BREMERTON — A rainbow of carrots with long, leafy tops were greeted with “Whoas!” and “Wows!” from waves of students streaming into lunch at Armin Jahr Elementary on Wednesday.
Children dropped them onto lunch trays. A few boys carried them like a scepters as they marched through the lunch line toward pizza, baked potatoes and specially prepared cold corn chowder.
The chowder was served as part of the Taste Washington Day celebration, in which 70 school districts, including Bremerton and Bainbridge, offered locally sourced items on their menus.
During October, Bainbridge schools are starting a Bainbridge farm-to-cafeteria program. Menus will include potatoes grown by students, staff and parents from Wilkes Elementary and sweet corn and other food from local farms.
The push for local produce got a boost with the state’s Local Farms-Health Kids Act, which helps link farms, distributors and schools. It also offered grants and funding resources. Armin Jahr in 2008 received a two-year $26,000 grant, as part of the program — a slice of $600,000 designated to help schools with a large number of low-income students buy produce.
Michelle Obama created more buzz about local produce in schools with her call for healthy school lunch program. As part of that effort, Bremerton chef Chris Plemmons was invited to Washington, D.C., this spring and asked to help improve school nutrition in Bremerton.
Plemmons was part of Wednesday’s celebration at Armin Jahr. Under his guidance, Olympic College culinary students shucked and roasted corn from Minder Farm. The soup was made from a recipe Plemmons wrote.
From a chef’s perspective, part of getting kids to eat more vegetables and establish healthy eating habits is making sure that food tastes good.
“When I was a kid, you put (vegetables) in boiling, salted water and boiled them until they were soft,” Plemmons said.
But by preparing the vegetables differently, such as by roasting corn, “you’re going to add flavors without having to add the calories,” he said.
Third-grader Marissa Jameson, 8, may not have known how the soup was made, but she was impressed with it.
“It tastes like corn, and it kind of sounds funny, but it’s kind of good,” she said.
She took another bite of soup.
“It still tastes like corn, but it’s mashed,” she said.
Schools aren’t always capable of cooking elaborate recipes because of time constraints and the lack of high-profile chefs in their kitchens.
But they have been able to experiment with what they offer, so long as the foods are easy to prepare or can be served raw, said Lisa Johnson, supervisor of Child Nutrition Services for the Bremerton School District.
Johnson has collaborated with Mary Ellen Coughlan with Charlie’s Produce, a Northwest food distributor that works with multiple districts, on what the schools can affordably offer.
Kids are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables when they have variety, Coughlan said.
“(School children) tend to have a monotonous selection because it’s the least expensive type of items,” she said, and gave an example of the ubiquitous Red Delicious apple, which costs less than other varieties.
Students have been open to trying the new foods served to them, Armin Jahr Principal Mike Sellers said.
“(Students) found that they had this whole new vista of fruits and vegetables that they hadn’t tried before that they were willing to eat,” said Sellers, who sampled roasted parsnips for the first time at school and started serving them at home.
It’s been difficult for Armin Jahr to offer the same variety of produce since the grant funding ran out, Johnson said.
The school still plans to offer as much as it can, though it will have to get creative, she said. This year, though, there’ll be no Honey Crisp apples.
From the looks of Wednesday’s lunch, the kids are willing to experiment. Most lunch trays included a carrot or plum from the salad bar, and about a third of the kids tasted the soup.
But the old standby of the lunch line gave the freshly sourced foods some hefty competition.
Anidi Wagener, 7, had the soup with a slice of cheese pizza.
We asked what she liked better.
She thought about it for a second, hesitated then said, “A little bit more the pizza.”
