First Grade Soup

On Big Food's marketing of junk foods in elementary schools + what to do about it.

Recently my son, Raffi (12) and his friend Ethan, sold snacks outside his old elementary school, which is a few houses down the street from us. They set up a table. I got them started with cases of Bai drinks (mildly flavored anti-oxidant water), bottles of cold water and run of the mill chips from Costco. He marks up the prices on the individual pieces and gives me money from his earnings to buy more product. 

The idea was to support the boys making some pocket money, keep them out of trouble, and also help them understand simple economic issues, like supply and demand and how to run your cash box, make change, pricing, and how businesses work and how money is made. 

Except he stopped asking me to buy him product at Costco. Even as kept selling. Because he innately understood what his buyers wanted.

Turns out, the boys figured out that Ethan (who still goes to that school) could take some of their profits and during the school day buy branded snacks from the school store, which they would mark-up and sell at their table.

On the one hand, genius. On the other….

Kids swarmed their table after school to buy suckers, Raisels, Nerds and Airheads, all kinds of spicy and tart Mexican candies, Takis, Doritos and Prime, a favorite drink of boys because Youtuber Logan Paul fronts the brand.

Ethan bought all of it, by the box, from the school store.

What did it mean that kids could buy this shitty ass food in their elementary school? Granted, here in Las Vegas, the school district mandates that “competitive foods” as they are called, cannot be sold “in the food services areas during meal periods.” So kids aren’t making these choices in the lunch line necessarily. But they are children still making choices about what they eat and what kid would rather eat school a proper lunch than a fistful of Airheads?

Why is this kind of food being sold in elementary schools anyway?

And what does this mean now that our governor here in Nevada has just vetoed universal free lunch for the children of Nevada? How will lunch money get spent? And what responsibilities do schools have to support healthy taste preferences for kids at formative stages of their lives, like elementary school?

Turns out competitive foods might be the most egregious part of what we feed our kids inside schools, setting taste preferences, as early as kindergarten.

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In December 2010 under the Obama administration, Congress enacted the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. This legislation requires federal nutrition standards for all competitive foods sold in schools. This means any branded food sold in schools has to meet certain nutritional requirements. As a result, many companies simply re-jiggered their ingredients and re-packaged them with “whole grain” written on the side with a photo of a cow in a pasture or something.

Things went down hill from there. Big Food lobbied hard and the USDA caved to pressure in 2014 and made it easier for schools to serve French fries and pizza. And again, Big Food lobbied hard and the USDA pulled back restrictions on sodium levels, flavored milks and amounts of refined grains. It got even slipperier during the Trump administration.

The big culprit though is how we think of education.

We believe culturally that the cafeteria is not the classroom. That education is not connected to food and how we eat. That if it is part of education, it has to be “learning about cups and quarts through cooking.” Instead food is a monstrosity that has to be cobbled together outside of state and local tax dollars for instruction and it has to be done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. It can be shitty and we are still getting the job done.

These adult ideological issues and arguments leave kids at the mercy of brands inundating them, and changing and setting their taste preferences with packaged and nutritionally deficient foods at earlier and earlier ages. The brands get into schools and that kind of marketing makes lifelong consumers for the company. And they are paid well for it. This also applies to food pantries and banks. I personally know one nearby food pantry that does a “soda day” where a Coca-cola truck pulls up with pallets of soda to give out to people in need.

It’s marketing gold.

Take Raisels, found in schools as a competitive food and a perfect example of how packages foods can disrupt taste preferences. Raisels are naturally sweetened raisins (dried fruit tends to have a lot of natural sugar anyway) dipped in sour dust-candy. They come in flavours like sour lemon and sour watermelon, and are on the list for approved snacks in our school system. (You can go to your school system’s food services website and approved competitive foods should be listed somewhere.) But a closer look at the ingredients shows that they one serving of Amazin’ Raisins has 22 grams of sugar. That’s 4.4 teaspoons of processed sugars. Consider that an orange has 9-14 grams of natural sugars (which impact the body differently than processed sugar).

But after you eat all that sugar how good will an orange taste? Can it deliver that tart overload of sugary dopamine rush? Nope. Every box of sour-dusted Amazin’ raisins makes having a banana or an orange that much less satisfying.

