Healthy School Lunches – Maggie Memmott Walsh

More Useful Info, Please  – One thing I’ve been trying to get from the food services department at CCUSD is a listing of the nutritional information for as much of the food served as possible – even just the prepackaged stuff which should come with a label with all of this information already calculated. LAUSD provides this information on a handy-dandy downloadable pdf and I think all parents in our district should be able to see this information including: calories, fat, sodium, and selected vitamins and minerals for the food their kids are served. I have a little of this information that was provided to me in the spring but have been asking and waiting since then to see it for all the meals.
I’m going to be attending the CCUSD board meeting on Dec. 14 (That’s at the CCUSD District Office on Irving Place, at 7 p.m.) to ask for support from the board to prioritize this request to the food services director so that she can spend the time necessary to compile this information. She states that more than 200 labor hours would be required to fulfill this request.

If you think more nutritional information about the food served at the elementary school cafeterias would be helpful please let me, the school board ([email protected]) and Julie Garcia ([email protected]) know.

The Actors' Gang

1 Comment

  1. Is Ms. Garcia really claiming that it would take her more than a solid month of non-stop work, 8 hours a day, to compile nutrition information for the 50-60 items on the school lunch menu?

    Even if my guess of the number of items is way off (I only know the variety served at the elementary level), a significant number of items are purchased pre-packaged. As you said, those are required to come with nutrition data provided, so they require only a few minutes to type up the information.

    For the rest, I believe she mentioned in a meeting that she has a software program that will do this, she just needs to enter all the information on ingredients and quantities to generate nutrition data. If I misunderstood and the school district doesn’t have this software already, it sounds like it’s time to buy it. Or just use one of the many free web-based calculators, if state and federal lunch program regulations don’t forbid that.

    How inefficient is her office that it would take them over 25 full working days to do this?

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