At New York City’s high-priced private schools, the $35,000-a-year tuition includes free-range, cage-free, locally sourced, chef-designed lunches, reports the New York Times. Forget about mystery meat and tater tots. These kids get “steak and blue cheese tossed with dandelion greens” and “oven-roasted rutabaga fries.”
Students at Friends Seminary eat locally sourced, grass-fed beef. Girls at Spence eat sesame Napa cabbage. Earlier this year, Dalton students welcomed , an alumnus and food activist, and Dan Barber, owner of the high-end farm-to-table Blue Hill restaurant, for a daylong food symposium. . . . Discussions included food production in America and the perfect Moroccan merguez. Lunch, served family style, included roasted fennel with Parmesan frico, apple and red onion on frisée and faro with grilled vegetables and nebbiolo vinaigrette.
I don’t know what most of those words mean, but then I was raised on bologna sandwiches and tomato soup (home) and beefaroni (school). Roasted fennel salad?
About Joanne
Just gotta say, when I was a kid, if I didn’t recognize it, I didn’t eat it. I didn’t even like cheese pizza until sometime in Junior High!
Coming soon, taxpayer subsidized chef-designed lunches via vouchers
Only the fennal is roasted. The salad is not roasted.
Sounds yummy, but I’d expected better than tacos and pizza for 35k a year.
I read that article a few days ago, and they did toss in a mention or two of public schools offering (somewhat) similar fare, if I remember correctly. Eating locally sourced food is a good idea for a number of reasons, but I think it could really tie in to the gestalt of a holistic education. Count me as a fan of this.
I have an old friend who’s the caf manager in an exclusive private school in Marin (Sean Penn’s kids, for example…). The cost of lunch is not included in the tuition (that’s in response to Stacy in NJ).
Joseph, public schools have to feed low-income kids on an absurdly low pittance from the National School Lunch Program. Here’s a brief video made about San Francisco schools comparing what’s served now to a sample fantasy lunch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QEeaZ7nQb8
Well… that’s not really “San Francisco schools” — that’s Lowell, which is practically a private school all on its own.
But I take and agree with your point about the absurd budget. On the other hand, the free/reduced price lunch program is basically charity. There’s an old saying about beggars and choosers….
Caroline, at just about all private schools in this price range in NYC, lunch is included in the tuition. Usually books, fees, costs for field trips (including overnights), and extended day are included as well. Many of these schools will charge $40K (!) for grades 9-12 next year, and they are in a constant state of one-upsmanship, so the Battle of the Gourmet Lunches was an inevitability.
What’s mind-blowing to me about these tuition costs isn’t just that they are so high, but that the schools claim that full tuition falls significantly short of the actual cost to educate each child. These schools do provide a lot of full-tuition scholarships, but 75-80% of the student body isn’t getting a dime’s worth of aid, and even all that tuition money plus six- and seven-digit gifts from alums and folks buying their way in allegedly leaves them $5,000-$10,000 short per child. Amazing stuff.
Michael, the dining scenes were actually filmed in my kids’ (former) middle school, Aptos in SFUSD. The narrator is a Lowell kid, of course.
Tim, San Francisco magazine did a feature a couple of years ago on the competition for the most lavish facilities and amenities at Bay Area private schools. Libraries and gyms were big.