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It’s a little hard to spot, but right next door to all the bustling construction going on at Crittenden Middle School is a culinary powerhouse churning out hundreds of scones, pancakes and muffins. The breakfast food — all made from scratch — will be shipped off the next morning to feed thousands of kids in Mountain View schools.
Crittenden’s kitchen is the food preparation site for the Mountain View Whisman School District, and has been changing fast in recent years. Prepackaged and heavily processed foods have been ditched in favor of local, fresh ingredients, and sleek new industrial-grade cooking equipment lines the kitchen interior. It hasn’t been cheap, but district officials say it’s the best way to get kids lined up and excited for school lunch — and the only way to get the food services budget back on track.
Starting this year, the district’s child nutrition budget went into investment mode. The most recent interim budget report shows that the district expects to spend $300,000 on food services equipment, including new refrigerators, large tilting skillets, salad bars and a massive kettle capable of cooking up pasta for thousands of students. Although the food services budget has typically floated around $2 million each year, this year it’s popping up an extra $500,000.
A report from 2014 shows that the school lunch program has been a relatively unpopular money-loser in past years. Breakfast participation, including students who qualify for free and reduced-price meals, dropped to below 20 percent across the district in the 2013-14 school year. The slump in sales has landed the department anywhere from $68,000 to $144,000 in the red each year. After dropping a contract with the food services provider Sodexo in 2014, district officials decided it was time to turn things around.
Debbie Austin, the district’s new child nutrition director, said it was the right decision to ditch Sodexo. Standing inside the Crittenden kitchen, Austin offered her view on what the district ought to be feeding children: locally sourced fresh foods that are in season, with no exceptions. It may sound like a hard-line policy, but Austin said it’s what parents want to see — and ultimately what drives up student interest.
“The kids love the food,” she said. “Student participation has gone up, and it’s going to continue to go up.”
Austin has been serving up food in just about every capacity imaginable. She ran a restaurant in Oakland until the 1989 earthquake destroyed the building, then worked for food services at two Bay Area county jail systems. She most recently worked at the child nutrition departments in the Burlingame School District and the Alameda Unified School District before joining Mountain View Whisman just three weeks ago.
The move towards higher-quality food in school, Austin said, is really just a return to a bygone era. In the 1960s, when she was growing up and in public schools, she said, they saw the same kind of locally sourced and fresh food that schools are now scrambling to bring in. Since then, school districts have increased the use of prepackaged and pre-prepared food that is reheated and served to students regardless of quality.
Around the time the Mountain View Whisman district decided to shift gears on food, the district hired Bob Mencimer — known affectionately by the students as Chef Bob — to help run a kitchen with an eye for culinary improvements. Like Austin, Mencimer has a background working in restaurants, and is known by his colleagues in the food services department for having a mean chili recipe.
“We’ve been working on the recipe for a long time, trying to get the right amount of each ingredient,” Mencimer said.
There are a couple of key differences moving into school food from restaurants. Strict guidelines can limit the amount of salt added to dishes, and regulations require school districts to provide plenty of whole wheat products in the dishes they serve to students. Many of the meals also must be produced in massive quantities, as the district provides roughly 3,000 meals a day to students. Still, that doesn’t stop Mencimer from getting creative
Mencimer and the six or so kitchen staffers work from 6 a.m. to about 3 p.m. cooking, assembling and baking meals from scratch. On a late Tuesday morning, two cooks were busy chopping vegetables to put in chicken Caesar lavash wraps, one at a time, for the next day’s lunch. Mencimer, across the kitchen, got started cutting up and cooking a massive piece of beef — bottom round — for roast beef.
Being a head chef, Mencimer has less of a direct presence with students compared to teachers or counselors. But students have really warmed up to Chef Bob since he joined the district. His face can be seen on a laminated sign in the cafeteria with phrases above his head like “eat your vegetables,” and students have a good idea of who is in the back of the kitchen cooking up their next meal.
Students also have no problem dropping suggestions on how to improve recipes. “We had a whole contingency of kids coming in saying, ‘This needs more ginger!'” Mencimer said.
If something isn’t cooked on campus and comes from a local company, Mencimer said, it has to go through the strict chef scrutiny in order to make sure students aren’t getting poor-quality food. Pizzas are put together by an outside company, Mencimer said, but the sauce has to have the right specifications and the cheese has to be good enough to pass muster.
Most of the equipment in the kitchen is brand new. The district’s last director of child nutrition, Juan Cordon, made an appeal to district staff and the school board last year making clear that it’s going to take a serious investment in better kitchen hardware if the district has an interest in improving food for the students — many of whom come from a low-wealth background and rely on consistent meals.
Purchases made since last June total $310,000, including tilting skillets, salad bars, slicers, tilting kettles, and three high-tech ovens.
