In the past few months, many schools around the country have been debating the effects of food dyes in their school lunches, concerns brought up because of the hyperactivity and other health impacts they may cause, according to the New York Times. In fact, a bill was signed into law late September in California that will ban public schools from putting six artificial food dyes in their meals, starting in 2027.
However, Berkeley High School has already made strides of progress in eliminating toxic chemicals and dyes due to their scratch lunch system. According to Bonnie Christensen, BHS’s former Director of Nutrition Services, Berkeley Unified School District was ahead of its time in regards to the quality of school lunches.
The current BUSD Director of Nutrition Services, Rich Hannan, spoke about the value of having lunches made from scratch. “You got so much more control of what's going into the food. It's because you're starting with the raw products,” Hannan said.
Due to the system of making lunches from scratch, Hannan explained that BHS can make sure they are not using Red Dye 40 and brominated flour. According to Pederson's Natural Farms, Red Dye 40 can cause migraines, hyperactivity, and allergic reactions like hives. Brominated flour is a human carcinogen, meaning it could expose humans to benign and malignant tumors, according to the National Institute of Health.
However, BUSD's school lunches have not always been made from scratch. “Fifteen years ago, Berkeley was the first school district to really embrace scratch food cooking. Before, everything was coming in frozen, reheated, individually wrapped, heavily processed (packages),” Hannan said.
For many years, BUSD, like other school districts, relied on processed food filled with unhealthy preservatives, according to Chritensen. Parents noted the issue and campaigned for the school to change the way they approach school lunches, according to Hannan. “When I started, we had cases, like a pallet worth of croutons, they just taste(d) like chemicals. Just in 2006 they started getting salad bars. But before that, it was frozen vegetables, government hamburgers, chicken nuggets, things like that,” Christensen said.
Hannan also attributed the change to BHS parents like Alice Waters, a food activist, Anne Cooper, a previous chef at BHS specializing in health, and Christensen, who fought for Berkeley to have lunches made from scratch. “I think Berkeley was already way ahead of its time. I mean, at that time, they even had parents who were coming and testing the foods, for all kinds of chemicals … they were really the grassroots effort that was powerful,” Christensen said.
Waters was also instrumental in creating scratch lunches for BHS students. “Alice was there, working with them to really make strides. And she's a prominent, well known person in the industry and was able to get a lot of people's attention,” Christensen said. According to Christensen, Waters worked directly with parents, campaigning for better quality lunches. Her foundation, formerly called the Chez Panisse Foundation, now called the Edible Schoolyard Foundation, helped BUSD hire a food consultant and helped pay for the salary of Anne Cooper, now a former BHS chef, so she could institute scratch lunches.
The scratch lunch change was also helped in recent years by the School Lunch Initiative (SLI) which gave BHS more funding. According to BUSD's website, SLI’s goals are “to serve nutritious and delicious, freshly prepared meals using locally grown food to all of our students and to educate children in kitchen, garden and academic classrooms about their food choices and the impact those choices have on their health.”
BUSD’s website said that this program allowed them to eliminate processed foods, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, refined sugars and flour, chemicals, dyes, additives and nitrates from their school lunches.
Hannan notes the necessity of meals made from scratch, explaining how toxic additives are hidden in the foods we eat. “(Food manufacturers) come up with all sorts of acronyms and abbreviations for items, and ... you'll have to almost be a food scientist to know everything that they stand for,” Hannan said.
Oftentimes, when the quality of the products of the foods improves, so does the reception from students. Yael Pollak, a sophomore who used to eat school lunches everyday, said “I think the quality is fine but the lines are really long so I never get it.” When comparing it to fast food in the country, she said, “it's definitely better, although there are similarities.”
Despite BUSD making progress, there is still more room for even more improvement. BUSD’s school lunches are entirely made from scratch, but their breakfasts are not. BUSD is still getting their breakfast options from a variety of different companies, for example Kellog’s Nutri-Grain bars, and baked goods from City Baking, Bay Area Bagels, and Altamira Bakery, according to Hannan.
Increasing the quality of school lunches and including scratch breakfast meals in BUSD's menu would require higher salaries for staff among other things, according to Hannan. “Getting salaries up to attract (chefs with culinary experience and education), getting wages up for our staff. Our staff are the lowest paid in the district, so we have a lot of turnover, with our staff and recruiting people,” Hannan said.
Healthy school lunches can not only provide crucial benefits to students, giving them the energy to learn throughout the day, but also impact the general Berkeley community.
“I also think that parents in Berkeley get that, if you wanna make change at large, it's really impactful to … (have) a good start in the schools … it impacts a lot of the community," Christensen said, "If you can change what's happening in the schools, you'll see changes ripple out from there."