Annette Fuentes

Orinda I.S. students line up outside cafeteria windows to buy lunch

On a recent late morning, hungry students queued up at Bow Wow Chow, the new self-service cafeteria at Orinda Intermediate School, where they could choose from an array of freshly prepared pasta or green salads with organic vegetables and sandwiches, Jamba Juice or IZZE naturally sweetened sparkling fruit juice. At the pre-order windows outside, others were served by school-mom volunteers who run the cafeteria. The kids swipe debit cards and pick up the special entrée of the day, like three cheese lasagna or grilled chicken kabobs with jasmine rice and tahini-yogurt sauce, each from a different local restaurant that caters and delivers the meals fresh daily. The cost for a complete lunch is $5.25, and 75 percent of students participate in the pre-order program, paid for by their parents.

“The kids in Orinda have very sophisticated palates,” said Linda Judkins, director of the Bulldog Kennel, the school’s food service. “I remember the first time I brought in kiwis, the kids went nuts. A lot of these kids grew up going to restaurants with their parents. They know what a Bolognese sauce is.”

Annette Fuentes

Students peruse choices in Bow Wow Chow store

At the other end of the Caldecott Tunnel, 12 miles away, students at the West Oakland Middle School file into their cafeteria where the day’s menu offers cheeseburgers or chicken chow mein. The burgers, like most of the food, come from food distribution giant Sysco. They are pre-cooked and reheated in the school kitchen. The chow mein is prepared with fresh noodles and vegetables by in-house cook Tamara Purifoy, who is assisted by four student volunteers in running the lunch program.

A salad bar is a new addition, just a few weeks old, offering fresh romaine lettuce, baby spinach leaves, chopped hard-boiled eggs, shredded cheese, cucumber slices, cherry tomatoes and canned fruit cocktail. But Donny Barclift, a field supervisor in Oakland school district’s nutrition service, is worried to see that few students this day are taking the fresh vegetables while many are going heavy on the canned fruit. “I’ll have to do something about that,” he said, jotting down a note. Nutrition education is a big part of his job. “Kids ask, ‘Why does it have to be whole grains?’” Barclift says, “and we say it gives you fiber, it’s not processed, it’s better for you.”

Annette Fuentes

Students line up at salad bar at W. Oakland Middle School

A complete lunch with milk is priced at $3 for Oakland middle- and high-schoolers. But at this middle school, all students eat free because almost all of them--nearly 90 percent--are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch based on their family’s low income. It is one of many schools where all the kids eat free because of the high numbers of income-eligible students.

Bay Area school districts have been recalibrating their approaches to healthy lunches as part of a wider trend of improving school nutrition, encouraged by public sentiments and prodded by state laws and federal guidelines. Berkeley school district’s lunch program, funded by the Chez Panisse Foundation of chef Alice Waters, is a celebrated local example of the trend in improving student nutrition.

But there is a world of difference in how districts provide healthy school lunches. One key difference is money—both the income levels of school districts and the cost of lunch programs. Another is the food culture of diverse communities, so to speak, and what kids and their families are used to eating.