A move towards healthier food
The food services department has made a concerted effort over the last year to introduce students to more healthful, locally grown food they may not have ever seen before, including an array of vegetables. In recent months, the district has tapped into its own reserves: student-grown vegetables from several Mountain View campuses.
The district, working with the nonprofit group Living Classroom, has more than 20 planter beds, full of fruits and vegetables, spread out among all its schools. Mencimer and the rest of the kitchen staff have been working hard to take the school’s own vegetable yield and turn it into tasty meals, with a goal of getting kids to try something new.
At a recent event at Crittenden, for example, kids got to try out kale chips and kale salad. Other schools have harvested turnips, beets, Swiss chard and broccoli, and upcoming meals will include bok choy, spinach, and sugar snap peas. The vegetables produced in the school gardens are offered at each school on a rotating basis.
The district is also getting some outside help. The Silicon Valley Leadership Group recently announced that it will be buying salad bars for all of the elementary schools in Mountain View this year. The group hosted several fundraising events to pay for them, and has donated a salad bar to each school that needed one, according to Nancy Sanchez, a spokeswoman for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
“We’ve pretty much saturated the market,” Sanchez said. “All of the schools that have asked for a salad bar have gotten one.”
As a longtime chef in local schools in the area, Mencimer said he welcomes the shift towards more healthful food made from scratch. The days of cheap, prepackaged pizzas with questionable cheese are over, he said, and that’s great for the kids and great for him as well.
“As a chef you like the change. That’s what keeps it interesting,” Mencimer said. “It’s not opening a cardboard box and saying, ‘here you go kids!'”
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Architects displayed a scale model of Google’s proposed new campus for the Charleston East property at a March 29 Mountain View City Council study session. Photo by Mark Noack -
Tom Hiddleston stars as musician Hank Williams in the biopic “I Saw the Light.” Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. -
Tom Hiddleston stars as musician Hank Williams in the biopic “I Saw the Light.” Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. -
Tom Hiddleston stars as musician Hank Williams in the biopic “I Saw the Light.” Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
This is badly needed improvement and I’m very glad the district has made such important changes.
Has the district been promoting this to the parents? I know the meals served by Sodexho were dreadful… but knowing that the food is now locally produced definitely makes me want to give another shot at more hot lunches at Huff.
The first paragraph mentions scones, pancakes and muffins for breakfast. I hope that was just a generalization and that they’re serving protein for breakfast, too, like eggs and plain yogurt. The sugar in baked goods (mass-produced or locally sourced) is what we’re trying to get away from, right? Overall, it sounds like a big step in the right direction.
This is so important! While my kid was at Castro Elementary I watched kids on free/reduced price lunch and breakfast program being fed so many foods that worked against their ability to stay focused and grow up with healthy eating habits. Friends would report that their children would no longer be willing to eat homemade soup, beans, oatmeal, etc because they wanted pizza and cinnamon rolls.
Getting the lunches and breakfasts to be healthy and fresh should bring more paying customers to the lunch program. MV Voice, please continue to help get news out to the community about what is being served for lunch and how it is being prepared. It will take time to turn around past impression of what is served at schools.
Kudos to the district and best wishes for Debbie Austin in her new role!
This sounds nice, but why is my elementary school child still getting Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast?
This is why we’ve been trying to avoid the breakfast–it seems to consist of graham crackers, sweetened cereals, etc. Where are these locally sourced items?
My son attends Monta Loma and I’ve got to say, the food offered is nothing like what is described here. It consists of meatballs, pizza, hamburgers and hotdogs. We had heard that the meals were prepared by a chef, nutritious etc before signing on for the lunch program but we didn’t know exactly what was on the menu. Subsequently, we went back to home-prepared meals within a week of starting the program.
This kind of a menu is not teaching children moderation, how to make healthy eating choices, or encouraging them to try new foods.
To be fair, they do offer fresh fruit which is apparently sourced locally but this really isn’t good enough. The bulk of the menu resembles something I’d expect to see at a fast food restaurant, it’s not something any kid should be eating day in, day out.
A bigger focus needs to be put on getting kids involved in the veggie garden, as well as cooking/preparing the food themselves and learning about *truly* wholesome and nutritious foods.
Finally some positive news !I read the menus and it seems like most are cooked from scratch. Unfortunately , the dinning areas still need help in displaying the food so that kids want it.
Sounds very good, but why is my child eating hotdog on every Tuesday and Pizza on every Wednesday? Apparently, this is EVERY WEEK, since start of school year 2015. Looking at menu from the district, every months there is a new menu in PDF, however, compare month to month – they are exactly the same, except the “Month” is different.
We eat the lunches and they are delicious. I have been eating in the district for 6 years and Crittenden lunches are so much healthier than anything you can pack.