Good Kid Food

Linda Mailhot doesn’t have much time to talk. “I’m the only one here today,” she says.

In a few moments, dozens of hungry children will descend on her with trays outstretched, like baby birds with their beaks open. But Mailhot, the food service director for the Mount Desert Elementary School in Northeast Harbor, is ready for them.

Traditionally, cafeteria cooks crammed those trays with food of questionable nutritional value and questionable taste: pale fruit cups loaded with corn syrup, flattened burgers heavy on the grease, and a couple of ketchup packets thrown in for the vegetable group.

But the food neatly arranged in Mailhot’s kitchen bears little resemblance to standard cafeteria fodder: neat rows of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on thick bread with flecks of whole grain, steaming red soup awash with vegetables, and a salad bar full of crisp, colorful vegetables and apple slices as big as a third-grader’s hand.

The lure of the latter clearly enticed one of the first children in line; Mailhot eyes his tray overflowing with apple slices.

“Got enough apples there?” she asks.

“They’re huge,” he says, wide-eyed.

Mailhot smiles. Those apple slices and other fresh produce didn’t get to the cafeteria by chance. For the past few years, she’s been using part of the school food budget to buy produce and eggs from two local farms and receiving donated bread from a local organic bakery. Scott McFarland, the school’s principal, is the first to admit the school’s culinary improvements are almost completely her fault.

“She’s always been doing things to make our lunches healthier,” McFarland says.

Mailhot says she decided to shop local because of her visceral reaction to what was available when she first started at
the school. “I was disgusted with the quality of produce from our suppliers,” she says. “There’s something wrong with it if I don’t want to eat it.”

Through the Healthy Acadia Farm-to-School Project, Mailhot arranged to buy organic produce from the nearby Beech Hill Farm and eggs from another farm on the island. Beech Hill Farm was a natural fit for the farm-to-school program because it’s founded by and provides food for another school, the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor.

Mailhot often picks up the deliveries herself, but she also gets some help from the students. Each year, the fourth grade class travels to Beech Hill Farm to harvest some of the vegetables and apples. The trip gets the kids connected to their food, says Mailhot.

“They take ownership of what they’re eating,” she says. Over bowls of soup made from the vegetables they harvested, the kids talk excitedly about what they learned on their field trip. Becca Walls tells how to make soup broth richer using kohlrabi, a vegetable most adults can’t even pronounce, let alone cook with.

“You put it into the broth a couple of minutes and it tastes like butter,” she says. The other children nod matter-of-factly, as if it’s perfectly normal for them to be exchanging cooking tips instead of packages of Twinkies.

Quinn Isaacs talks authoritatively about using cover crops and the magic of the inside of a compost pile.

“The middle was a lot hotter,” he says excitedly.

The kids don’t just harvest the vegetables; they also make the soup. Mailhot receives daily help from the school’s culinary arts club for breakfast and lunch. Without them, she says, she couldn’t keep up. The kids help with everything from cooking to washing dishes to filling out the USDA forms.

The club also gets a final say in how food’s prepared; the student chefs decided to leave turnips out of the soup at the last minute this morning.
“Your brother made the soup this morning,” Mailhot says to a girl as she hands her a bowl.

“Why’d he have to make it?” the girl asks, scrunching up her face in fear of sibling cooties. She took the bowl anyway.

Making the food is one thing, but getting kids to eat it is another. Mailhot uses a few culinary tricks to make meals more palatable to young eaters. She helped kids get used to cauliflower by mashing it like potatoes; she then neglected to call attention to the difference.

“I use a lot of deception by omission,” she says, chuckling.

She also isn’t above a little creative advertising. When the menu is leftovers, Mailhot writes “While They Last!” at the top. The simple phrase makes the food move quicker.

Mainly, Mailhot just prepares the food to taste and look good, using little touches like marinating vegetables or chicken in olive oil and spices long before baking or coordinating meals to have varied colors. She also moves slowly with new foods, to keep kids from getting spooked.

“Kids didn’t learn to eat the garbage we’ve been feeding them overnight, so we can’t expect them to change overnight,” she says.

Mailhot admits there are limits to what she can do. The local food costs the school some 10% more. The community is generous with school funding, but she still must rely heavily on national suppliers. Even the vegetable soup base for today’s meal has a long list of multisyllabic ingredients and actually isn’t suitable for vegetarians. “At least there’s no MSG,” Mailhot says.

But the overall effort is paying off. School lunch counts are up, the amount of food thrown away is down, and kids are excited about lunchtime.

Recently, a girl came up to Mailhot to ask what the next day’s meal would be. Because it was a leftovers day, Mailhot said she hadn’t yet decided.

“Can you call me tonight when you know?” the girl asks. Mailhot says she will be sure to.