How to start a full-kitchen in an NYC School

NYC Green Schools has written extensively about improving the food
served in our schools, but what if your school doesn’t have a fully
equipped kitchen, which is the case for most New York City schools?
What do you do then? We decided to ask Helen Martineau, a parent
serving on the Wellness Committee at The Neighborhood School in the
East Village, what steps they’ve taken to improve school lunch,
despite not having a stovetop and exhaust system. We hope their
resourcefulness is as inspiring to you as it was to us.

WHEN YOUR SCHOOL DOESN’T HAVE THE LUXURY OF A FULLY WORKING KITCHEN

by Helen Martineau

In the cafeteria kitchen of the Neighborhood School and P.S. 63, our
ansul system, which is a fire suppression system typically found in
restaurants and food-service kitchens, broke more than ten years ago—
so long ago that no one who presently works in the cafeteria remembers
a time when the kitchen staff was able to actually cook. In the
meantime, the remnants of our ansul system and our exhaust system have
become so obsolete that fixing them is a massive job.

The first step in undertaking the huge task of getting a working
kitchen is having a feasibility study done. The DOE is presently
giving priority to problems that pose a danger to students, so they
weren’t likely to pay for our study ($35,000!) any time soon. We
applied for and received public money from the City Council for the
study. Next, we have to try and get our kitchen on the DOE’s Five-Year
Capital Plan. Again, updating our cafeteria to a working kitchen is a
low-priority project for them. It didn’t make it onto their current
plan, which would take us to the year 2014, and there’s no guarantee
that it will make it onto their next one either, especially with the
budget cuts we’re seeing.

We are working on a request to the City Council for money for our new
kitchen in an attempt to speed up the process, but even if that
funding comes through, we’ll still have to rely on the School
Construction Authority to do the work, and they are notorious for
working at a glacial pace. So who knows when, if ever, our schools
will have a full, working kitchen.

In the meantime, we have explored other options to facilitate cooking
in our kitchen. One of the families in our school owns a restaurant
(Ciao for Now), and they have an induction burner, which doesn’t
require an ansul or exhaust system. We repeatedly tried to get
permission from the DOE’s Office of School Food to purchase one (it
costs $2,500, which we planned on financing ourselves somehow), but
were denied. We were told that the fire department determined that an
ansul system was needed with an induction burner, even though
restaurants all over the city use them without ansul systems. My hope
is that parents around the city will start making enough noise about
induction burners so that the city will finally relent. It seems like
such a simple and cheap solution. We are also looking into getting a
giant rice cooker, which would have to be vetted by SchoolFood as
well.

Our cook, Jackie, does an amazing job of making do with what she has:
a double convection oven and a steamer. The DOE gave our schools the
steamer as a workaround implement for the stovetop (an option for
other schools without stovetops). On the outside the steamer looks
like an oven, with a door that opens on the front. Inside is a pan
that you fill with water, which creates the steam. Jackie can actually
cook pasta in the steamer, as well as rice and vegetables. When she
makes sauces, she roasts onions and garlic in oil in the oven before
adding tomatoes and spices. That’s her method for cooking Cuban black
beans and just about anything saucy. But that’s about it. We can’t
have soup, for instance, or anything else that would require boiling.

Our SchoolFood partnership meetings are currently about tweaking the
menu and trying to be creative with what we have.

We enjoy Meatless Mondays, although we don’t officially call it that.
For our meat-free Mondays, we mostly work within the existing
SchoolFood repertoire: pasta, toasted cheese sandwiches, and lasagna
roll-ups, while also serving lots of rice and beans, vegetarian chili,
vegetable egg rolls, and even a little tofu (even though the USDA does
not recognize tofu as either a protein or a vegetable, so it goes into
our bean stew).

As for other changes we’ve made, we have eliminated chicken nuggets
altogether. On hamburger day, we also offer veggie burgers. We try not
to have a lot of beef items on our menu as a result of the New York
Times article that exposed the poor quality of the beef served in our
nation’s schools. We offer rice and beans at least twice a week, which
can be served either as a side dish or a main entrée (this is proving
to be very popular). We have a sort of whole-grain bread—the first
ingredient is still white flour, but there are many whole grains in it
as well—that we use for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
providing a more nutritious entrée alternative for our students.

Years ago the former principal at the Neighborhood School and a group
of parents did some work to improve the schools’ lunches. They brought
in our salad bar and got all fried food off the menu. They assumed
that once they’d made these changes with SchoolFood, the menu would
reflect their preferences on an ongoing basis. But we found out that
if you don’t stay vigilant and meet regularly with your SchoolFood
manager, all those chicken nuggets and beef raviolis you thought you’d
eliminated will sneak back on the kids’ plates. Once you agree on your
priorities and develop a strategy with your SchoolFood nutritionist,
though, it’s just a matter of a quick meeting with her once a month
and things move pretty smoothly. Beyond that, it’s a matter of your
own ambitions for your school’s lunches.

Here at P.S. 63 and the Neighborhood School, we continue to work on
getting our stovetop, even though it looks like it will take several
years and none of the current parents’ kids will benefit from it!