And how is the food at the Calhoun School in Manhattan this year, now that Chef Bobo is in charge?
"It's awesome," says a student diner. "The hot dogs don't bounce."
That's an admirably succinct review, and no doubt accurate, but it doesn't quite capture the big picture. When Calhoun's administrators decided last year to drop their commercial catering service, they heard about a man called Chef Bobo, a charismatic teacher at the French Culinary Institute with an ambition to work with children. Calhoun's headmaster hesitated--"Having a clown as a chef was not my idea of trouble-free administration," he says--but he hired Chef Bobo and several students from the institute. Since this school year began, the team has been systematically reeducating the palates of more than 500 kids in grades two through 12. What the chefs are doing is simple--they're making nice lunches from scratch--but it's also profound: an object lesson in how to reverse the metabolic disaster of the modern American diet.
On a recent Friday the scene in Chef Bobo's lunchroom is the kind of thing school cafeterias probably dream about at night. On the menu are vegetable soup, green beans with shallot butter, potato salad with scallions, and baked salmon with citrus butter. Dessert is a tiny piece of superb chocolate cake. The students are eating it up, as Marion Nestle, the well-known nutritionist, can attest--she's making a cameo appearance over in a corner rooting through a trash bin, confirming that hardly anything is going to waste. As this is the last day of school before Christmas break, Chef Bobo is receiving handmade cards from grateful students with variations on the theme "We love your food!"
"This is completely different from what they had before," says the chef, a New Orleans native with a big smile and a gold earring. "The first two months I would not allow any ketchup or mayonnaise in the lunchroom. Students constantly asked for it, but I would say, 'Sorry, I don't believe in ketchup.' Ketchup has more sugar than ice cream. I wanted them to taste what food really tastes like. Now they don't ask for it anymore."
In Chef Bobo's kitchen, vegetable stock is made every morning. Bread and muffins are freshly baked. Each day the kids are fed a soup, an animal entree, a vegetable, a starch, and fresh fruit. Ninety percent of what's served is vegetarian, organic whenever possible. At the start of the school year the students were consuming one case of vegetables a day. Now that's up to four cases, and a fifth may be needed.
"The philosophy that comes out of the kitchen is to eat wonderful things moderately," says Steve Nelson, the headmaster. There have been other benefits. Teenage girls are eating the food because they know it won't make them fat. Teachers are mingling with students at lunch instead of going out. "The kids tell me that when they go to McDonald's or Burger King now, they get sick to their stomach. That's one of my goals," Chef Bobo says. Adds Nelson: "We have a cooking club now, so we have high school students who, instead of going to a rave party downtown and consuming large quantities of ecstasy, are having a dinner party and consuming large quantities of herb-crusted cod."
As the Calhoun experience shows, it's easy as pie to change the way people eat.
Oh, sure, you might say, but this is a Manhattan private school that can afford an elitist extravagance, right? Chef Bobo is even a minor local celebrity: The New Yorker recently ran a little profile of him, noting that he also works as Derek Jeter's personal chef during the baseball season.
But surprise: Calhoun's food costs per child are almost identical to what they were before. The school pays more for ingredients, but servings are smaller, little goes to waste, and because the chefs are employees, there's no catering-company overhead.
The broader point is that human diets are eminently changeable; they change all the time, and there is nothing inexorable about the national drift toward bloat. There is also nothing immutable about the swill that people buy in supermarkets and restaurants. A generation ago it was almost impossible to get a good cup of coffee in America. Yuppies fixed that. Beer too.