Students do like their school salad bars, despite off-campus temptations

December 27, 12:53 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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The good news is that it’s not true that the new salad bars in San Francisco school cafeterias are unpopular with students. While I frequently take the mainstream media to task for being unquestioningly enthusiastic about this or that innovation, experiment or fad in education, in this case the dead-trees San Francisco Examiner was overly negative in a  Dec. 24 article.

Over the past couple of years, salad bars have been installed in most SFUSD middle and high school cafeterias, and hundreds more students are eating regularly in those cafeterias, compared with the pre-salad bar days.

For the article, the Examiner reporter interviewed students at my own kids’ high school, School of the Arts (SOTA), about why they weren’t eating in the cafeteria. However, SOTA is one of the few high schools without a salad bar. And a number of “perfect storm” factors mean SOTA students will always be more tempted to leave campus for lunch than students at other SFUSD high schools:

• SOTA, an open campus, is close to a pleasant shopping strip with really tempting and fast lunchtime options – a Round Table, a burger spot, a taqueria, a Starbucks, an independent bakery/coffee shop and a couple of other places to get great sandwiches. I live nearby and find myself getting takeout lunch more than I need to because of that. I can't think of any other SFUSD high schools quite that close to that much temptation.
• The “free spirit” culture that pervades SOTA encourages kids to roam off-campus at lunch just because they can.
• SOTA has fewer low-income kids than most SFUSD schools, so more of its students can afford to buy lunch – and the culture is that kids who have money readily buy lunch for kids who don’t.
• Sorry if this sounds un-PC, but district insiders observe that Asian students seem more inclined to dine in the cafeterias than other demographics – low-income students of other ethnicities often perceive a stigma, while that’s reportedly less common among Asian students. SOTA has a significant Asian population, but less than most other high schools in our plurality-Asian district.

But why would students (sometimes including my own kids, I admit) climb the couple of blocks uphill to Round Table or Tower Burger -- in a climate that's often cold and foggy -- when they can get pizza and burgers in the cafeteria for less money? Unfortunately, it’s probably because the cafeteria items are considerably lower in fat and calories. Parent volunteer Dana Woldow, as chair of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, has become very well-informed about nutrition, and here’s what she says about the comparison.

“Middle and high school cafeterias offer pizza as a lunch option every day. The 5-inch pepperoni pizza contains 290 calories and 9 grams of total fat (81 calories), of which 3 grams (27 calories) are saturated fat. Compare that to the 640 calories and 32 grams of fat (288 calories), 14 of them saturated fat (126 calories), in the 6-inch personal size original pepperoni pizza from Round Table. Sure, the “personal” size nutrition facts label indicates that it yields four servings, but the name “personal” says it all – most students eat the whole thing themselves. Even if two students shared one, just half of the Round Table pizza still provides more calories (320) and more fat (16 grams, 144 calories) including more saturated fat (7 grams, 63 calories) than the cafeteria pizza. Is it any wonder the Round Table pizza tastes better to students used to eating a high fat diet?”

Fat and calorie content in school food items, by the way, are limited by federal law and also by the SFUSD Wellness Policy.

Nobody who is informed enough to be reading this post is unaware of our national obesity epidemic and its deadly consequences. All we can do is take baby steps, as one fellow activist likes to say -- if we’re not too obese to move at all, that is. The popularity of the school salad bars is one of those steps.