Walking through a field of rich soil at Arnold Farms on Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore, Tony Geraci plucks a ripe tomato off the vine and bites in. As the juices spill out, Geraci, the new top chef for the Baltimore school system, smiles broadly. “I’m thinking about a fresh tomato salad with basil and mozzarella,” he says. Soon, he’s talking about raw cauliflower with a dipping sauce; super-sweet corn on the cob shaved into crab soup; and his recipe for vegetarian loaf with lentils, garlic, and onions.
Lunchtime for Baltimore’s 82,000 students may never be the same. Long a place where the typical diet centered on snack foods, soda, and fried chicken in a box from the corner store, Baltimore is going Berkeley.
“Anything is possible,” says Geraci, a 51-year-old New Orleans native who came to Baltimore from New Hampshire, where he gave school lunchroom menus a major makeover and then ran a program to prepare low-income and developmentally disabled adults for careers in the culinary field. Geraci has vowed that within his first year in Charm City he will wipe out most of the frozen lunches that one teacher describes as “breaded bread with bread sauce,” and replace them with Maryland-grown farm specialties at least three days a week. He’s enlisting farms like Arnold to sell produce to the schools at fair market value, which helps the farmers as well as his mission.
Gone are the days of rubbery chicken nuggets and fries. In their place the chef plans to offer roasted poultry and baked herbed potatoes. Pizza will now be made with whole-grain crust, and each slice will come with a garden salad and fresh fruit. It’s all in keeping with strict USDA guidelines for school lunches, Geraci says. For instance, he explains that government cheese will be used to make dipping sauce for fresh broccoli spears, rather than goopy macaroni and cheese. And USDA-provided rice and beans will be combined to make red beans and rice (on Mondays, of course).
At the same time, he will introduce Baltimore schoolchildren to a new way of healthy eating in a system that, because of the city’s high poverty rate and large number of homeless students, offers many their only meal of the day. The city’s schools have Maryland’s highest rate of overweight children and teens enrolled, mainly because most live in poverty and don’t have healthy eating habits, Geraci says. A report released in June by the Baltimore City Health Department showed that one-fifth of city high school students were classified as obese in 2007. “This has to change,” Geraci says. “We’ve lost an entire generation of children to obesity and poor nutrition, and we’re about to lose another one if we don’t reach our hands into the fire and pull them back out and start doing the right thing.”
Beginning today, the first day of Baltimore’s academic year, the farm-fresh haul will appear on lunch trays as the push for a healthier palate moves into the schools. Around 11:30 this morning, Geraci sat at a table in the cafeteria of Calvin M. Rodwell Elementary School in west Baltimore and encouraged students to try the fresh peaches on their trays. An arrangement with Baugher’s Orchards in rural Carroll County, MD had brought 82,000 pieces of the fruit into Baltimore’s schools for opening day. “I just had two first-graders tell me that they had never had a fresh peach,” Geraci said. “And that’s my point. Kids need to know what real food is.” Pointing to a second-grader who was digging in, he added: “When I see this kid right here with a face full of peach juice, it brings joy to my heart. Look at that smile. Look at that face. That’s why I’m here.”
Geraci’s cooks are up for the challenge of revamping the menu, which he says will actually result in cost savings for the financially strapped school system. He estimates that the high cost of gasoline adds as much as $13 per case to the total cost of food now trucked into cafeterias from out-of-state distributors. “Besides the health benefits, it will cost us less to cook fresh,” Geraci says.
Geraci has a personal stake in the change. “I was born and raised in New Orleans—I began my life in the Desire Street projects, probably one of the most dangerous and impoverished places in America,” he says. “I know what welfare cheese tastes like. But my family was blessed with great cooks. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we grew our stuff and cooked it, and our family meals were important times when we shared our lives together.”
He hopes to recreate that fellowship with “grab and go” breakfast boxes, which made their debut today: Students can grab the boxes in the lunchroom, take them to class, and eat together at their desks. “I want to create a community over breakfast,” he says. “In breaking bread together near their teacher and classmates, it’s not just about the consumption, it’s the interaction that makes it powerful.” Since 78 percent of the city’s students are eligible for free breakfasts and lunches under federal poverty guidelines—with the number projected to climb to 100 percent next year—this is a big deal. The boxes offer milk, fruit juice, whole-grain cereals, and graham crackers (a far cry from the old school breakfast options, which included doughnuts, sugary muffins, and sweet rolls). The new boxes also contain hundreds of different prizes, including iPod downloads and Baltimore Orioles and Ravens tickets, donated by the sports teams and other sponsors like fruit juice companies. One in 20 boxes is a winner, creating what Geraci hopes will be a “Pavlovian” approach to school breakfast. (The kids I spoke with today were very excited about the prospect of winning prizes.)
Geography and the city’s urban challenges—starkly portrayed in the HBO series The Wire, which focused an entire season on the failings of public education in the city—make Geraci’s quest for culinary conversion different from the Edible Schoolyard project that Alice Waters started in Berkeley in 1995, he said. But the results could be the same. He plans to involve students in designing their school menus and planting some of the foods and herbs to be served. And the chef is planning to install a 33-acre farm in a gritty part of east Baltimore—something of a nod to Waters: Today, that farm is being used to grow office plants for school administrators, but in the near future it will become a unique outdoor classroom. By January, he hopes to open a 37,000-foot central kitchen using a mix of public and private funding, merging most of the school-based kitchens and their equipment under one roof. There, the student-designed menus will take root as local chefs visit to teach cooking and nutrition classes alongside Geraci.
“You can walk the street here and look at the litter to know what they eat,” said Denise Whiting, owner of the Baltimore restaurant Café Hon, who has met with Geraci about school nutrition. “It’s all about introducing them to food as a new subject.”
Geraci said that could be a tough lesson. “What these kids know about food is what corporate America has taught them. I think it’s unrealistic to expect an educator to execute their lesson plan if the kid sitting in front of them is jacked up on Lucky Charms, or worse, no food at all. This is about reeducation.”