Flavorful, diverse food is returning to school lunches across New York and New Jersey
In New York and New Jersey and soon Philadelphia, thousands of schoolkids are beginning to see something strange and unexpected on their cafeteria trays: the flavors they grew up with.
In Harlem, the meal of the day might be barbecue chicken and collard greens. In Newark, Portuguese-heritage teachers are thrilled to teach their classes the charcoal-grilled origins of hot-salty-sour peri peri chicken. In South Jersey’s Camden County, a staple might be the savory, tomato-rich comforts of West African jollof rice. And in the strongly Caribbean South Bronx, students might sit down to a meal of scratch-made Trinidadian curry with roti flatbread.
“Chicken with roti is a very traditional Caribbean heritage dish,” said Rhys Powell, CEO of Harlem-based food services company Red Rabbit, which prepares meals for more than 200 schools from Westchester County and New York City to South Jersey. “And to watch the kids with Caribbean heritage — Black, English-speaking Caribbean heritage — teach kids with Spanish-speaking heritage how to eat with roti was kind of a really magical moment.”
Consider it a quiet revolution of sorts: Flavor is returning to the American school, in all its world-hopping or hyperlocal variety.
Over the past few years, Powell’s company has embarked on an experiment in how to re-imagine school food so that it meets the tastes — and culture — of every student.
He’d founded Red Rabbit in 2005 after leaving a career in finance, with a goal of providing scratch-made, healthy meals. He expanded to include public and charter schools in 2011, keeping prices below federal reimbursement rates that now sit at $3.51 a meal. In the process, he grew the company into what he believes to be the largest Black-owned school food provider in the country.
But as his own children reached school age, he started to wonder whether he’d missed the mark. “I started thinking as a parent, not just as a vendor,” Powell said.
Most of the schools he served in New York and New Jersey were majority students of color — from a variety of backgrounds. Powell started to worry that the one-size-fits-all approach wasn’t the best way to get students interested in healthy food.
“We tell kids to eat a kale salad and like it. And if you don’t like it, you’re gonna get diabetes,” he said, riffing off a line he credits to food activist Leah Penniman. “And especially if you’re serving Black and Latino kids whose backgrounds don’t really gravitate towards eating kale salads, you’re doing those kids a disservice.”
Under the bywords of “cultural competence” or “cultural relevance,” a growing number of schools and food nonprofits across the country have been coming to similar conclusions.
In immigrant-rich Austin, Texas, district chef Louis Ortiz told the local NPR affiliate in 2016 that he was adding pho, tabbouleh and tacos al pastor to the menu after polling students about what they liked. Hawaiian students on Kauai can now look forward to meals with poi and starfruit.
Philabundance, the Philadelphia region’s largest food bank, announced this year they’d made cultural relevance a central pillar of their new food policy — which is sometimes a simple matter of asking people what they’d like to eat, spokeswoman Chelsea Short said.
“It makes more sense for us to be able to ask the question and get the answer from the community about what they want, instead of us assuming,” Short said. The nonprofit recently added items such as coconut milk and tea to their offerings among Southeast Asian communities — and consulted with South Jersey Lebanese chef Elias Bitar last year to help serve appropriate food to Afghan evacuees.
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For Red Rabbit, with customers spread out across two states, serving culturally appropriate meals meant developing different menus for the students at each district — and sometimes, each school.
“We have evolved beyond just feeding kids nutritious meals, but more so creating meals that are a reflection of the communities we’re serving, in order to uplift all cultures in the school cafeteria,” said Red Rabbit business officer Naeema Arrastia-Rateau. “Because at the end of the day, representation matters at all levels.”
Creating food that’s reflective of students’ cultures
If the goal is inclusiveness, the process can look a lot like old-fashioned market research.
“We just really canvass the school and the classrooms, and find out where people are from,” said Talicia Tiempro, who joined Red Rabbit last year to help create bespoke menus at schools with onsite kitchens.
“That could include asking their favorite food, drawing a picture of their favorite food,” she said. “It can be as far as going home and asking their parents where they’re from or what their lineage is, and then being able to come back with that information.”
In part because neighborhoods and schools in New York and New Jersey remain largely segregated, Powell said, each school might have students from a tight subset of backgrounds — whether predominantly Afro-Caribbean or Puerto Rican or Dominican — and so those conversations can dig into granular differences between cuisines.
“The census might say the students are 60 percent African American and 40 percent Latino,” Arrastia-Rateau said. “But there are a lot of cultures there. You know, Mexican rice is different from Dominican rice. We get into the nuances of chofan rice, which is a Dominican fried rice, and why are black beans and rice different from red beans and rice?”
There are some universals, of course: Pizza and mac and cheese are staples at most schools, Powell said. But the research can also go as deep as deciding whether to call a dish “peas and rice” or “rice and peas.”
