Posted:
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Category:
Alcohol & Food Safety
As children head back to school for the first full month, many parents are packing lunches and preparing meals for their children. Far more are enrolling children in free and reduced lunch programs or sending along lunch money because packing a lunch is just extra work that they don’t have time for. For these parents, it is their trust of the public schools and their food service training that is relied upon to keep their kids safe and well-fed. Too often, you hear horror stories about the food served in most school cafeterias. However, the majority of these stories are false or fabricated from minute occurrences that may or may not have occurred.
Generally speaking, foodservice and sanitation in schools is at its best. The servers and cooks wear hair nets and protective gloves, and do their best to keep the food hot, fresh, and plentiful for all the children that come through their kitchen every day. While you wouldn’t want bad service at a restaurant, you definitely don’t want safety regulations violated or food service guidelines ignored in a school setting. With so many mouths to feed every day (often hundreds, if not thousands), everything has to work like a well oiled machine. Food safety is job number one.
Schools are doing everything that they can to improve cafeterias and make foodservice provided in the schools more desired by students so that they aren’t losing money or wasting food. Many schools still rely on lunch counts, or a daily count that homeroom teachers take stating who packed their lunch and who will be buying, as well as what they will be buying. That way, there is no wasted food and nothing will sit out for too long uneaten.
While kids are worried about early bedtimes and new homework assignments, parents and others who are concerned can rest easy knowing that the foodservice operations at public schools are taken very seriously. Nonetheless, sanitation and food safety is a priority at all times, but especially important to think about as the new school year gets underway. For parents packing lunches, food safety is still something that needs to be monitored. Chicken and other meats don’t fare well if they sit in a locker for four hours. Parents who pack lunches don’t often think about food safety on a larger scale, but there are many items that kids eat in their sack lunches that need to be packed with caution.
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