It sounds like a foodie conspiracy. I mean, if you pushed aside the negative connotations that the word conspiracy carries.
John Weatherup, president of the
Toronto Education Workers (CUPE 4400), walks me through the different components of "the plan," hardly pausing to take a breath.
It swirls together, with each element of CUPE 440 and the Toronto District School Board's vision for Healthy Living Healthy Learning (HL2) fitting into another element like meticulously matched puzzle pieces. It's a multi-pronged approach tackling dietary and social challenges starting with kindergartners. Good food choices beget better brains.
And it's not just the food itself but the culture of food, it's the social elements, the way cafeterias look – all play a part in HL2 in one way or another.
"Stop me if it's too much," he says with a chuckle. But I'm intrigued. I want to hear about the future of cafeteria food.
It's ambitious, almost utopic – schools growing their own food while culinary class pupils prepare the daily offerings with cafeteria staff. An ecosystem neatly tucked between the four walls of the public school system.
But he believes it. And further to that, there's nothing to balk at because it's already happening.
Foodie startup Skyline Farms have worked with Thistletown Collegiate Institute in Rexdale to develop a vertical aeroponic tower garden farm onsite. The first crop of lettuce, chard, kale, zucchini, baby bok choy, cucumbers, tomatoes and a variety of herbs came off in October.
"We're trying to figure out how we emulate Thistletown citywide," adds Weatherup.
But the latest buzz coming from the forward-thinking plan is
My Food, My Way (MFMW) , a partnership between George Brown College's Food Innovation and Research School, the TDSB and CUPE 4400. It's a response to the Ontario government's PPM 150 policy launched in 2011, which bans fatty, sodium-heavy and sugar-loaded foods and drinks from school cafeterias. You know, the "good stuff" kids like to eat.
"Students started going elsewhere to eat," says Amy Symington, a professor of nutrition at GBC and one of the faculty members helping to guide student's contribution to the MFMW project.
Couple the high school student's unfortunate recourse with rising obesity rates – according to Statistics Canada, last year 31 per cent of Canadian children were overweight or obese – and it seems the cafeteria is in need of a reinvention.
"So the TDSB and CUPE asked us to come up with recipes that meet the PPM 150 bill requirements, but also taste good and are appealing to high school-aged students," adds Symington. "We gathered together a team of students from George Brown and have come up with 12 recipes and 12 sub-recipes."
The program is less about policing student behavior and more about teaching them how to make better food choices. The best way to do that: concoct healthy spins on the staples. Further to that, the sub-recipes ensure the leftovers can be converted into a fresh dish to avoid food waste.
The pragmatism is inviting.
"We wanted to make dishes that could be reproduced easily by anyone staff or student and that can be implemented in the cafeterias across the GTA," says Candace Rambert, a culinary technician at GBC's Food Innovation and Research Studio. "The students tried to find recipes very familiar to a Canadian population as well as the demographics you would find across the GTA."
Veggie lasagna, pork souvlaki skewers, butter chicken, beef sliders, fish tacos – the meals range from trendy to archetypal.
Recipes were tweaked along the way eschewing sodium in favour of using a squeeze of lemon or a handful of herbs to make the flavours pop. Symington kept a close eye on nutrition levels to ensure they stuck within the guidelines of PPM 150.
"For one of the recipes we were struggling with the sodium levels, but lime juice brightened up the entire flavor profile of the dish," says Katherine Sowden, a GBC student and researcher on the project. "It was an eye opener for me. It helped me to be extra conscious of sodium and fat levels and look at the trends of where the markets and consumer should be going."
Price was also a consideration when spinning together ingredients. Part of the reason teens gravitate towards the less than nourishing foods is that the other stuff is cheap.
The beef sliders meal – a four-ounce portion divided into two little burgers – costs about $0.88 a slider. The ingredients for veggie lasagna, one of the pricier options, costs $2.60.
"The cafeteria wouldn't inflate that too much," adds Symington. "They're not really trying to make a huge profit off of students."
The recipes went through a rigorous testing process and several panels of judges including student ambassadors from the TDSB and GBC.
"In the last tasting a lot of people were quite shocked we were able to create such good flavor with the beef sliders using such a lean cut of meat," says Sowden.
With the recipes perfected, the plan now is to introduce the new menu in January at Lakeshore Collegiate Institute via a pilot program, then roll it out to other schools both with and without culinary programs.
When asked what the timeline is for setting up MFMW in every school, Weatherup shows some trepidation.
"I'm not sure it will be in every school, we have 100 plus cafeterias in the city," he says. "Ideally, we would hope by next September to be in about 30 to 40 schools, but it's not an easy task."
Other elements of HL2 seem years away. It's a colossal investment of time and money, so selling each element to various stakeholders from the government to the schools and students is apt to be a lengthy process.
But utopic or not, there are clear links between diet, mental wellbeing, brain health and learning.
"There are so many studies that have been done connecting school success with proper nutrition, it just goes hand in hand," adds Symington. "I think we just really need to step up our game here in term of what we're serving our future leaders of the country."
Andrew Seale is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose writing has appeared in The Toronto Star
, The Vancouver Sun
, The Calgary Herald
, and Alternatives Journal
among other places.