Local groups remake school lunch with cultural staples like congee and jollof rice

“There’s a saying in Chinese: ‘chīkǔ.’ You have ‘to eat bitterness,’” says Roslyne Shiao, co-director of AAPI New Jersey . “That was something I started to feel like.”

Shiao, who lives with her family in Montclair, had seen her kids deal with micro-aggressions that students of various cultures often deal with: derisive looks from classmates at the lunches they brought to school, or comments on their appearance and customs. For a while, she felt resigned to telling her kids to eat that bitterness or, effectively, just suck it up. But during the pandemic, which coincided with a rise in anti-Asian hate, Shiao and other parents in Montclair decided to be proactive.

“Do I have to treat my kids like this, where you just put your head down and keep going if someone's teasing you for your food or how you look or that you take your shoes off when you get home?" Shiao remembers thinking. "We reached point in the pandemic where we said it's enough."

So Shiao and others started AAPI Montclair, which has since expanded to AAPI New Jersey, whose mission is to bridge cultural gaps and provide resources for the 1.1 million New Jerseyans of Asian American Pacific Islander heritage. One of their initiatives, Love Your Lunch, puts resources into teachers’ hands to foster that education in schools — AAPI New Jersey sends gift boxes of books and art projects that help teachers educate students on different culinary traditions.

AAPI New Jersey is one of several local organizations, food service providers and legislators working to encourage schools to provide and teach about various culinary traditions. The hope is to inspire students of all backgrounds to use food as a means of understanding through education initiatives and by providing lunch service that reflects the heritage of a school's demographics.

Shiao and other parents launched Love Your Lunch with full recognition of the fact that teachers already have much to manage, particularly during the pandemic with masking, distance learning and other safety-focused regulations.

"Love Your Lunch came out of that moment when our kids were going back to school and we didn’t want them to be teased for bringing smelly lunch to school. We didn't want these micro-aggressions swept under the rug, but we also knew teachers had lot on their plates,” Shiao says. “So we created Love Your Lunch to be able to give teachers an easy way to understand what the problem was and to do something in their classroom."

Those resources sent to teachers include books like Joshua David Stein’s Lunch from Home , which explores what happens when a child's favorite packed lunch is met with disparaging comments. Other resources include art projects, like one which asks students to draw their unique lunches and identify why they love them. And there are talking guides crafted with a social worker to help teachers navigate the micro-aggressions that might pop up in a cafeteria.

"We have had incidences in our own community of kids getting teased for bringing rice porridge or sushi, where the teachers have not always been equipped to handle it and kids are like, 'Oh, what is that?' or, 'Oh, it smells,'" Shiao says. "And the teacher, instead of addressing it, they’ll separate the kids [and] perpetuate the problem. We still do see that happen. Food comes from a place of love and it comes from a place of family and home and culture."

A better (and more familiar) school lunch

While AAPI New Jersey empowers kids to feel better about the food they bring to school from home, organizations like Red Rabbit are working to change the food that’s served in New Jersey cafeterias to better reflect diverse student communities.

“Food is something more than just chicken on a plate; it is an entire experience and as a result of which it requires time and attention,” says Nausher Khan, vice president of partner relations at Harlem-based Red Rabbit. “Bringing in these notions of equities, cultural appropriateness and scratch cooking is just as important as ensuring [students] have a sufficient math program and art program.”

Red Rabbit does that by upturning school meal service and education programs. It works to understand the demographics of a school district, then places a professional chef, preferably from the area, into the school with the mandate that they understand the cultural makeup of that district and serve “authentic and sincere” meals from those cultures.

Red Rabbit currently runs school food services throughout the northeast, including the Philip's Academies in Newark and Paterson; it's also worked in Jersey City, Camden and with the Food Bank of South Jersey.

