Photo by Son of Groucho/Flickr CC
If we create something by believing in it passionately, as a philosopher once said, then reforming the food system might start with changing the options that federal employees have for lunch. How can we expect USDA employees to passionately defend needed changes if their imaginations about food options are stuck in the 1970s?
Washington, D.C. is famous for its contrasts--partisan politics, affluence and poverty--but who knew that food choices were on the same list? Last week, when I visited the White House garden and the USDA cafeteria on the same day, I saw firsthand the present and the potential of our food system, separated by only a few blocks, but virtually by about 40 years.
The Friday farmer's market and the First Lady's well-publicized garden--all 1,100 square feet of it, with a thriving bee house, plants germinated from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello garden, and leadership from Mrs. Obama--represent the potential. According to the First Family's chef, Sam Kass, the White House garden has produced 700 pounds of food in six months and educated thousands of young school children who come to visit and work.
Most college students wouldn't put up with this. Why should public servants?A few blocks away is the people's garden at the USDA headquarters. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack employed a jackhammer and two department landscape architects to replace what had been only cement and grass months ago. They planted produce in raised beds and put in cover crops to enrich the soil in the ground. They erected a bat house to produce guano to fertilize the plantings organically. Free public seminars are offered there on a weekly basis and almost 200 gardens have been developed at USDA offices around the country as a result of this first effort.
Representing present conditions is the food dished out to employees in Federal cafeterias. Forgive me if this description of what I observed takes you uncomfortably back a few decades:
• A station that defines global food as pasta that is prepared in a pan with your choice of bits of meats and sauces without flavor. The pasta is pre-cooked and piled in an open vat whose capacity rivals my refrigerator's.
• A salad bar with cottage cheese, black olive slices, and pineapple chunks in syrup. Despite the map of local farms on a nearby wall, most everything here came out of a can or was previously frozen and thawed.
• A comfort food station where you can use an ice cream scoop to serve yourself barbequed meat hiding in various brown sauces, any number of starches, and soggy collards--one of the very few green options but they're so overcrooked as not to be really green in color anymore.
The 2009 variation in this throwback cafeteria is an incentive for bringing a reusable tumbler: get any size beverage container up to 32 ounces refilled for the price of 24 ounces. Under what health and wellness scenario can one justify discounting the price of 56 ounces of soda on a given day? Most college students wouldn't put up with this. Why should public servants? They deserve better than this, especially if we need them to see the connections among fresh and healthy food, well-raised food and healthy ecosystems, their personal health and great-tasting produce.
To the credit of the senior members of the administration leading the President Obama's wellness initiatives, improving federal cafeterias is actually on the table. Representing Bon Appetit Management Company, I was one of seven people invited to Washington last week to discuss 'best practices' for providing food service.
Fundamentally, our group tried to impart three ideas: focus on food (fresh and cooked from scratch whenever possible); focus on people (making chefs and servers accountable for the food they offer); and use the federal cafeterias as teaching tools just as the White House and people's garden are. Tens of thousands of public servants eat in these cafeterias daily, many of whom help set food and land use policies for the nation. Surely they need their imaginations stoked as well as having their caloric intake satisfied (or over-satisfied, in the case of beverages).
How about serving meat that is grown without antibiotics? Or more vegetables, cooked with healthy oils and a minimum of salt? Because a high percentage of the foods being served that day was highly processed or from cans, much of it contained corn syrup and therefore packed more calories than was obvious. Switching in cans that contain no syrup might not constitute a best practice, but it would be a good start.
To some, feeding federal employees better may seem trivial compared to the big goals such as eliminating subsidies for the wrong cropping systems. To others, myself included, feeding the creative imaginations of the people we depend on to work on these big goals is a necessary prerequisite and a worthwhile effort.
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Thanks for this insight. Different federal agency, different city, but basically the same cafeteria here: a sad salad bar straight out of 1982 (and frankly, the iceberg lettuce so wilted it usually looks like was harvested in 1982), a grill for burgers, hot dogs, chicken wings, a couple of tasteless but intensely salty soups, and a sandwich bar with white bread, bland pressed turkey or ham, more of the wilted iceberg lettuce, and plain yellow mustard. For breakfast they never have enough bagels (all plain or blueberry, never whole grain) but do have piles and piles of doughnuts! In response to employee demands for healthy options we got.... baked potatoes smothered with cheese sauce and a sprig of overcooked broccoli! Now the average age of our workforce is 45-65 so maybe reliving 1980 over and over again goes over well, but I do get the sense that some healthier, fresher choices would go over well.
