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Paul Nelson reportingWhat's the point of serving healthy school lunches if the kids won't eat them? The Granite School District is trying a new way to get children to enjoy eating right. It hopes a traveling salad bar will do the trick.
Lunch at Granger Elementary is always a big undertaking. On the day I visited, it was serving hot dogs.
Granite School District Central Kitchen Manager Betsy Scholl said, "We believe that we need to give the students what they want, what they want to eat, and also give them a lot of different choices."
Scholl says the school is trying to make meals as healthy as possible, but some people might ask, "Why not just get rid of the hot dogs and hamburgers and pizza altogether?" She says, if kids are only given choices they don't want, some of them won't eat anything.
"For instance, if you went out to a restaurant and they only had one choice, you probably wouldn't go back there again. But if you've got choices, different choices every day, you're going to feel like, ‘Well, there is going to be something that I want,'" she explained.So, since they can't have kids skipping meals, Scholl says the real trick is to train them to like healthier things. One way Granite School District is trying to do that is by having what they call the A to Z Salad Bar.
"We think it's important to introduce the students to a variety of fruits and vegetables that they might not otherwise choose," Scholl said.
The concept is simple: have either a fruit or vegetable that starts with every letter of the alphabet. Apricots for A, Blueberries for B, and so on. They had to get creative with some of the lettering. For example, they tried to get something called ugly fruit, which is a mix between a grapefruit and a tangerine. They couldn't get it, so they put "unusual kumquat under "U."
"I remember when I first tried a kumquat somebody said, ‘Just eat the whole thing.' Your first impression is you think you have to peel it," she said.
Some of these kids have never seen a kumquat before, so when she told them to eat the peel, they looked at her like she was crazy.
So, what did the kids think? Was it a hit, or not?
One boy said, "It's good," talking about the kumquat.
Another student stuck with the items she had already tried, but still, she liked the jicama.
One kid had bad luck with the guava. "Ow! I ate a seed," he said.
During this salad bar there was a run on strawberries, but not so many kids were eating turnips. Plus, there were still more hot dogs being eaten than there were veggies. The A to Z Salad Bar will visit four more schools by the end of next week.
Here are the next schools to be visited:
Tuesday, March 18, Arcadia Elementary School
Thursday, March 20, Magna Elementary School
Wednesday, March 26, Howard R. Dregs Elementary School
Thursday, March 27, William Penn Elementary School
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
