School lunch taste test raises bigger questions

January 3, 12:54 PMFood ExaminerEric Burkett

Previous Next

2 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Food Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Traditional school lunch standby or a harbinger of
dark secrets?

In an interesting experiment conducted last fall by the Portland, Oregon, public school system, students were asked to taste-test grass and grain-fed beef.

The project was part of the school system’s effort to use more locally produced foods in their cafeteria lunch program. With help from Oregon State University, students at two Portland elementary schools tasted and rated samples of hamburger from grain-fed and grass-fed beef in blind taste tests. For the most part, the kids were evenly divided on their preferences but an overwhelming majority of the kids were able to discern a difference in taste between the two kinds of beef.

In the end, the Portland school district decided to stick with grain-fed beef as part of its lunch program. Why? Cost. The difference between grass-fed and grain-fed was so pronounced I actually had to go back and read it again to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

“The grain-fed beef the district serves costs $17.11 per case (with 140 patties per case) and the particular brand of grass-fed beef it tested costs $44.85 a case (with 75 patties per case)”, according to a release from OSU.

There are plenty of factors coming into play here: the grain-fed beef was supplied by the federal government’s National School Lunch Program, which buys the meat at fixed prices and redistributes it according to a complex formula to each of the states. That beef is purchased from farmers throughout the United States. With subsidies and established price formulas, the grain-fed beef is certainly going to be cheap, but something still seems amiss here.

The grain fed beef is also spiced, precooked, and loaded with fillers. On top of that, it’s shipped long distances across the country. Presumably, the grass-fed beef, which was not precooked and had to be salted to put it on an equal footing in the taste tests, has much lower overhead costs and had only to be transported a much shorter distance.

The Portland public school system deserves a big thumbs up for its efforts to use locally produced foods, but their experiment raises a lot of questions.