Students in the Norwin School District are getting a taste of Asia in school cafeterias.
Last week, the district's food services department introduced several chicken-based Asian food selections in each school's cafeteria.
Administrators started the program by offering students sweet and sour, teriyaki and General Tso's chicken dishes. They plan to add mandarin and Thai chili dishes to the menu by the end of the month.
The meals also feature rice and vegetables.This is not the first time Norwin cafeterias offered Asian cuisine. The schools offered Asian meals a couple times each year, said food service director Rod Stewart. The demand was high for the meals, prompting administrators to offer them regularly.
Administrators plan to use February to see how students responded to having the new offerings available on a daily basis.
In March, they plan to offer the Asian meals at Norwin High School daily, but will offer it to the other schools once or twice a month, Stewart said.
Students at Norwin High School responded well to the new meals, said cafeteria manager Marchelle DePalma.
"The staff is excited to be able to offer Asian cuisine, and the kids are just loving it," DePalma said. "It's really a big seller, and every time it's offered, we sell more and more of it."
The cafeteria's biggest seller is General Tso's chicken, she said.
Stewart said administrators are always looking for different styles of food to offer students.
"Asian food is very popular amongst the youth today," he said. "When they go out to malls, this type of cuisine is very popular in the food courts, so we wanted to get something for them that is very popular."
Administrators expect the Asian cuisine would fit into the new federal nutrition guidelines for school meals, which could be implemented over the next few years. The guidelines mandate more fruits and vegetables, and lower amounts of sodium.
The new guidelines are based on 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
Norwin began offering students more fruits and vegetables last year to meet the new guidelines, but schools will have about 10 years to begin lowering the amounts of sodium in meals, Stewart said.
"They don't want to lower it all at once so they don't change the flavor right off the bat," Stewart said. "If they did that, students wouldn't eat the food.
"Basically, manufacturers we get food from are going to be changing their products slowly to meet these guidelines."
Norwin's cafeterias are already taking small steps to reduce sodium, Stewart said. Their first step was by replacing regular cheese with a fat-free, low-sodium cheese.
"We're really trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new food regulations," Stewart said.
The new recommendations follow President Barack Obama signing into law a child-nutrition bill to help schools pay for healthier foods in subsidized meals, which are often more expensive.
The federal guidelines are in the public comment phase.
No comments:
Post a Comment