Red Rabbit supplements that cafeteria work, when possible, with education — culinary courses where students can see a meal prepared so that, if it’s something with which they’re unfamiliar, it’s not new or “weird” to them when it shows up on a menu. Red Rabbit also infuses culinary education with broader conversations on how “food is a manifestation of socio-cultural pathways,” like supply chains, neighborhoods, immigration and more.

Red Rabbit strives to give students a big-picture, holistic understanding of food and culture, but its staff intentionally doesn’t explain individual dishes to students in the cafeteria.

"We let the Nigerian kids who are familiar with jollof rice and suet chicken tell those stories," Khan says. "I, as a Nigerian boy, sit down down with my plate of jollof rice and next to me is a Pakistani kid who’s never seen it before and I am able to tell him or her about what this meal is."

That is, they own the story of their food. By validating the culinary heritages of students, and by exposing students to food from other cultures, Red Rabbit believes it is helping mold students who “are not only more competent and confident leaders, but they’re also able to make better dietary choices as the get older and have more agency.”

Khan says judging the effectiveness of Red Rabbit is a bit of a “gray area.” After all, how does one know if students are becoming better, more culturally aware neighbors, or feeling prideful in their heritages? Khan says the group takes a “qualitative approach," by looking and listening in cafeterias to determine its impact.

“What does the cafeteria sound like?” Khan suggests. “Are kids enjoying themselves? When you walk in, can you smell the food? Can you hear the sizzle of the grill?”

'A race to the bottom': The structure of school lunch funding impedes progress

There are financial obstacles to providing culturally relevant and nutritious meals in schools, Khan says.

School districts are reimbursed for food services through federal and state funding depending on the income of their student body; it's a complex formula that provides more money to schools who have more students who qualify for free and reduced lunches (about $4.40 per meal served in New Jersey), and less (about .83 cents per meal) for those who pay. Ultimately, though, school districts, which have limited financial flexibility, are inclined to work only with food service operators who can provide meals at those rates, Khan says.

“The federal and state governments have regulated it to set up the procurement environment to be on the lowest cost market. That makes it a race to the bottom," Khan says. "That means those who serve processed foods and can get those processed foods by the truckload at a super competitive rate are incentivized to do so in order to ensure they have more business.”

Khan says it’s hard to compete with suppliers who can meet that cost but don’t provide the education, cultural awareness and nutritional focus that groups like Red Rabbit do. New Jersey recently raised the income cap on students who can receive free lunch in the state, but that doesn’t address the reimbursement rate (overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) for districts on the supply end.

"To move the conversation away from cost, that is a slow-moving, sort of systemic issue. And we need the requisite support of the state and federal government to make that reality," Khan says.

There was a bill introduced in the NJ state legislature in 2014 that would’ve required schools to “establish a food services advisory committee to consider and recommend school breakfast and lunch menu options that better reflect the cultural, traditional and dietary food preferences of the student body.” It passed with bipartisan support, but Chris Christie vetoed it.

Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt (D-Camden) is the sponsor of a revived version of the bill that hasn’t progressed but that seeks to enact the policies of the previous one.

"We know that lunch time is one of the most important social parts of the school day, and that social isolation leads to diminished learning, mental health challenges and bullying,” Lampitt wrote in an email. “Lack of consistent access to healthy food hinders growth across the board. Our school districts are already required to make accommodations to minimize these effects throughout the educational experience. There is no reason they cannot during lunch as well.”

And, too, there is renewed focus from larger school food service providers. Keith Leder, president of the NJ School Nutrition Association (NJSNA) and a south region lead at Maschio’s Food Services, which services over 200 school districts in the state, says a workshop at an upcoming NJSNA conference will focus on providing more diverse foods — not only culturally diverse meals, but also vegan and vegetarian menu options.

"There are actually a lot more options available through broad-line distributors for plant-based products. Tons and tons of brokers and manufacturers are making those items," Leder says. "Many of our districts are not only doing products like that but also offer diverse selections using these products."

Matt Cortina is a food and dining reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Local groups remake school lunch with cultural staples like congee and jollof rice