Though Mira Costa has already made impressive strides toward healthier options for school food, including an emphasis on fruits and whole grains, new congressional regulations mandate that schools provide students with more nutritious alternatives.
These regulations will provide a valuable opportunity for Costa to make further improvements regarding student health and nutrition. In addition, Costa must effectively incorporate the regulations into the Costa food program.
MBUSD plans on further implementing Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, which focuses on reducing childhood obesity with a more nutritious diet.
While these requirements are a good start to complete nutrition, there are loopholes that need to be addressed. Requiring healthy alternatives does not mean that the students will necessarily make healthy decisions.
As part of the “Let’s Move” initiative, MBUSD will be using a new meal plan that, over a three-year transition period, will enact new requirements regarding school food, including only providing low or fat free milk, requiring different colors of vitamin-rich vegetables, making all grain used in school food whole grain by the year 2014, making tofu an available option, and restricting lunch meals to 750-850 calories for grades 9-12.
According to MBUSD Director of Food Services Lena Agee, the main concern about creating a more healthy menu is that students may stray from healthy options at school if they aren’t used to healthy foods at home.
However, the possibility some students may be turned off shouldn’t discourage Costa from offering nutritious meals to the many other students who would benefit from extra vitamins and whole grains.
In addition to providing students with a plethora of healthy options, substituting popular food that is already offered for more nutritious meals will have a positive influence on the health of the student body. Costa has slowly tried to replace unhealthy ingredients and methods of cooking with healthy ones. Costa now uses wheat flour instead of white flour and has removed both cooking fryers as well as soda machines from the campus in an attempt to create a healthier school environment. Costa needs to further these efforts.
In addition to supplying students with healthy food options such as tofu and yogurt parfaits, Costa should integrate a salad bar with locally grown fruits and vegetables, which has been a proven success in the Riverside and Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School Districts. This salad bar has proven profitable as well, with over 800 to 1,000 salads served at SMUSD every day.
If Costa implemented the “Let’s Move” campaign, along with the implementation of additional healthy options, Costa would experience a profound and necessary increase in student health and well-being.
