School lunch is more inclusive in Portland this year. The city, which is the state’s largest school district, has expanded its daily vegan hot lunch options to its three middle schools.

“We are sending the middle schools vegan lunches each day,” said Lori Beatham, who manages the district’s central kitchen, which is located in an office park near Riverside Street. In the past, the kitchen supplied only the city’s 10 elementary schools, which lack full kitchens. The middle schools have greater cooking and storage capacity and normally do their own ordering.

But staffing shortages, as well as the central kitchen’s experience preparing vegan lunches, meant that for now it was easier for the central kitchen to supply the middle schools. Students there are getting the same option each day as the grade schoolers.

Beatham says students and parents wondering what the daily vegan choices will be at King, Lincoln and Lyman-Moore middle schools should consult the elementary school menus until the December menus are posted online. At that point, the vegan options will be listed on the middle school menus, as well.

Vegan School Lunches

In 2022, New York City public schools implemented “Vegan Fridays.” School lunch’ menus included Mediterranean chickpeas, shown here. Portland’s elementary school students were offered hot vegan lunches as early as 2019. New York City Department of Education via AP

The Portland Public Schools gained national attention in 2019 after the district began offering vegan meals at all of the city’s elementary schools. The offerings survived the pandemic school closures and supply shortages and have evolved to suit student tastes and product availability. Since 2019, more districts across the country and here in Maine have added vegan menu items. Portland is unusual in that its vegan lunches started at the elementary level.

“What we typically see is high schools offering options that then trickle down to the middle schools and then to the elementary schools,” Stephanie McBurnett told me by phone from her office in Washington state. McBurnett is a registered dietician and the nutrition educator for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which helps school districts add plant-based meals as a way to increase student consumption of fruits, vegetables and fiber.

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“I really commend Portland for starting with the younger grades and giving them exposure to vegan options and then moving the options into the middle school,” she said.

The district recently hired a new chef, Tyler Guerin, and a new food service director, Jen Montague, so the vegan menu and how the meals reach the schools may evolve over the course of the school year.

Vegan lunch choices in Portland this school year include established favorites, such as the district’s own bean chili with pasta, and a Dr. Praeger’s veggie burger. Given the popularity of veggie burgers here, I’m not surprised about the latter. Other options are rice and bean bowls, plant-based chicken tenders, vegan meatball subs, and hummus bowls; the last is the only certified halal item the district offers.

Beatham says not only is hummus familiar to most students, it also accommodates two often underserved groups, since “both the halal children and the vegan children feel comfortable eating it.”

A focus area at the annual School Nutrition Association conference, held in Boston in July, was how to make menus more inclusive by adding “culturally relevant and plant-based menu options.” Activities included a demonstration of how to make black bean and cilantro-lime brown rice bowls. Diane Pratt-Heavner, who directs media relations for the association, said 2018 was the last time the group surveyed members about vegan meal options, when 14 percent of districts were suppling vegan lunches.

“We don’t have any recent statistics on this subject,” Pratt-Heavner emailed me, “but have definitely witnessed a growing trend of more vegan/plant-based school menu options as schools work to ensure students have access to culturally relevant choices and foods that meet their dietary preferences.”

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School food service directors and staff at a vegan and vegetarian recipe training held by the Maine Department of Education in Augusta in early 2024. Photo by Paula Nadeau

Efforts to make school lunch more inclusive by adding vegan options are also underway at a state level. In February, the Maine Department of Education held its first-ever professional training focused on how to prepare vegan and vegetarian school meals.

Another development is the recent hiring of Glenn Cummings, the former president of the University of Southern Maine, as the department’s first director of green schools. Cummings will primarily work on issues related to building construction and renovation, but will also spend time integrating these concepts into math and science lessons and improving the environmental footprint of school food service operations. During his tenure as president of USM, the number of vegan options in the dining halls expanded.

He said that Portland’s expansion of vegan hot lunch to the middle schools “shows why Portland is considered a national model in being sensitive to students’ philosophical and dietary needs at a much more significant level than we have in the past.”

Avery Yale Kamila is food writer who lives in Portland. She can be reached at avery.kamila@gmail.com

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