Ten years ago, School Nutrition Director for Montague Area Public Schools Dan Gorman, was invited to be a speaker at a local Ted Talk in Montague, Mich.
During the event, he ran into Muskegon Area Career Tech Center culinary instructor Elissa Penczar and her group of students.
“I was talking about healthy school meals as one of the speakers and she was there with her students and they were serving a butternut squash soup that they had created,” he says.
Gorman and Penczar got to talking and began looking for ways they could collaborate together. Their efforts led to a partnership where Penczar’s students now spend part of their class developing their own recipes for the nutrition program.
Today, the program not only provides new recipes for the nutrition team, but it also helps culinary students develop leadership skills and further strengthen their culinary abilities.
Marketing their recipes
At the start of the school year, the culinary students begin learning about different cooking techniques, the types of local produce they can incorporate into their recipes and how to market their dishes. Students also go over the different meal pattern requirements for school meals put forth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
From there, they spend the following weeks developing their own recipes that could one day be served on students’ lunch trays.
Before they’re added into the menu rotation, however, the recipes are first sampled with students. Instead of having Penczar or Gorman market the menu items, it’s the culinary students themselves who work to promote their creations to their peers.
“When they're on site handing out meals, and handing out taste tests, they have to talk and convince the high schoolers and middle schoolers that they should try their food,” says Gorman.
The culinary students then revise their recipes based on the student feedback they receive. At the end of the year, the dishes that struck a chord most with students are served on the menu.
Along with supplying new recipes to the nutrition program, Gorman also says that the partnership allows the culinary students to expand their people skills and gain confidence.
“You see the growth in the students and it's really gratifying for me,” he says. “When we meet with them in the fall, their demeanor and how they interact with you a lot of times is just shy and reserved, and by the end of the year, they're staring you in the eye and talking.”
Instigating change
Previous dishes from the partnership that have become fan-favorites include spinach enchiladas, a spicy coleslaw and more recently, Muskegon Muffins which are made using local beans, apples and sweet potatoes.
Created by then-senior Zoe Fauble, the muffins were a hit with students and received a 80% approval rating during taste tests. Gorman was hoping to serve the recipe as part of breakfast in the classroom and have it count as a serving of fruit and a meat alternative for the USDA’s School Nutrition Standard meal pattern requirements. However, because the beans are pureed into the muffin batter and not left whole, the USDA does not recognize the beans as a meat alternative.
Fauble and her classmates have met with representatives of the USDA as well as U.S. Senator and Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee Debbie Stabenow to try and get the rule changed.
“[The USDA is] excited about what we're doing, but they're not terribly open to changing rules because it's so complicated,” Gorman says, adding that it took the USDA years to finally count fruit and yogurt blended into a smoothie as a serving of fruit and a meat alternative.
While efforts to get the muffins to fulfill the meat alternative requirement have fallen short so far, Gorman and the culinary students plan to resume talks with the USDA this fall on potential steps forward.
“We're gonna work on how to change it,” he says. “We're back with the senator's office to have those conversations again and to see what we can do to kind of influence that change.”
Expanding further
This year, Penczar’s culinary students will again partner with the nutrition team to come up with new menu items for the district. Gorman is also continuing an effort he started last year to take prior students’ recipes and work with the current culinary students and the MSU Product Center in East Lansing, Mich., to mass produce the menu items for surrounding schools.
The aforementioned spicy coleslaw and Muskegon Muffins (since they still count as a serving of fruit) are two recipes that the students will work to tweak for commercial production this year.
Gorman will also spend the upcoming months looking for other potential partnerships and opportunities on the horizon.
His advice to operators looking to collaborate with others is to remain open to spotting possible partners and to have the mentality that there are people who want to help you. When attending conferences for example, Gorman goes in with the mindset that there will be at least one, if not more, attendees who will be willing and able to help him solve a problem.
“I have a weird mentality, I'm a paranoid in reverse,” he says. “I think people are conspiring to make me happy.”