Philip’s Academy, a predominantly Black and Latin American charter school in Newark, signed on with Red Rabbit specifically because of its healthy and diverse culinary offerings, said Principal Yasmeen Sampson. Red Rabbit polled the Academy’s students about foods they liked and held tastings with students and teachers, soliciting feedback at each stage.
“Our kids are enjoying foods that, you know, are reflective of their cultures. So, like, curry, and we have (Latin American) dishes, and it’s really kind of cool,” said Sampson, who learned the wonders of Portuguese peri peri chicken alongside many of her students. “Kids can be picky eaters. So the fact that they leave lunch excited is fun.”
Serving food students enjoy isn’t just a feel-good measure, said Andrew Ruis, a medical history researcher at the University of Wisconsin and author of “Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States.” It’s also a public health concern.
“One of the things that people have learned again and again, going all the way back to the 19th century, is that an efficient program that’s based on supplying meals isn’t going to do very much good if the kids don’t eat the food,” Ruis said.
How school lunch lost its flavor — and got it back
School programs like Red Rabbit’s, or the ones in Austin and Hawaii, aren’t without precedent, Ruis said. They hark back to the beginnings of school lunch in America.
At the turn of the 20th century, New York was America’s laboratory for experiments in school food. Then as now, New York was an immigrant city — a calico quilt of neighborhoods so partitioned that one school might be mostly Calabrian Italian, while the one down the street was full of Sicilians.
Early attempts at serving standardized school lunches failed, Ruis said, because children didn’t want to eat the food. And so school lunch programs learned to tailor meals to the tastes of the city’s many European immigrants.
“Right from the beginning, they developed different menus for different schools,” Ruis said. “They tried to hire, and usually were successful at hiring cooks and servers from those communities. The meals that were prepared for a child in Italian schools would have been prepared by Italian cooks. Jewish schools had kosher menus, and were inspected by rabbis.”
Similar programs sprang up in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. But during the Great Depression, Ruis said, taste gave way to necessity. In both urban and rural areas, menus were more likely to be formed from agricultural surplus than personal preference. One month a school might be swimming in onions, Ruis said. Next month could bring a flood of grapefruit, or stewed prunes.
School lunch proved a popular and enduring notion. But in the 1940s, famed Philadelphia-born anthropologist Margaret Mead came to a fateful conclusion.
Tasked by President Franklin Roosevelt with helping build a federal lunch program to pump nutritious calories into every growing child — no matter their cultural background — she came up with a simple solution. If you make the food bland, it won’t offend anyone’s palate.
She aimed for food that was “fairly innocuous and has low emotional value.” This meant nixing every seasoning but salt. Soup was relieved of its herbs. Vegetables arrived plain, butterless, steamed wet as a forest floor.
Some civic leaders took this further, envisioning standardized meals as a way to socialize the children of immigrants to eat all-American food, wrote University of Chicago professor Susan Levine, in “School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program.”
“Polish, Lithuanian, Mexican — yes, and Catholic, Protestant and Jewish children” all ate differently at home, said Joseph Meegan, founder of Chicago social services organization Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. But in his lunch program, he crowed, the children “actually ate democracy.”
That legacy continued to shape school food for decades, Levine detailed, even with the later introduction of “ethnic” dishes such as pizza and enchiladas.
The move to again consider students’ cultural backgrounds and tastes has been much more recent. It’s a conversation Powell believes has been hastened by the political sea change that followed a police officer’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“More broadly in American society, we’ve been grappling quite publicly with the concept of who is American, and what group of Americans are allowed to tell another group of Americans that they are the true Americans,” he said. “We consider ourselves a small part of that conversation.”
Red Rabbit menu developer Tiempro remembers growing up in Houston, where she didn’t have access to a varied school menu — and seeing Caribbean students looked at funny for bringing goat to the cafeteria. She contrasts that with a scene she recently witnessed at a school she serves in Coney Island.
“They were making tagine, and there was a young lady who was of Moroccan descent,” Tiempro said. “She walked up to the chef, and she said, ‘Do you know where this is from? This is from where my family is from.’ She was so excited…. And the chef was excited she felt affirmed in that way. Like. ‘I see myself in the food that I’m eating.'”
When Red Rabbit began trying to change its model for food service, Powell said he had a hard time finding the right language to describe what he wanted to do.
Now, he said, schools’ interest in culturally relevant food is one of the main things driving his company’s growth. He plans a South Jersey satellite office as soon as this year, and an expansion to schools in Philadelphia.
“I think in hindsight, two years later, if we’d have tried to make this change without society also changing, it would have been extremely, extremely difficult.” he said.
Matthew Korfhage is a food and culture reporter for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region How We Live team. Email: mkorfhage@gannettnj.com | Twitter: @matthewkorfhage
