Melanie

Alabama, USA

I was the first person ever certified in Alabama as a certified Child Nutrition Director. My number is 001. When the certification came about in the early ‘90s, I sent all my stuff in first, That’s how old I am <Laughs> as far as my career goes.  When I was hired in 1985, all that mattered was that you could get them fed, that you knew institutional foods, that you could grasp the bidding process, and that you knew how to keep the budget in line. 

I stumbled into the nutrient-based menu system[1]that was first allowed by USDA in the early ‘90s. Our reason for changing was we were low on funds. Alabama passed a mandated raise for employees without passing the money through to us. Plus, we had a high school principal who wanted iced tea on the serving line.  Well, once we had iced tea, no students were taking milk, so we were losing over a hundred plates a day in our high school that we weren’t getting Federal reimbursement for because of the iced tea. We were in the red.

We changed [to the nutrient-based system] and within a year, we were in the black. And we had improved on the amount of fat. We eliminated French fries at the high school and a brownie that had 47 grams of fat. It was the system’s most popular brownie. I’m still given credit for ruining that for everybody because it’s no longer available. <Laughs>

I had a cook resign that first year because she could not lather butter on top of the rolls anymore. She quit, she retired immediately. She was so mad at me. I was not gonna ruin her rolls; she wasn’t gonna have the reputation that she served that kind of roll. So she quit. 

Cooking is the cooks’ identity. We are in Alabama, so meat-based seasoning is the only seasoning they knew. And you have to realize, recipes were not used for anything except a baked product. Everything else you opened cans and you added grease. <Laughs> When they cut the fat, the cooks were not ready to season other ways. And the fact that I was gonna make them serve a product that they didn’t feel good about, they felt their reputation on the line. We had times when they would say, “I know it’s not good, but Melanie made us do it that way.” 

There’re new State mandates and now all these systems are calling us saying, “How do we do this?” My ladies are laughing because they will tell anybody that they would not go back to frying every day. There’s less work now that they have it down pat. They were shocked to begin with. One reason is I don’t force things on them that are not already preprocessed. We buy our collards ready to wash and cook. Our sweet potato sticks are ready to cook. We buy a lot of our salad things already ready to eat like you see in grocery store.  If we make soup, we may make it with fresh carrots and fresh potatoes, but we’re buying them ready to drop in the pot. So we do cook from scratch, but with many convenient things so it’s really not more time consuming.

I have some schools and some managers do better than others.  One manager is pulling a child from every class, once a month and tasting new foods in the school kitchen. They cook a recipe and then they do an activity around nutrition.  And she tells what day it's gonna be on the line.  When those 26 or 27 kids come into the lunchroom and it’s on the line, you can hear the chatter. “Oh, this is what we tasted, y'all need to try this.” And so they're teaching other students. 

Our goal is for them to remember when they see it on a restaurant menu or something, “Oh, I've had this at school, it's okay.” And by that, it spreads to the parents, too. It'll take time, but we're gettin' there. The parents are very happy and there’s been a lot of press. I was even asked to testify before Congress because we were doing some fresh vegetables. Their question was did I believe “that more funding was required to do this?” And my answer was actually, no, I didn’t think it was. I was not spending more money. I thought you just had to move your resources around. I don’t think American Food Service Association (now the School Nutrition Association) people were very happy with me. <Laughs> 

You’ve worked with food as a profession for many years. What does food mean to you personally?

I think food is pretty much always on my mind. I've associated it with going to my grandmother's who was an excellent cook. I think because of my weight, I've always had such a strange relationship with food and I've worked so hard to get over that.

One day I was thinking about this. I was taking dancing. My mother was driving me 30 miles to dancing once a week. Well, the teacher yelled at me and I refused to go back. I was a first grader and I said, “I'm not doing this anymore.” In order to get me to do it, mother bought me a large milkshake every week coming home.  It became the reason for getting through dance class. I realized one day, not all that many years ago, that I associated getting something I liked to eat to make up for something I didn’t want to do. 

That psychology is still in my head somewhere, but I do have better control of it and I was determined not to give that to my kids. I was determined that the foods they were exposed to they would see as normal, not as diet or not as reward or not as anything else. There was excitement over this fresh something we're getting as much as this dessert. My kids are now grown and neither have ever had a weight problem.  I try to put the same emphasis on the healthy things for the kids at school. I can say to my managers, “Let's try this. I think children will eat it, my kids love it.” And they would say, “Well, your kids are weird, they'll eat anything.” <Laughs>

It was not until probably mid '90s or sometime around the time I testified before Congress that it finally dawned on me that I might could really make a difference in a whole town that would stay for a generation. And maybe for generations to come because we had a preschooler come through last year and say, “Hey, lady, can I have some more of those green trees instead of a cookie?” And he wanted broccoli instead of a cookie. This year [after switching to all whole-wheat bread in the schools], we had a kindergarten child picking the seeds out of her bread and the manager walked over and said, “Sugar, you can eat those. Why are you taking them out?” She said, “I know, but this bread is so good I'm gonna plant them.”  

[1]School districts receiving reimbursement through the National School Lunch program are required to serve lunches that meet nutrition requirements set by the federal government. The original, and now the required, food-based menu planning approach requires specific amounts of specific food groups for different age groups. From the mid-1990’s until 2012, school districts could opt to use a system that used approved computer software to analyze the specific nutrient content of menu items to ensure meals met the nutrient standards.