School cafeteria junk food: "Be gone!"

An acclaimed chef leaves the restaurant biz to bring healthy foods to our nation's school cafeterias....

Hot Lunch Goes Healthy

by Sara Aase

SETH BIXBY DAUGHERTY meets his daughter Emma, 10, for lunch at her school cafeteria in Oak Point Intermediate School in Eden Prairie. Daugherty, the former executive chef of Cosmos, has recently traded the downtown Minneapolis restaurant known for its sleek décor and luxurious food for an eatery equipped with warming ovens, fluorescent lights, and long, low tables with attached plastic swivel chairs. The award-winning chef (he graced the cover of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs issue in 2005) is forming a nonprofit called Real Food Initiatives, with the long-term goal of working with schools to overhaul lunch menus nationwide, and creating a K-12 curriculum that gives kids culinary knowledge and skills.

But today, his main goal is to demonstrate what led him to this crusade. “This isn’t the worst or best lunch they serve,” Daugherty says, as he squeezes his tall frame into a swivel chair and nibbles his over-nuked hot dog and sickly sweet chili. Still, it’s easy to see that the items most kids choose—hot dogs, frozen quesadillas, and chocolate milk—contain lots of sugar, salt, and fat but precious few nutrients. Vegetables? One girl eats mushy canned green beans; another picks at a small salad with her fingers.

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