Investing in Public School Kitchens and Equipment as a Pathway to Healthy Eating and Equitable Access to Healthy Food.

Abstract

We gathered baseline data about student need of healthy, free school food, and if current school meal programming serves students in need of healthy free school food, in anticipation of the completion of a district-wide kitchen infrastructure and educational farm project in a high-poverty urban school district. We used mixed methods to assess student hunger, whether the school meal program met student needs, and to determine associations between presence of a cooking kitchen and perceptions of healthy food. Participants included 72 staff, 143 parents, and 6437 K-5 students in the qualitative component, and 9078 parents and 1693 staff in the quantitative component. Staff participants stated packaging and reheating food influenced student consumption. During observations, students at seven of nine high poverty sites with packaged reheated food did not eat school meals, but this was not true at four out of four high-poverty sites with unpackaged fresh food. Parents (OR=1.17, 95% CI 1.00-1.39) and staff (OR=1.58, 95% CI 1.15-2.17) from schools with a cooking kitchen were more likely to perceive school lunch as healthy in adjusted models. Food preparation and presentation appears to influence student consumption of school food and adult perception of school meal quality.