Cooking up Change - students design healthy school lunch
by Bjorn Bergman,
Vernon Area AmeriCorp Farm to School Member
What are your thoughts when someone says the words ‘school 
lunch?’ Chicken nuggets, french fries, over-cooked veggies? What happens when you give students the challenge of designing and preparing a healthy school lunch? This is what a national competition called Cooking Up Change 2010 asked students from around the nation to do, and a team of local students from Laurel High School rose to the challenge. They designed a healthy meal that not only tasted great, but propelled the team to the final round of Cooking Up Change 2010 in Detroit, MI this past May.
Cooking Up Change 2010 is a national healthy school lunch cooking competition put on by the non-profit Healthy Schools Campaign from Chicago. For the competition, student teams go through a rigorous process of designing a school lunch that uses ingredients from a list of foods commonly available to food service programs, uses at least one local food (within 250 miles of the teams home town), meets nutritional guidelines based on recommendations from the National Institute of Medicine, and, most importantly, tastes great. 
Soon after learning about Cooking Up Change 2010 in early March, I approached students that had participated in The Harvest Challenge, our local healthy school lunch cooking competition about entering. Dylan Bruce, Kateri Burton, and Anders Lewis from the winning Laurel High School Harvest Challenge team were excited for the opportunity to be on a team for Cooking Up Change 2010. I paired the team up with local chef Frank Wildingway to provide culinary guidance and inspiration.
After a few meetings and a very successful cooking trial, the team had developed a beautiful school lunch menu consisting of a rice pilaf with tons of veggies and chicken, a spinach salad with roasted tomatoes, pinto beans, shredded carrots and raisins, and a mouth watering peach cobbler. In late March, the team submitted their entry for the first round of the competition to a judging panel of culinary experts in Chicago and we all crossed our fingers.
The competition features two tiers: a qualifying round and the finals. The qualifying round consists of teams developing and nutritionally analyzing recipes and them submitting them, along with a nutritional report on their meal, a series of supplementary questions and photos documenting the whole process.
The panel of judges combs through the submitted documents from each team and rates them with specific judging criteria such as: According to the team’s analysis, does the meal meet the nutritional guidelines? Do the ingredients complement each other? Does the recipe show creativity through the combination of ingredients, cooking process, etc.? From the qualifying round, the top three entries would be chosen to prepare and serve their meal for a prestigious panel of judges at the Cooking Up Change 2010 finals in Detroit, Michigan on May 17th, 2010.
Two weeks after the team submitted all the competition paperwork, I received a call from Healthy Schools Campaign – our Laurel High School team had been selected as one of three in the nation as a finalist for Cooking Up Change 2010. We were going to Detroit in May! Hooray!
Fast forward to Monday, May 17th. The previous day the students 
and I flew into Detroit and now were at breakfast with Monique Hooker, a local chef from DeSoto and Farm to School volunteer extraordinaire. The team was nervous yet excited to get in the kitchen. Soon we were on a shuttle over to Southeastern High School in Detroit for the competition.
After going over the kitchen space with the contest organizers, the team jumped right in and began preparing their meal. Each student tackled one of the dishes. Kateri masterfully put together the peach cobbler, Anders whipped up the spinach salad and Dylan sliced, diced and cooked for a good hour before he completed the delicious rice pilaf.
While the team was working their magic, the two other finalist teams were also preparing their meals in the same kitchen. The St. Paul Community Design Center Culinary Crew from Minnesota prepared a meal of crunchy pesto chicken, polenta pizza, and Minnesota Slaw, while the Tohono O’odham Community Action Cooking Club from the Tohono O’Odham Native American reservation in southern Arizona prepared a delicious meal of tepary bean quesadillas, Baby Spinach and pear salad with carrot vinaigrette, and yogurt peanut butter dip.
After two hours of cooking in the hot and cramped high school kitchen, it was time for the teams to present their meals to the judges. The Laurel team plated up tasting portions of their lunch and served them to a prestigious panel of 21 judges, including Karen Duncan, wife of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Christie Vilsack, wife of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The food looked and tasted great and the judges were clearly very impressed.
After all the teams presented their meals to the judges, they gathered in the kitchen and shared their leftovers with each other. The food and the company was fantastic. I was extremely impressed with the lunches that these talented high-schoolers had prepared.
After about an hour, the students left to relax back at the hotel for a few hours. But on everyone’s mind was the announcement of the winning team and school lunch the following morning.
The next morning during the opening plenary of the 5th National 
Farm to Cafeteria Conference, the students from all the teams gathered at one table at the front of the ballroom hall to eat breakfast and await the results of Cooking up Change 2010. Rochelle Davis, executive director of Healthy Schools Campaign was joined by Margie Saidel, from Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality and Chris Ely, from Applegate Farms to announce which team had prepared the winning school lunch. And the winner is... Tohono O’odhan Community Action Cooking Club!
While the Laurel High School team did not take home the top honors, each student from the team received a cookware set from T-fal and many accolades from conference attendees, including Ann Cooper, the Renegade Lunch Lady.
Later that afternoon, the conference lunch featured one item from each team’s meal that made it into the final round of Cooking Up Change 2010. The Laurel Team’s peach cobbler was served to all in attendance and it was a huge hit. During the lunch the team spoke in front of all the conference attendees (over 700 people) about their meal. It was really a powerful and amazing experience.
I am so proud of Anders, Kateri and Dylan for taking on a direct role in what is fed to them in their cafeteria and to others around the nation by getting involved in healthy cooking competitions like Cooking Up Change. It is so powerful to see them having an effect on school lunch reform at the local and national level.
A special thanks goes out to the team’s sponsors, Viroqua Food Co-op and Organic Valley. We couldn’t have made this happen without them. The team would also like to send out a big thank you to Frank Wildingway and Monique Hooker for culinary guidance and Bev Buss for embroidering the team’s chef whites.
For more info on the competition visit the following websites:
http://healthyschoolscampaign.org/event/cookingupchange/2010/welcome.php
http://healthyschoolscampaign.typepad.com/healthy_schools_campaign/2010/05/qa-with-cooking-up-change-national-finalists-laurel.html