First Lady Michelle Obama and assistant chef Sam Kass in the White House garden. (White House photo)Bravo’s new season of “Top Chef,” set in D.C. and billed as “from the White House to your house,” debuts tomorrow with a big wet kiss for Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity.
Even the White House assistant chef, Sam Kass, who has become more and more of a TV presence, gets into the act as a judge for episode No. 2 of the contest on June 23. That’s when the 17 contestants — all competing for the “Top Chef” designation, plus prize money — are supposed to make a meal with only $2.68, the same amount the federal government gives schools for reimbursable lunches.
The Obama Foodorama blog expects that this episode will “be loaded with drama, thanks to the astonishingly low budget the chefs, all pros from top-level restaurants, have to work with.” Except that $2.68 would be astonishingly high, if that were in fact the amount schools could spend on the food they serve to kids in the nation’s woefully underfunded cafeteria meals program.
Apparently, the writers at “Top Chef” failed to do their homework where school meal finances are concerned. Only a fraction of that $2.68 federal subsidy actually goes toward purchasing food. The majority is eaten up by labor and overhead costs. What schools actually spend on the food component of the average lunch is more like $1 per kid — or less. And the average school loses 35 cents on every meal it serves.
Makes you wonder what Kass, whose White House title is “Food Initiative Coordinator,” was thinking when he agreed to play his part. Or doesn’t Kass know how school lunch works either?
“The National School Lunch program’s funding leaves less than $1 for the cost of food on our kids’ plates, and yet its policies demand that we serve milk, fruit, and 650 to 750 calories [per meal],” said school-lunch reformer Ann Cooper, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady. “Feeding children delicious and nutritious food — never mind regional or organic — is tremendously hard on that budget, yet school food professionals all across the country strive hard to do that every day.”
Cooper has a suggestion for the “Top Chef” producers: “Perhaps instead of restaurant chefs trying to cook a meal for $2.68, we should have ‘Lunch Ladies’ competing to showcase what’s actually possible when we cook fresh food from scratch for our kids. After that, let’s give the professional chefs the USDA commodity food to deal with.”
