Tavon Frazier is a skinny 9-year-old squirming in front of his Styrofoam lunch tray. He's eaten most of his chicken taco and his friends, all wearing the navy polo shirts of East Oakland's Korematsu Discovery Academy, are wiggling around him, chewing on their flour tortillas and nibbling on baby carrots. Tavon didn't stop at the salad bar on his way to the cafeteria table today. He says sometimes he'll get applesauce when they have it, but mostly he doesn't like vegetables, especially broccoli and carrots. His ideal cafeteria meal would be "donuts and cupcakes and a cake," he says with a mischievous sideways grin.
Tavon Frazier
Efforts to make sure that Tavon doesn't end up eating donuts every day and maybe even learns to like broccoli are underway in Oakland's public schools, though how successful these efforts will be remains to be seen. Between a convoluted and chronically underfunded system, divergent visions for what exactly healthy food is, and a cast of characters that range from bureaucrats to poor kids to soccer moms to farm-to-table visionaries, the school food situation in Oakland is messy. But the consequences for inaction are no joke.
"It's a totally different menu than what's being served in the rest of the elementary schools," says Jennifer LeBarre, director of nutrition services with Oakland Unified School District, as she watches kindergarteners line up for lunch. "We're doing it here as a pilot project because we're trying to see whether or not we have the capability with our equipment, our facilities, our staff." LeBarre says scratch cooking will be rolled out at Manzanita, Bella Vista and Lincoln elementary schools next. "And then our big hurdle is to see how we can take the same food and do it at the central kitchen level."