Another trend is to outsource food service to fast food companies. If you look at dining facilities at Defense Dept. installations, usually instead of a cafeteria staffed by federal employees, you'll have a food court typically with a Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, usually a Subway-like sandwich place, Chick-Fil-A or Popeye's, and sometimes a Panda Express. Those are the food options at the Pentagon, for example.
I was just in Washington DC for the first time last month, and took a photo of the USDA on my way to where my local friend insisted we have lunch, the cafeteria at the National Museum of the American Indian. An even closer counterexample than the White House garden, this was the most amazing cafeteria I'd ever seen. Each station represented the foodways of a different group of Native American tribes. Everything was cooked to order with fresh ingredients, and those ingredients were as diverse as our own geography. Clearly, the Smithsonian has something to teach the Feds about foodservice as well.
A brilliant recommendation that provides a live, local example of how cafeteria food can be improved. Here's a more radical concept. Fed employees pack a lunch and boycott their cafeterias until healthier choices are provided.
Or here's a thought...
Close the cafeteria and let our poor, malfed public servants pack a nutritious lunch, perhaps using leftovers from last night's dinner, which was probably cooked by their live-in chef using the finest ingredients anyway. Not only would it be much better for them, but maybe it would help reduce the tax burden. Wouldn't that be nice?
I'm not sure why I'm even responding to a troll like this, but the food service at federal offices is 100% financed by what they take in at the cash register. The food service employees work for contractors, not the govt. Frankly, you pay more for a sandwich in our cafeteria than you would if you left the facility and went to Subway, and a can of soda is more than you'd pay at 7-11.
Live-in chef? The average federal govt employee earns about $55,000/year, and even senior managers, people who have to be confirmed by the Senate, top out at around $160,000. So "live in chef", please....
Thank you, anirprof, for saying what I wanted to say! Cafeterias in federal buildings are certainly not free to the employees, nor do they add to federal spending. A salad, sandwhich, and a drink costs the employee upwards of $7.00, out of their pocket, just like the rest of the working world. At my agency, the average annual salary is $56,000, we clearly do not have "live-in chefs". Not everyone works on the hill or lives in big white houses, most of us are workerbees just like the rest of the country's population. And our work, in some way, shape, or form, supports you - the American citizen. Federal employees are certainly interested in reducing the tax burden...we pay taxes too! But closing the cafeteria is not going to have an impact on taxes. Thank you, Molly, for your uninformed and hasty comment. Yes, I agree, we can bring our own lunches, and many of us do. But sometimes there are no leftovers, sometimes we don't have time to make a lunch, and sometimes we forget our lunch at home. Our walk out to the overcrowded parking lot and back in after finding a parking space upon return doesn't allow us time in our half-hour lunch break to get to an outside vendor, eat, and be back at our desks when we need to be. This statement is certainly not to make you feel sorry for us, or to say "oh, woe is me", it is to make a point that a healthy cafeteria makes for healthier (and in turn, more productive) employees which also equals less money spent on federal health care - and THAT, Molly, will help reduce your tax burden.
I am a civil servant AND my husband is a professional chef who has no time to pack me a brown bag lunch. He also flatly refuses to entertain the thought of eating at my building's cafeteria: once but never never again he says. Yes it is quick, which means it is fried on the grill or it's the daily special, also fried or overcooked canned veggies, etc. Our building is not close to any restaurants and employees generally try to keep their lunch to a 30 minute break. It would be nice to have 'made to order' salads, not what the cafeteria chooses to put in their refrigerator sometimes, which means we don't know how long it's been there either and it wasn't terrific to look at to begin with, so never mind. A healthier cafeteria makes for less cranky employees who won't mind paying so much if it tasted good AND was healthy, too.
Come on. No one has corrected the comment about "live-in chefs" ... clearly the person was alluding to the individual in the home who prepares the evening meal, whether that person is mom or dad, grandma or grandpa, son or daughter ... no one really assumes that civil servants have "staff" like a butler or a chef do they?
Sadly, the real opposition to the live-in chef comment is not that we public servants don't have our own professional cooking staff at home, but rather many American families don't eat a freshly prepared evening meal at home. The rate at which American families eat take out food or quick-prep meals like Stouffers Lean Cuisine et al. is as damaging, if not worse, than the abysmal cafeteria food.
If you prepare a fresh dinner every night of the week, then you are part of a lucky minority in this country, and leftovers probably aren't too hard to come by. However, more and more Americans use their microwaves and ovens for reheating rather than baking.
Let America reconnect with what food tastes like and how to prepare it, and let it start at the USDA!