all the food that's fit to print The Education Issue - Slow Food

CO-Producer
The Incredible, Edible, Unattainable Egg
— By Gary Giberson
How to get a locally sourced school lunch
In 2004 my life as a chef and food service
director changed in unimaginable ways. At the
start of the twenty-first century in an industrial
food world, procuring food for contract feeding
is done with the click of a mouse. For a chef,
operating a computer is akin to having classical
knife skills. I had been through countless inservice
computer training courses designed to
better prepare the user with the newest and most
efficient web-based purchasing system. None of
this, however, prepared me for what would be
my greatest challenge: locating, obtaining, and
purchasing eggs that were organic, local, and free
range.
That year, the Lawrenceville School, where I
am the Food Service Director, began what would
prove to be a long and rewarding journey. We took
The eggs that I was able to
purchase through the existing
system were known in the food
service contract business as
“liquid eggs”: picture boxed
wine, and now imagine the box
filled with ultra-pasteurized,
homogenized, caged, medicated,
enriched, whipped egg product
on the daunting challenge of becoming a green
and sustainable campus. My first challenge was
to convince the food service contract company
I was employed by to purchase from local and
sustainable farms. This purchasing request was
unheard of in the current school contract feeding
environment. To understand this, however, I must
first describe how food arrived at my kitchen.
Menus and recipes were developed by corporate
chefs then approved by corporate dietitians
who then would submit the ingredient list for
the menus to the corporate purchasing division,
where the real decisions of purchasing are made.
Once the items were identified and specifications
determined, they were put out for bid to the large
industrial food manufacturers to determine price,
availability, and most importantly, large-volume
purchase incentives and rebates. When this
process was completed and the food bids awarded
to the manufacturers, the corporate-approved
ingredients were then stocked by the approved
national contracted food distributor. At my school,
the approved menu items list was downloaded
to my purchasing system, which restricted me
in selecting only the items that appeared on the
approved list to be delivered by approved vendors.
From my computer I would enter my purchasing
needs and electronically send my order to a
password-protected website two days before my
scheduled delivery date. These systems controlled
my ability to know who was producing the food
and where it was coming from. This complexity
can be rationalized when considering that
because most school food budgets are limited,
companies are forced to specialize in feeding
students cheaply and efficiently while aiming for
the greatest profit. But let’s get back to that egg.
The eggs that I was able to purchase through
this system were known in the food service
contract business as “liquid eggs.” The product
comes delivered in large, 20-pound plastic
dispenser bags packaged in cardboard with a
pouring spout. Envision boxed wine, and now
imagine the box filled with ultra-pasteurized,
homogenized, caged, medicated, enriched,
whipped egg product with citric acid added to
preserve freshness.
For me to procure organic, local, free-range
eggs from the farmer adjacent to the school’s
property was way out of the box. These are just a
few of many problems the food service company
had with this request: the farmer was not on the
approved vendor list and did not carry a large
general liability insurance policy; the eggs were
still in their original packaging (a shell) and,
therefore, could be hard to work with and possibly
contaminated; the product was not pasteurized
and potentially unsafe; and the corporate
purchasing division could not negotiate a price or
a large-volume purchase incentive rebate with the
local farmer.
Continued on next page 17
The snail | spring 2008