Come July 1, schools nationwide will have to make menu adjustments to meet the USDA’s new standards for healthy school lunch offerings, as championed by First Lady Michelle Obama.
Well, most schools anyway.
“Edmond [Public Schools in Oklahoma] will not have to do anything this year — they’re done,” said Chef Dave Fouts during a phone interview. Fouts created the Simply Smart Food pilot program with dietitian Vicki Bovee in 2008, and Edmond was the first school district to benefit from its method of eliminating processed foods and bringing scratch cooking back to cafeterias.
Fouts is coming to Syracuse this week to pitch his program to a group of area school administrators. He’s in the process of turning his second school district’s kitchen and menu around at Hinton Schools in Oklahoma, and he hopes to make Syracuse his next customer.
Meredith Price, Chief Administrative Officer for Upstate University Hospital at Community General, is excited to bring Fouts to the area for two presentations on Thursday, Feb. 9. Administrators from school districts spanning Onondaga and Madison counties have been invited to attend the first presentation, entitled “Changing the Taste of School Lunch,” at 2 p.m. at the hospital.
“We understand the challenges school districts are facing with the recent USDA changes to school lunches that take effect July 1,” Price said. “Chef Dave affords us the opportunity to share with local districts an area of expertise they may not otherwise have available to them, offering them a resource as they undertake this significant step aimed at reducing obesity in children.”
Fouts recognizes that schools will be crunched to accommodate the new regulations into their budgets. While every school is different, Fouts says that at Edmond, it only took four months for the school district to make back the money it cost to implement the program, which requires a complete overhaul of how the food is prepared. Edmond is a big school district that employs more than 200 cafeteria employees.
He says the schools turn a profit because the food is more desirable.
“It’s like the McDonald’s theory,” he said. “You can sell one hamburger and go broke, but if you sell a million hamburgers you make money. The same goes for the school districts. If you’re only feeding 200 of your students but there are 600 students in that school, the other 400 start buying. Those nickels add up.”
As part of his presentation Chef Dave will offer a preview of what can be served at schools under his program by cooking up a menu of meatloaf with tomato gravy, linguini primavera, peach cobbler, Mexican pasta casserole, black bean corn salsa and tossed salad.
In his second presentation of the day, entitled “Comfort Foods Made Healthy” and slated for 5 p.m. at Upstate, Fouts will prepare recipes that are not bariatric- and diabetes-friendly, and great for anyone interested in eating healthier. He’ll also be signing copies of his newest book, “Ditch Your Diet in 30 Days.”
In addition to being an advocate for healthier food in schools, Fouts happens to be the world’s first bariatric chef. Fouts underwent gastric bypass surgery in 2002 when he weighed nearly 400 pounds, and has since lost 200 pounds.
“We’re excited to be hosting two events featuring Chef Dave Fouts,” Price said. “Upstate recognizes the seriousness of the obesity epidemic and is committed to expanding our resources to address this on a number of levels — from public outreach and education to medical approaches including both surgical and non-surgical weight loss options.”
Since getting the surgery, Fouts’ mother along with four other family members have undergone the same procedure and had tremendous weight loss success.
Fouts wants you to know that in no way did he convince them to go through with it.
“If you look at my before picture, and you look at my progression over the last 10 years since I had surgery, every year I’ve gotten healthier and I’ve gotten better as far as my weight goes,” he said. “So I lead by example. I basically had surgery and then my family members who were overweight saw my successes that I had with the surgery, and then they made a decision on their own.”
To people considering turning to surgery to lose weight, Fouts says it should be their very last option.
“If you have never tried to diet, if you have never tried to eat healthy, if you have never exercised — if these are things that you have never done, at no point should you be going and sitting on a table to get ready to have surgery,” Fouts said. “And it is not the easy way out, because it still requires a lot of work, a lot of dedication, and it is just a tool … a push-yourself-away-from-the-table kind of tool, as far as I’m concerned.”
Both of Thursday’s events are free and open to the public, though space is limited; register in advance by calling Upstate at 800-464-8668.
Fouts lives in Edmond, Okla., with his two boys Noah and Michael. Learn more about his weight loss journey and his career as a health-conscious chef at chefdave.org.