So, take the school store filled with Air Heads and Takis, and then add on the other school food events that sell these sweet and nutrition-compromised foods to our kids, PTA, school fairs, Trunk or Treats, etc. At the elementary school I mention here, they have a policy of only pre-packaged foods in the classrooms. This has something to do with managing children’s allergies and preventing law suits, I believe, but it means that every classroom event is filled with bad punch and plastic containers filled with store-bought donuts. There are kids in that school who have NEVER or RARELY had a home-cooked meal. But because we view food outside of education, that doesn’t feel like something that should be tackled at the school level. And while we sleep on this, Big Food is setting the taste preferences for kids across generations.

As of right now all of my kids are either out of school or doing some kind of from-home hybrid schooling and I have to say that I was so relieved to have my youngest kids (12 and 8) no longer inundated with gross food constantly throughout their day. They love it, don’t get me wrong, Raffi, if he has two dollars in his pocket, will find some chips and a soda somewhere. But by limiting the school foods, I have a shot at being a part of their taste preference development because I no longer have to compete with the school system. It makes my job so much easier.

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This leads me to the experience my oldest kids Lucy (18) and Edie (17) had when they went to elementary school in NYC. Their school, Central Park East II, in East Harlem believed in food as education. There were no chips, soda or candy available for purchase. I wrote a self-published book about the year I spent cooking some really grown-up flavors and foods with four-year-olds in Lucy’s class. You can grab it here (It was never professionally edited, so be kind. I was a newbie). I went in once a week and we made pastas, dumplings, meatballs, pan pizza, spring rolls, all from scratch with four-year-olds.

In this pre-K class there was often a wok of boiling oil on the burner while kids huddled around it watching egg rolls fry. It felt radical and dangerous and totally the result of an amazing teacher (Hi Lisa!) and principal (Hi Naomi!) and parents, who let me do things with the kids I probably shouldn’t have done.

Food was a part of the education even if it wasn't cooking as math or cooking as food history.

But truth is, I had a lot of privileges that allowed me to do this kind of cooking with kids. Time, money, freedom, skills, etc. Not everyone has access to that. A couple years later, Edie’s kindergarten teacher (Hi Vanessa!) worked with me to create a much more do-able and replicable activity.

We created something called First Grade Soup.

Here’s how it worked: The kids and their grownups got to choose a soup - one they love, or one that is a family tradition, a soup from their culture, whatever they want to make. Every Friday one kid presented about their soup in circle, usually with a grownup but not always, and we might taste something (hominy before we made Pozole) or see photos (a kid and his dad eating pho in Vietnam) before we made the soup. Then when the kids finished their math and reading they cycled into the kitchen - a part of the classroom with electricity - and they chopped, sliced, smashed, stirred, sautéed until the smells of garlic and simmering vegetables filled the room. Later, everyone ate soup together.

The kids were suspect at first. It takes a kid a bunch of tries to get them to accept new tastes but as the school year progressed you could see them get comfortable and then get excited about soup day.

When we first tried clam chowder (Edie’s favorite soup) and cream of tomato (her BFF Nabrakissa’s favorite soup) a lot of the kids didn’t want to eat them. But when we revisited these two soups later in the year, the kids loved them, asking for more clams in their cups and asking for seconds. Kids with food issues were also included. One kid, Nico, would only eat Lipton noodle soup so we made clear stock and added ring noodles. He didn't eat the soup but he presented it and watched his friends lap it up eagerly.

Soup day also brought a lot of staff and faculty to the room to share the soup and the kids loved making a cup of soup for their favorite aids or their principal. The program works if families chip in ingredients or if the soup organizer gets funds from school or self-funds the whole project, or if the organizer has funds to chip in when families can’t. There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. It requires being thoughtful, having a plan and getting everyone on board.

I do not think First Grade Soup is going to set US school districts on fire. But I do think it serves as a community-based, inexpensive and do-able model for incorporating comforting sustaining foods and simple cooking into everyday classroom life, without having to engage the bureaucracy. If it were implemented school-wide, it might even make a difference, over years, in how kids eat in their communities. And it provides a nourishing scratch made meal for kids who might need it. There could even be leftovers to take home if it were planned out that way.

First Grade Soup is a small step in a big uphill climb. But as I’ve said, every one of these little efforts matter and you never know what can happen just by doing it.

I am offering the FREE PDF (bottom of page) which details our cooking, some photos, recipes, the soups we made, and some advice on putting it all together in your classrooms. I hope it inspires and supports. Also feel free to email me at Kim@FosterEntertainment.net if you have questions about getting this going.

All of the kids who have participated in First Grade Soup will be graduating next year from high school. But I haven’t stopped thinking how fun and worthwhile this was for the students, the class and all of us adults who were involved.

Good memories. Good soup.