School faculty works with chef and school nutrition expert Samanta Gasbarro, center, on diversifying food options with a workshop starting on rice. Courtesy photo / Westbrook High School
Westbrook students can expect to see a little more cultural variety in their daily meals soon as cafeteria staff has been working on new menus pulling from other country’s cuisines.
School district Nutrition Director Mary Emerson said her vision is to honor and promote acceptance of other cultures through cuisine on specific days of the week, hopefully to start next school year.
“With the divisiveness of the country, we wanted to work on equity within our school district, and food is where we can do our development,” Emerson said. “We serve corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day, so we want to make sure we are doing that for other cultures.”
Training in the new cooking techniques and dishes is paid for by a $26,000 state grant, which also funds remote meal distribution. Cafeteria staff members have so far had one workshop, which focused on properly cooking rice and using spices to jazz up a meal without salt. They have already begun to incorporate their lessons.
Rice was a good place to start because it is a part of meals across many cultures, Emerson said.
“Food is a great broker of culture,” Superintendent Peter Lancia said.
Multicultural dinners hosted at the high school have always been popular, he said, bringing “people from different cultures together to share foods that are important to them around one table.”
“By having a variety of foods available in our cafeterias, we can expand this hospitality and build bridges among our students,” Lancia said.
Cuisines under consideration for school meals include Iraqi, different Asian cuisines and Mexican, Emerson said, and others will be added to the list once the staff and completed their workshops.
Students maybe be used to Mexican food, but the schools will serve less-Americanized versions of it, preparing rice dishes rather than nachos or tacos, said the middle school’s Food Services Director Sally Hume.
Diversifying the menu also presents opportunities to offer vegetarian meals, for example, and to serve dishes acceptable to all religions, Emerson said.
Hume said cultural awareness about food is growing among the staff.
“It’s been a learning experience really,” Hume said.
Muslims, for example, do not eat pork, and gelatin, a common ingredient in many foods, is derived from pork.
“At breakfast, a child brought a Pop-Tart and asked if it had pork. Someone said no, but I looked at it and realized it does,'” Hume said.
Emerson said the next focus will be vegetables, before moving onto more specific cultural dishes.
“Hopefully we have more people choosing other options rather than just a burger or pizza simply because we offered more choices to them. When one student eats something and likes it, that inspires other students to try things too,” Emerson said.
It works the other way, too.
“The kids are vocal. If something is gross, they are honest about that,” Hume said.
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