Denise Foote –
A New Era of School Lunch Lady

By Cheryl Herrick

How about a lemon-rosemary orzo salad for lunch? Spaghetti with a homemade marinara sauce that’s chock-full of garden vegetables? A 38-item salad bar? Israeli couscous with pesto, chicken, and fresh Swiss chard? Crunchy curried chick peas?

While it wouldn’t be surprising to find these items in a downtown restaurant, it is extraordinary that they’re usual fare at the Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes, a school serving some of Burlington’s most economically challenged populations.

The creative, nutritious menu can be traced to 36-year-old Denise Foote, a foodservice worker at the school since November 2009. Foote brings a passion for good food to her work – and not just because four of her six children attend the Academy. “I just wouldn’t want to feed other people’s children in an impersonal way,” she confided over snacks at a cafe down the street from the school’s temporary home one recent afternoon.

But don’t call her, as one friend did, a “lunchroom revolutionary.” “I’m uncomfortable with that, because it implies that what I’m doing is singular, and it’s just not. I was just at a conference with lunch ladies from all over Vermont who are incredibly devoted to their salad bars and providing fresh food for their students.”

She smiles a bit mischievously and adds, “That said, I’m totally willing to have fights with my boss about what we serve. I dislike and have passionate feelings about how terrible commodity beef is, for instance. Standards for this thing that we serve to children are lower than the lowest grade sold in the grocery store.”

But items like commodity beef are part of the puzzle of putting together a lunch that can be purchased with an extremely limited budget, address nutritional standards (a meal must contain choices from three food groups), and be able to be prepared quickly enough each day. And staff know that the meals they serve may be the most nutritious food children from impoverished families eat in a day.

Complicating things further is the diversity of this part of the Burlington School District. Foote says, “We’re feeding Muslim kids who keep ha’lal and won’t eat meat [that isn’t butchered according to Islamic custom], Hindu kids who don’t eat beef, vegetarian kids, lactose-intolerant kids and gluten free kids. Lots of schools rely on peanut butter and jelly as a stand-by for the students who don’t eat the hot lunch, but many of our students just aren’t used to that.”

Her approach to handling these different requirements has been both practical and compassionate. The school accommodates individual needs and preferences, primarily through its expansive salad bar, as well as nutritious and good-tasting hot lunches. But the staff know that their good intentions don’t matter if students don’t eat what’s offered, and sometimes compromises must be made. Foote cites one example: “We’re not crazy about serving chocolate milk here at school. But when we stopped offering it, only 17 students drank the plain milk that was offered. And we know for a fact that the milk that’s at school is the only protein that some of our students have access to on any given day. So it’s a trade-off we’re willing to make.”

Foote offers compassion by being available to families. “Look,” she says, “my supervisor and I live in the neighborhood. When families come in to talk about what their kids need, they know that they’re talking to a neighbor. And we’re cognizant of the fact that families really rely on kids getting healthy food that they’ll actually eat.”

Those families often contribute help, too. Foote says, “Three of our families are farmers, and you’ll see them coming into school with crates of melon or squash to add to what we get through the District. We know that we’re incredibly lucky to have all this fresh produce. I mean, how many schools have fresh fruits and vegetables from the farms right down the road? So we don’t like to waste anything.”

She and the first grade teaching staff recently offered a “Salad Bar Class” to some of the school’s youngest students: “We taught them what makes up a good salad, how it should have three or four different colors. And how all the parts of a plant should show up on the plate: fruit, flowers, leaves, stems and roots.”

Students can also take after-school cooking classes where they learn to prepare foods from the week’s leftovers. Recently, they had bananas that turned brown and staff knew that no students would eat them as they were, so Foote’s after-school group turned them into banana bread. “But when we served it, I stood at the front of the bar and students had to show me two vegetables on their plate before they could have any,” she adds.

Foote’s passion is appreciated throughout the school. Says principal Abi Sessions, “Denise, like Doug Davis and the whole food team working with the school district, is incredibly passionate about local food. It’s a perfect match between her interests and capability and our mission to learn about sustainable agriculture. She’s terrific at making good food attractive to children.”

Cheryl Herrick cooks and eats and lives in Burlington with her two young sons. Follow her quest for food-love and mom-life at http://crankycakes.com.