Wellness in the Schools (WITS), a national non-profit, works to ensure access to nourishing food and active play in public schools. As part of their Chefs in Schools initiative, WITS is partnering with the New York City’s Mayor’s Office and the Department of Education’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services (OFNS). The program assigns chefs to train school cafeteria workers in cooking wholesome school lunches and teaching aligned nutrition education classes to select schools, supporting meal participation.
The 72 chefs who work for Wellness in the Schools teach cafeteria workers culinary skills and children the importance of eating nutritiously. The WITS chefs also train OFNS chefs on how to execute newly developed recipes by New York City’s Inaugural Chef Council. Tasked with developing menu items for NYC schools, the Council includes prominent chefs from around the City.
The goal of the Chefs in Schools program is to “provide meals to NYC public school children that are scratch-cooked, plant-based, and culturally relevant, and to give OFNS cooks workforce development skills, such as mise en place, storage and organization, and batch cooking,” Alexina Cather, the Director of Policy and Special Programs at WITS, tells Food Tank.
Over the next two years, the 72 WITS chefs will spend a total of one month at each of New York City’s 1,200 public schools. The chefs have already begun training cafeteria staff, sampling recipes with students, and teaching students how to make some of the lunch recipes in WITS’ Food Lab at their flagship schools.
“Chefs, increasingly, are leaders in their communities…{bringing in a chef} elevates school meals and makes families and kids feel like someone is paying attention to their food and that they care,” Cather explains.
According to Advocates for Children in New York, one in nine NYC students is experiencing homelessness. WITS is working to ensure that the free universal school meals every public school child in New York City has access to are nutritious.
Cather says that “regardless of what neighborhood each student lives in… they should be coming to school knowing that they are going to have options, that they are going to have wholesome food that is nutritionally dense, every time they show up at school.”
WITS is also overcoming the challenges of encouraging kids to eat unfamiliar foods by meeting students and families where they are. Studies in the journal Appetite, have found that children are most likely to enjoy a new food after trying it eight or nine times, and once they make it themselves. But “if you are on SNAP benefits at home as a parent, you don’t have ten times for your kid to try a new food. Your food budget is so limited that you have to make sure that what you put on their plate they’re going to eat,” Cather tells Food Tank.
That’s why WITS is taking action and encouraging students to try new foods by offering samples of new meals, where “the emphasis is just on trying it…and celebrating that because that is the biggest hurdle,” says Cather. Additionally, the organization’s culinary and nutrition classes (aka WITS Labs) allow students to cook the dish before it debuts on their menu, so when it does appear on their plates, students are excited to try it.
As the WITS and the Mayor’s Office partnership rolls out, Cather is thinking about how to turn programs like Chefs in Schools from pilot into policy, offering schools, families, and communities more opportunities for accessing real and good food.
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Photo courtesy of Wellness in the Schools
