Lunch at Baldwin Elementary is a little more exciting these days.
The Friday menu at the Manassas City school, usually featuring kid-favorite pizza, now includes a make-it-yourself salad bar.
How can lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and mandarin oranges compete with pizza dough, tomato sauce and cheese?
Pretty well, actually.
Of the almost 200 third- and fourth-graders who chose between the regular menu and the salad bar, more than 70 children opted for salad. That number was more than double from the previous week when the bar was first introduced, school officials said.
Laura Thompson, Baldwin’s cafeteria manager, said the school has always had a good salad contingent, but including the salad bar has “been kind of cool.”
Third-graders Alexis Bender and Alejandra Medrano were enthusiastic about their salad lunches, especially the boiled eggs, mandarin oranges and chow mein noodles.
“I will keep getting it forever and ever. I just love it,” Alexis said. “I get to design it.”
Baldwin acquired the salad bar through a grant from the Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools project, a national grass-roots initiative to increase children's daily consumption of fruits and vegetables.
The White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has endorsed salad bars in schools, according to the Let’s Move Web site, which also states that research shows “school children significantly increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables when given a variety of choices in a school fruit and vegetable salad bar.”
Cecily Anthony, director of Manassas City Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services, said she pursued the grant because she wanted to help students “make some good decisions during lunch.”
“Maybe they’ll make some different choices . . . think outside the box,” she said.
The grant provides a 72-inch portable and insulated salad bar, 20 covered serving pans, serving tongs and spoons, squeeze bottles, knives, a cutting board and a digital thermometer.
The schools individually decide how to fill and organize the salad bar.
Anthony said she chose to have the first salad bar installed at Baldwin because the cafeteria crew is organized and runs on time. Thompson’s interaction with the children also helped make Baldwin a good choice, she said.
The bar is a lot of work for the four cafeteria staff members, including Thompson. Vegetables are chopped and ingredients, like chicken, are wrapped for portion control. The bar is also refilled throughout lunch periods.
On non-salad days, Baldwin plans to serve pre-made salads, such as Oriental chicken salad, so the ingredients are familiar to the students.
For the first two weeks, the salad bar was only offered on Fridays to third- and fourth-graders.
First- and second-graders will be included this week. Additional days will be added once they “get into the swing of it,” Thompson said.
She said that once the students and teachers weigh in on what they would like to eat, she will adapt the salad bar accordingly. For example, when bread rolls were put out during the salad bar’s first week, she heard from students that they wanted crackers. The next week, they had crackers.
Michelle McKenzie, a cafeteria monitor, is responsible for training and helping the students with the bar. She reported that the first week ran very well.
“Our kids are very responsible. They take pride it that,” she said.
In addition to Baldwin, Mayfield Intermediate, Dean Elementary and Metz Middle schools each received a salad bar grant. Those schools will open their bars in the fall.
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