But Will Mikey Like It?

Hopkins’s public schools earned nationwide attention when they hired Bertrand Weber, a Swiss–born hotel and restaurant manager formerly of Minneapolis’s Whitney Hotel, to remake the district’s meal plan. Weber and his staff waged an impressive campaign, removing trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup from 98 percent of the schools’ offerings and creating almost 75 percent of the menu from scratch. They replaced standard cafeteria chicken patties with chicken mole, flabby pastas with heartier whole grains such as quinoa, kasha, and couscous. The changes cost money—about $1.10 more a plate. Sadly, the changes also cost the district student participation in its lunch program.

“I’d say 90 percent of the parents were in favor of what we were doing,” says Michele Wignall, who worked with Weber and took over as the district’s manager of student dining when he departed last year. But, she says, quoting parents at one school who decided the revised offerings “weren’t kid-friendly enough,” participation dropped 5 percent. The same effect has been noted in Great Britain, where Jamie Oliver’s remade menu resulted in a 30 percent drop in participation at some schools. A British TV series that followed the menu makeover frequently showed parents slipping bags of fish and chips through school gates. “It’s really important to educate before you do a change like that,” Wignall says.

St. Paul officials say they’ve learned a few lessons from the Hopkins experience and are trying to involve the district’s 40,000 students in the menu-making process. A “coolest vegetable” contest yielded high marks for jicama, which is now served at salad bars throughout the district. A recipe for Sichuan green beans was rewritten when the students said they like their beans even spicier than the original offering. (More like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos perhaps?) A veggie meat loaf that “seemed good on paper,” according to Ronnei, “was a total disaster.”

So, all things considered, is the St. Paul initiative working? The average number of fruit and vegetable servings at lunch in the district has risen from 1.98 in 2001-02 to 2.47 in 2005-06. “We’re going up and holding steady,” Ronnei says.

More encouraging to Ronnei and her staff are the signs that students will eat what’s good for them if given a choice. The final tally of the great focaccia experiment was eighty-four votes in favor of the whole-grain recipe versus fifty-five for the other. Thanks to the thumbs-up from the discriminating lunch crowd at Galtier, whole-grain focaccia is being served in cafeterias across St. Paul.

Laura Billings is a Mpls.St.Paul Magazine contributing writer.