From the Oregonian (read entire text here: http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/living/1160427322150110.xml)

The from-scratch project at Abernethy Elementary (Portland, OR)

It’s lunch-crunch time at Abernethy Elementary School cafeteria. Children scramble for seats at low tables, stab straws into milk cartons and nibble around crusts of their PB&J. A timeless lunchtime scene.

In the kitchen, though, are signs of a new frontier.

Kids load lunch trays with chicken drumsticks kissed with house-made barbecue sauce and baked in the oven that morning. They grab bowls of cauliflower bisque, or a pulled-pork sandwich. If mac ‘n’ cheese is on the day’s menu, it’s made with real bechamel sauce and looks a lot like what you’d find at the natural-foods-store deli down the street.

Out in the school garden, tomatoes are ripening, and limbs of the Italian plum tree sag with heavy fruit. Linda Colwell, the chef-turned-lunch-lady, sees tomato topping for pizzas, dried prunes for chicken tagine.

Welcome to Abernethy Cafe, where Colwell and her staff are trying to change the future of school food. Colwell, a Paris-trained chef and the driving force behind Edwards Elementary’s Garden of Wonders, landed here last fall after her neighborhood school closed and merged with Abernethy.

In the beginning she dreamed of buying direct from Oregon farmers, creating menus centered on local products. But with 200 kids to feed, a litany of purchasing rules to conform to and $1 to spend per child per meal on food, she quickly scaled back her efforts to focus on scratch cooking, regardless of the source of ingredients.
It wasn’t as simple as thinking up great recipes. Arcane buying rules require bidding on food months before it enters the kitchen. USDA nutrition requirements govern what, and how much, lands on every plate.

“I had to learn a whole new way of thinking about food,” Colwell says, remembering workdays that started at 5:30 a.m. in the school kitchen and ended after dark, sending e-mails and plugging nutrition data into a computer.

Now, as the pilot enters its second year, she counts the lessons.

Change is possible, but slow.

Scratch cooking is expensive, though the food isn’t.

One person can’t do it all, and a healthy program needs both enthusiasm and staffing.

Kids like kid food, but with the right exposure and encouragement, they can surprise you and eat things you never dreamed they would.

Though food costs were lower in the scratch kitchen — 94 cents per meal at Abernethy versus 99 cents at a control school — labor costs were much higher, $2.58 compared with 68 cents at the control school, where heat-and-eat entrees are the norm.

The real question: What are we willing to spend? Overall Abernethy’s meals cost about twice as much to produce, $3.52 per scratch-cooked lunch compared with $1.67 at the control school.

The question to ask isn’t why scratch-cooked food is so expensive, but why we are paying so little for lunch?

The above excerpt is from ongoing coverage of healthy lunches at public schools. See this link for all 4 parts: http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living/1160166303188070.xml&coll=7