Joliet Junior College chef is part of White House school healthy lifestyle initiative

JOLIET – While demonstrating how to make healthy black bean salsa to elementary school-aged children, chef Michael McGreal listed off the ingredients – tomatoes, green peppers, black beans and onions – and received the same reaction to each one.

“Ick.”

“The kids were looking at me like, ‘I’m not going to eat that,’ ” said McGreal, chairman of the Joliet Junior College culinary arts department.

According to a JJC news release, McGreal spent Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C., for a “Chefs Move to Schools” leadership team meeting, a part of first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” healthy lifestyle initiative for schoolchildren.

At the meeting, McGreal and other team members – who included representatives from various divisions of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Institute of Child Nutrition, the School Nutrition Association and a corporate chef from General Mills – recapped their past work and discussed what they should address in the future.

McGreal was the only post-secondary educator on the team.

This is the first time, McGreal said, that the government has looked at nutritional guidelines for schools since the 1970s and the reasons for doing so were much different.

“Back then, kids were too skinny to be drafted,” McGreal said, “So they said, ‘In order to get kids healthy, let’s give them free and reduced meals. Maybe their only chance to get the nutrients they need is at schools.’”

Today, McGreal said, many kids have diseases formerly associated with middle age, such as hypertension and diabetes. He attributes this partly to frequent consumption of soda, potato chips, candy bars and fast food.

“This is the first generation in a long time where the parents might outlive the kids,” McGreal said. “At least we came from the generation where we ate a lot of fruits and veggies and ran through the parks until the streetlights came on.”

This wasn’t McGreal’s first trip to the White House. In 2010, McGreal and Kyle Richardson – another JJC chef – went to Washington, D.C., also as part of the “Chefs Move to Schools” program, which had then just begun.

The initiative matched chefs with interested schools in their communities to educate students on good nutrition and to demonstrate techniques for healthy food preparation.

However, the downside in those early years was there was no unification and no listing on the White House website, so no one could measure the program’s effectiveness, McGreal said. Still, McGreal felt good results came from those efforts, such as the American Culinary Federation’s “Chef & Child” initiative.

Locally, the JJC culinary arts department used “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” to teach the children of the other JJC staff – about 60 kids – how to prepare whole grain vegetable pizza using low-fat cheese.

As it turned out, JJC was ahead of the game. The new USDA guidelines for school lunches, McGreal said, emphasize whole grains instead of white flour – even for pizza crust and
tortillas – brown rice as opposed to white and dried legumes in place of lard-laden canned refried beans, as well as replacing extra sodium with herbs.

“This isn’t the old days where you took the box of spinach and threw it in the steamer so it tasted like seaweed,” McGreal said.

Part of McGreal’s role as a USDA food consultant is training school food service staff on meal preparation using the updated guidelines, along with presenting ideas to positively spin the new recipes so kids will want to eat them. In today’s global society, McGreal believes this is not impossible.

“Kids are curious,” McGreal said, “I think if we talk about different places in the world, like Thailand or India, and show pictures of how people dress and then make a nice dish using their grains and fruit, kids will be excited to try it.”

McGreal said he has already hosted training programs in California and Kansas and that one Joliet area school district has expressed interest in scheduling one in spring 2016.

He understands change won’t be easy, especially in school kitchens with deep fryers instead of stoves or schools working with tiny budgets – $1 a student a meal in some cases, McGreal said.

“I couldn’t operate a restaurant on that,” he said.

He also hopes to include JJC culinary students in the demoing process, especially when demos occur at the students’ former schools. Another possibility is starting a national contest in which kids would create and submit a healthy recipe, with the winning entry appearing in school lunches.

McGreal feels this would boost kid appeal. During the black bean salsa demo for the grade school kids, McGreal appointed an assistant chef, who tasted the salsa and liked it, which encouraged the other kids to try it, too.

It reminded McGreal of the old Life cereal commercial where two kids shunned the unfamiliar brand until picky eater Mikey wolfed it down. McGreal hopes creating healthy eating patterns in today’s kids will influence generations to come.

“This will make a healthier, happier society, I think,” McGreal said.