Spicing Up ‘Taco Tuesday’ for Healthier School Lunches

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Having a healthy lunch is vital to students who consume most of the day’s calories at school.

Schools in Oyster River Cooperative School District are learning how to work with flavor, spices, culture and more to help increase student’s consumption of healthier school lunches in their schools.

Themes like “taco Tuesday” are popular among students, offering them a variety of different dressed up fruits and vegetables along with a lean meat for protein in the crunchy taco offered. The district also just won the New Hampshire School Breakfast Challenge with a 69 percent increase in student’s participation for consuming high school lunches.

The school’s director of school nutrition, Doris Demers, has been working with creative and dedicated managers and school board members that have helped improved the program’s financial stability as well. The district was also recently awarded a grant from the U.S Dept. of Agriculture to help bring a new convection oven to the middle school.

Having the option to cook more “real food” explained Demers in a recent article, is a huge benefit to the new oven. Demers also stated that they have also been working with local University of New Hampshire (UNH), where college students helped in designing new menus for the high school’s new and very popular taco bar.

Dietetic students from UNH’s dietetics program, will also help to incorporate a farm-to-school menu in the near future, increasing more fresh and local fruits and vegetables into the districts diet.

Latino kids need access to healthier foods in schools, having fresh farm-to-school menus may help them increase consumption of healthier foods and in turn have less risk to diet-related diseases.

To learn more about why it is important for all kids and especially Latino kids to have nutritious school lunches, click here.