How meal time at school can be as important to learning as the rest of the school day

Odds are pretty good that you’ve heard that school meals have become a pretty charged topic nationally over the past few years as a result of changes to federal nutrition requirements and the political maneuvering of groups impacted by these changes.  In this context, over the past year at ANCS, we have been moving towards supporting our own “farm to school” program with the idea that it is a part of our mission as educators to (1) provide students with foods that will help nourish their minds and bodies to do their best work and (2) allow students to learn about food choices and the world around them by actually engaging on some level with the development of their meals.  We got off to a good start through the support of a grant from the Aetna Foundation that has led to the building of infrastructure for a robust school garden.  But the program has really taken off under the vision and leadership of Kari Lovell, our Director of Business and Operations, and David Bradley, our chef extraordinaire.  With a nearly 30% increase in the number of meals served this year at ANCS, the work of Chef Bradley and his staff was featured in a recent story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution focused on why some schools are “winning the school lunch war” that’s caused many schools to see declining participation in their meal programs since the start of new federal regulations.

Chef Bradley—who serves on a chefs’ advisory council with the Georgia Organics organization and is helping our school to host to a meeting of the Georgia Organics and the Governor’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity next week—is guest blogging here about what led him from the world of high-end restaurants to the school cafeteria and what he’s learned so far along the way.  I really appreciate all the work Chef and his staff put in for our school and for the care he has for his craft that is so evident in the post from him below.

Guest blog post from ANCS Chef David Bradley:

I’m seven months in to my first school year as chef and nutrition director at Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School (ANCS). It’s also my first foray into school nutrition, and this new role has been consistently fascinating to friends and colleagues from my prior life as a restaurant chef. Some immediately see the potential and promise that this position holds, while others are completely puzzled.

I spent the prior 14 years working my way up the ladder in a well-regarded Atlanta restaurant group, eventually as opening executive chef at a new restaurant focused on sustainable seafood. I started as a waiter while I was in college, and found that my interests in food, wine and service quickly edged out my studies. I soon migrated to the kitchen, or “back-of-house.” In lieu of cooking school I tried to educate myself on any and all aspects of food and cooking. I became obsessed with restaurants and in developing my own skills as a cook and later as a chef. I worked to be more efficient and cleaner every day when I was on the line, developing a muscle memory for exactly where I’d placed ingredients or my fish spatula so that I could pick it up without looking or burning myself. I was always trying new flavors and techniques. I would try to recreate great meals I had at cheap but wonderful places on Buford Highway, reverse engineering the recipes to better understand the cuisines of countries I would never visit. I religiously read the New York Times food section (still an invaluable resource to me) and any other good food writing I came across. I was like a New York food scene savant, able to tell you the prior work history of the new chef at the hot place on the Lower East Side even though I had never been there or tried their signature dish. I saved menus from all sorts of restaurants, and transcribed whole meals into my notebooks whenever I had the opportunity to travel and eat somewhere notable.  Above all, I wanted to learn to make everything well, and to have done it from scratch. This extended to cured and smoked fish, pastries, sauces, stocks, butchery, and more. I was fascinated by all aspects of the craft and still am.

As I progressed in my career, I took on more responsibility and began purchasing most of the food in the places I was working. While before I focused on technique, I was increasingly interested in the quality of the ingredients and where they came from. I developed an admiration for chefs who were working with a certain sense of mission, those in the world of food who appreciated that good food changed with the seasons, and that restoring a connection between the producers and consumers was an important part of one’s practice. This included prominent American chefs in the “farm to table” movement, starting with Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower and others in Berkeley, to Dan Barber of Blue Hill in New York. I was also inspired by European chefs like Alain Passard, Michel Bras and Rene Redzepi who had established relationships with farmers and emphasized traditional foods even in the most modern and refined dishes. I tried to incorporate all of this in my own practice, purchasing local ingredients for the restaurants I worked in and buying as much food as I could for my own family at our local farmer’s market. I found a synergy here, that my initial interest in my food simply being as delicious as it could be was bolstered by the food being fresher and not sitting in some refrigerated warehouse for weeks before it made its way to me. Meat from animals who had been raised humanely on pasture and without being bulked out from a diet laced with antibiotics was of a higher quality across the board. And it ran counter to the larger trends in food and agriculture that had been happening my entire life. There’s been a kind of leveling where the same produce is available at any time of year in most grocery stores. Meat and fish is widely available, stacked on styrofoam trays and wrapped in cellophane, and it’s all prime cuts, never the more flavorful but less popular cuts or offal. Americans rely on processed foods for a majority of our meals, and there’s an ever-growing insistence on faster, cheaper, more convenient options, all at the sake of quality. Making ethically sound, sustainable choices for my family and my guests made for better food.

