Photography courtesy of Healthy Schools Campaign
Aretha Brown, a senior-to-be at Beaumont Career & Technical Education High School, said that competing in the Cooking Up Change contest was like being on the Food Network.
“We had a three-hour time limit, and all the teams were all crowded into one big kitchen,” she says. “We had to share everything, even though we didn’t want to. Sometimes you had to wait for other people to finish using utensils. Some people were hiding utensils from us! It was fun, but it felt like Chopped, so there was a lot of pressure.”
Brown and teammates Clarese Mathews and William Viney kept their cool and whipped up a cafeteria lunch that the judges chose as the best from among five area teams. The winners earned the right to compete at the Cooking Up Change National Finals, set for June 10 in D.C., where they’ll cook at the U.S. Department of Education, then chat with lawmakers about investment in school nutrition.
According to the organization’s website, “the contest challenges high school students to create a great-tasting lunch that meets nutrition standards on a tight budget, using only ingredients commonly available for school food service.” It’s part of a broader effort to make moribund, often pathetic school-lunch options both healthier and tastier. If you happened to catch the erstwhile TV drama Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, or the film Yuck: A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch, you know there’s a movement afoot.
Brown and company filled their lunch tray with barbecue baked chicken, sautéed broccoli and carrots, and poached pears.
“Before the competition we had to choose what dishes we wanted to make and the whole menu had to be under 1,500 calories,” Brown explains. “During the competition, each of us cooks one dish. One person does baked chicken, one does the sautéed veggies, and one does the poached pears. We help each other, too, but each of us has our own thing to work on.”
The chicken, which has a piece of pineapple perched coyly atop the sauced meat, is juicier than you might expect, Brown says. “You have to put a lot of love into it [the chicken],” she adds. “We chose to make chicken because it’s healthy. Children always want to eat fried chicken, but ours is healthier, and the barbecue sauce and pineapple are fun.
“Also,” she continues, “it’s not bland and nasty.” What is bland and nasty? Typical school cafeteria food, of course. More on that in a moment.
Brown, Mathews, and Viney competed at their own high school; Beaumont has a culinary vocational program and a commercial-style kitchen, so the kids were playing on their home turf. However, as juniors, they were not expected to best Beaumont’s team of seniors.
“We were the underdogs, and it felt so good to win,” Brown says. “In your face!”
The youngest of a dozen children in her family, Brown says she has found a home in Beaumont’s technical program. “My dream is to become a world-famous baker,” she adds. “I love cupcakes. I want to open a bakery called Candyland Cupcakes, inspired by the board game. But I have to go to college first.”
Now, about that “bland and nasty” fare—Beaumont may boast a culinary-education track, but that doesn’t mean its cafeteria serves fois gras and truffles to the kids at lunchtime.
“At Beaumont our lunches are supposed to be healthy, like baked not fried,” Brown says, “but they don’t look at the taste factor. It’s bland. That’s why for the competition, we incorporate a lot of flavor, so we can show kids that healthy foods don’t have to be bland. That’s the whole point of the competition.”
We hear that. On a lighter note, Brown says her school cafeteria was the scene of good times recently.
“Three weeks before school let out, a girl tripped and her pears went everywhere and they hit another girl in the face. Then the whole cafeteria went crazy, and there was a big food fight,” she says. “There was milk everywhere and our uniforms were soaked. We all had to stay there and clean it up. It was fun.”
