue to serve botulism-tainted food while the victims poured in?). This new building stuff is just another excuse. Most new school buildings look like prisons (I actually mistook one for a jail once) and are just as confortable. Few, if any, windows, rat-maze like floor plans, poor lighting, poor ventilation, and flat, leaking roofs. Unless they want the inmates (er, I mean students) to get used to the archetecture, I see no reason not to maintain the existing buildings and concentrate on the real mission – was it education?