Eventually, as I moved on in my life and had children of my own, the rigors and demands of working in restaurants began to wear on me. I still loved the work and the responsibility that all my hard work had resulted in, but the late nights and long hours kept me from my family at times. I also occasionally began to wonder whether my work was actually affecting the kind of change in our society with regards to locally, ethically, sustainably raised food that I wanted to be a part of. When a friend mentioned that ANCS was looking for a chef for a farm to school program, I was intrigued. Perhaps all of the study and work I’d done was preparing me not for a career in restaurants but rather for working in schools. I decided to try to establish a program that supports locally grown meat and produce and connects the dots on the food chain. I was attracted to the potential of influencing the taste and choices of my children and their peers, and hopefully many more beyond ANCS, by exposing them to delicious, nutritious food and helping them see where it comes from. I hope that our students will appreciate food as a central part of their life, not merely a convenience or commodity. I’m trying to share my interest and knowledge of good eating with them, to introduce them to ingredients, preparations or cuisines they may not have tried before. I hope to have students growing some of the food we serve in gardens on campus, and to have students in the kitchen preparing food and serving each other. Being proud of their work and having results that are appreciated by the whole school community will help guide students’ food choices beyond what they eat for school lunch. I also hope that the kitchen can enrich their studies by developing curriculum on the cultural and historical influences on cuisine, the science of cooking, math skills for the kitchen, and the health implications of nutritional choices.

Our program is still getting off the ground, but the response has been very positive and our students, parents and teachers are all enthusiastic about having a well-made, fresh and nutritious meal program. We’ve supported a handful of local farms and purveyors, and I’m always looking for more opportunities to incorporate GA grown meat and produce. We bought a whole, fresh, pastured lamb from Gum Creek Farms for our shepherd’s pie in October. We featured produce from the wonderful Grant Park Farmer’s Market for vegetable plates in September and October.

Being the chef at an elementary and middle school has not been without its challenges as well. The greatest of these so far has been wading into the ocean of regulation that I was not subject to before coming to school nutrition. We’ve had to put the new meal pattern into practice and make changes on the fly to ensure that our almost entirely from-scratch food is compliant. Of course there are also big differences between feeding a relatively sophisticated midtown Atlanta clientele and kindergarten and first graders. While I knew that I wouldn’t be serving any more grilled octopus, curing my own trout roe for caviar, or finishing scallop crudo with lemon oil and sugar snap pea jus, getting myself to really think about food like a grade school student has sometimes been a challenge. I have a daughter in kindergarten at ANCS, and cooking for her at home has certainly helped, but dishes that I thought would be a hit were anything but. On our first farmer’s market veg plate, I had purchased some beautiful tomatoes and watermelons. I decided to make a very simple salad with the two of them and shaved parmesan cheese. I reckoned that everyone loves watermelon, and while this is true, my students weren’t interested in trying this combination.

Our menu continues to evolve, and is a mix of the most familiar dishes and items that are new to some. We now have enthusiasts of quinoa, plantains, pozole verde, and Vietnamese basil rolls, among others. And getting to know the students both in the lunch line and in the classroom has been for me the most rewarding part of the transition so far. Even though I had many regular guests in years prior, I wasn’t feeding the same group five days a week and I was rarely privileged to such unfiltered feedback on what I was cooking. On balance it’s been a very warm reception, with students and faculty alike asking me for recipes and I get my share of high fives in the hallways. I’m half a year in and I haven’t missed the restaurant at all.