Nutritional Meal Program

Our nutritional program includes breakfast, lunch, and a hearty afternoon snack. We’ve extended food service into a mid-morning snack, most ordinarily a fresh fruit or vegetable. We follow USDA recommendations for food groups to be served at these meals. This means that your child will get a carbohydrate, fruit or vegetable, and milk every morning for breakfast. This might be fresh baked muffins or hot cereal in the winter and fresh strawberries in season. At lunch your child will have a protein, two fruits or vegetables, a carbohydrate, and milk. For the afternoon snack your child will have foods from two different food groups. If you look closely, you’ll see vitamin C everyday and vitamin A foods at least three times a week. Beverages are fruit juices, not fruit drinks, and low-fat milk. The menu is tailored to be low fat, low salt, low sugar, high fiber, and no artificial colors or flavors (Feingold Phase I). Many of the breads and all cookies and sweet breads are baked at the school. Almost no fried foods are served. Infants are put into the food program as soon as they can grasp and move food to their mouths.

A unique feature of our menus is that they are extremely varied. Sometimes parents worry that their child won’t eat these unusual items because they tend to be ethnic or regional specialties. The philosophy is that when our children are exposed to lots of different tastes, they will be much more open to new experiences as adults in the coming decades as they travel around the world and possibly around the universe.

What you’ll see when you visit the school at lunch time is children who competently sit not in their workspace but in the dining room at tables set with fresh flowers, glass glasses, and porcelain plates. In this family-style service, the children graciously pass food to their friends, pour their own drinks, and get up from the table and scrape their plates when they’re finished. This includes our infants. Children are capable of much more than conventional wisdom expects.