"school" news and stories

The term "California roll" may prove to be something of a misnomer as students in southern states rapidly embrace school-cafeteria sushi.

This fall, Schwan's Food Service, the frozen food powerhouse and one of the nation's leading distributors of school pizza, rolled out a new line of fully cooked, frozen sushi. According to company spokesman Chad Stelter, schools in Florida and Tennessee are among the most enthusiastic early adopters.

While pizza has long been the backbone of Schwan's school menus, the company is gradually expanding its product line.

"We sell breadsticks and egg rolls," Stetler says. "But the topic that kept coming up in focus groups was sushi. So we took a look at it."

Schwan's tested eight different rolls across the country, staging a roadshow that included a stop at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Tampa. "We have no idea what the acceptability will be," school nutritionist Maggie Giunta told the St. Petersburg Times before the one-day event. As it turned out, the students were big fans –- although their excitement was apparently tempered by adolescent nonchalance.

School lunch.

For many of us, the dread words conjure one glimmer of hope -- that a delicious carton of chocolate milk could be sipped illicitly, far from Mom's watchful, sugar-phobic eyes.

White, gluey pizza stuck to the plate by "cheese"; burger patties so flat they looked like they'd been stomped on by the gym teacher; the terror of sitting on one of those red shared seats with a classmate of the opposite gender (red means love, orange means friends) -- school lunch, in the best of times, can be traumatic.

When we stumbled upon this Web site of school lunches around the world we felt not terror, but rage.

Look at the French lunch: mussels, a steamed artichoke, baguette, cheesecake, half a pink grapefruit and French fries. Seriously? Was this staged purely to infuriate American diners raised on beaten-down chicken nuggets and gummy peach slices from a can? And French fries? Does a beret come with it, too?

As food prices rise, so do school lunch costs, reports the New York Times. Meal prices have increased about 25 cents across the country as schools struggle to feeds students with increasingly expensive fruits, vegetables, milk and bread.

While some schools are raising lunch prices, others are reducing food management costs, buying cheaper plates and cups, or replacing individual rolls with slices of French bread. The U.S.D.A. recently issued a report called "Meeting the Challenge of Rising Food Costs," to help school districts learn to stretch their budgets.

Many worry that price increases are hitting schools hard just as administrators are getting hip to the idea of healthier - and more expensive - fare, replacing chicken nuggets with baked chicken breasts, french fries with fruit. Will we go back to the bad old days of "economy loaf" and iceberg lettuce salad?

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Yep - 50,000. In honor of the holiday, University of Maryland bakery staff took two months to make the confections, which are being stored in various freezers all over the College Park campus.

UMD officials expect about 80,000 people to attend the event today, which is free to the public.

The numbers are unbelievable: the ingredients were $14,000, which were paid for in part by corporate sponsors, and the total calorie count for all 50,000 cakes is a staggering 12.6 million. Take that, Weight Watchers.

Oh - and the photo? Courtesy of rockin' Slashfood Flickr user Cupcakequeen.

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And you thought the green-beret'd Girl Scouts and their cookies were enterprising little kids?

In Victorville, CA, the latest trend at schools is an underground sugar trade. With candy and other "bad" snacks banned from school campuses, kids are selling contraband Snickers and Twinkies right out of their backpacks.

According to Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville, it's become quite a lucrative business for the dealers. Kids bring things like candy bars, soda, and even energy drinks from home in their "sack lunch" and turn around and sell them for a healthy profit, with some kids walking around school with upwards of $40 in cash.

While I understand this is a bit of a problem for the schools and parents, I have to hand it to the kids -- at least we can count on them to be very good businesspeople when they grow up.

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