Perhaps the President had to go out to lunch yesterday at Ray's Hell Burger because White House assistant chef Sam Kass was cooking at Martha's Table in Washington. Mr. Kass joined six lucky culinary students from Chicago's Richards Career Academy high school to cook their award-winning recipe for the annual Cooking Up Change contest sponsored by Healthy Schools Campaign (above: Alvaro Aguilar, Rafael Ruiz, Emanuel Sandoval, Mr. Kass, Mike Martinez, and Marquice 
Kent). The non-profit HSC organization works on a variety of school issues, and yesterday's Cinco de Mayo-themed event was the kickoff for a national campaign to focus attention on children's school lunches, in advance of the upcoming refunding of the Child Nutrition Act; re-authorization occurs next Fall (above: Mr. Kass with Marquiece Kent) .For HSC's annual contest, student teams compete to create healthy, nutritious school lunch recipes that can be served in school cafeterias which use USDA funding for lunch programs (about 30 million students participate in these programs, and
child nutrition is the largest single part of USDA's budget). With a fixed price of about $1.30 per student per day, USDA critics say it's a tough call to create an excellent menu, although in the UK, Chef Jamie Oliver has managed to create brilliant locally sourced school lunches for about .65 cents per child. The Richards students did a terrific job with their meal, which included a chicken-stuffed bell pepper, a carrot quesadilla, and fresh fruit salad "refrescante" (pictured, above; editorial note: It was very tasty!)The winning team not only got to cook with Mr. Kass, but their recipes were also cooked at schools around the country yesterday, and specially prepared for Congressional members on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Kass was present at the event as a
"private" volunteer rather than as an official White House spokesperson, so he didn't join the group of excellent panel speakers, which included Healthy Schools Campaign founder and executive director Rochelle Davis (above); Jesse Ruiz, of the Illinois Board of Education; Louise Esasian of Chicago Public Schools; and Rafael Ruiz, one of the award-winning students. Each discussed the need for more funding for child nutrition programs, and for working to get overly processed foods removed 
from the USDA-sanctioned list of approved school lunch foods. In the Bush era and backward in time, all kinds of curious low-nutrition food items crept onto the USDA-approved list of school lunch ingredients; for instance, ketchup has been considered a vegetable under USDA guidelines, and large industrial farming interests routinely beg the USDA for bailout purchases of their commodity products. There's also currently no USDA requirement that school lunch foods be locally sourced, as fresh as possible, or grown with either low- or 
no-pesticide use (or completely organically grown, either). Unfortunately, there's also no structure in place to encourage environmentally friendly Ag practices from the companies that sell their products to the USDA. With luck (and continued work by advocacy groups like HSC), all of these issues could change with the Obama administration. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack has already shown himself to be open minded, willing to consider new policies, and he seems to be an 
advocate for farmers from all branches of the Ag tree, from conventional through organic--crucial for changing the dynamic of what's acceptable in school lunches. President Obama has also pledged to change school lunches; in his most recent budget, he called for $1 billion for childhood nutrition programs. Both the President and First Lady have made food and nutrition a policy priority (above: Student chef Rafael ruiz presents Mr. Kass with a Cooking Up Change chef's jacket)Lately, everyone seems to want to meet Mr. Kass (his appearance in People magazine last
week has amped this up; and he was also part of this morning's news feed on CNN, when the network suddenly turned into the Obama Food Channel). He was mobbed with requests for photos, and now seems pretty good at ignoring having video cameras stuck into his face--CNN was at the event, among other msm. He's kinda rocking the Shaka Obama vibe--and is also a lefty, like the President (above: Mr. Kass with David Blackmon, the director of the Culinary Arts program at Richards Career Academy). The culinary students were thrilled to be cooking with Mr. Kass, and he discussed knife skills, food safety, and healthy food choices. He was quick to offer advice during the recipe demonstration, encouraging the kids to be creative when cooking, and attentive to their dishes.
"Even if you've made a dish a hundred times," Mr. Kass said, "Always taste it. Taste is key. Don't assume it's going to taste the same every time."
Mr. Kass sat with the students during lunch, and they asked him about life as a chef, and particularly about working at the White House. At one point, one of the students asked Mr. Kass to say "hi" to his mother via phone cam video, and Mr. Kass leaned into the phone cam, and said in very
good Spanish "Hi, your son Michael is an excellent chef!"The students asked Mr. Kass to autograph their special "Cooking Up Change" chef jackets, and after he did, Mr. Kass asked the students to sign the special jacket they'd presented to him. And then the culi champs had to
dash. They were off to Capitol Hill to present their same meal to members of Congress, in the Longworth Cafeteria. Mr. Kass went back to the White House.... 
