U46 expands vegetarian menu at elementary schools

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Alexia Alvarado, 7, eats a vegetarian pizza puff during lunch at Lowrie Elementary in Elgin, Ill., on Thursday, May 19, 2011. | Andrew A. Nelles~For Sun-Times Media |

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Updated: September 29, 2011 12:47AM

ELGIN — First-grader Frankie Flores said the pizza puffs are “amazing.” So amazing, in fact, the 7-year-old Elgin boy with the big toothless smile and cowlicky hair said he could eat “a box of it.”

“Pizza puffs are really good because they’re like pizza!” Frankie said.

The puffs are his classmate Gabriel “Gucci” Gallegos’ favorite food in the lunchroom at Lowrie Elementary School, on Elgin’s west side.

“That’s because there’s sauce inside with meat,” said Gucci, 6.

And because, Diego Barraza added, “It reminds me of Beef Villa.” The 7-year-old patted his stomach for emphasis.

But that’s not meat in those pizza puffs, according to Claudie Phillips, School District U46 director of food service.

It’s “textured vegetable protein” similar to tofu, according to Phillips. And it’s part of the expanded vegetarian options the district piloted at its elementary schools lunchrooms this school year, which ends next Wednesday.

“It went really well, so next year we’re going to expand our vegetarian options so every day the child will have a non-vegetarian and vegetarian option,” Phillips said.

U46 began expanding the vegetarian offerings to its elementary students in April, after the food service director said the district had been getting more calls from parents about options for their students. Many eat vegetarian at home, either because of religious or cultural beliefs or a “lifestyle change,” she said.

Currently, the district has about 1,000 requests for vegetarian items each day, according to Phillips. Students who require vegetarian options register with the district so it can make sure there are enough lunches for everybody, she said.

High schools and middle schools across the district already served hot vegetarian lunch items each day, the food service director said. Elementary students could choose from yogurt, peanut butter and jelly, and cheese sticks.

This spring, those elementary schools began offering a vegetarian item alongside the regular lunch items, including baked beans, cheese pizza and macaroni and cheese, she said.

Of 320 lunch offerings at Lowrie, food service lead Sue Hodge said, about 20 were vegetarian.

The pizza puffs were so popular, they were brought back May 19 as the regular lunch item, Hodge said.

“Really, they were meant to be for vegetarians, but we have no registered vegetarians,” she said.

Not all vegetarian options have been so popular, Phillips said.

Part of that is the marketing, she explained. When U46 called the puffs “vegetarian puffs,” nobody was interested. When the district switched that to “pizza puffs,” everybody wanted one, she said.

“The main thing is if it looks good, tastes good, that’s all they want,” she said.

And many times, with offerings such as macaroni and cheese, students who don’t regularly eat vegetarian still “look for the meat,” Phillips added.

“They look for something else. They don’t look at that as being a complete entrée,” she said.

That comes from home, the food service director explained. Parents who don’t eat vegetarian often view meat as the center of the plate and build the meal around it, she said.

But there are other sources of protein, she said, and U46 just held a healthy-vegetarian cooking class for parents on Friday, May 13. It’s important to reinforce those messages both at school and at home, she said.

The pizza puffs still were a hard sell for a trio of girls more interested in the tater tot and graham cracker sides served at Lowrie late last month.

First-grader Alexia Alvarado, 7, grabbed the pizza puff by its corner and waggled it in the air, giggling.

Her classmate Savannah Ercoli said they’d tried the “patty thing” before. And Brianna Adams, who said her favorite school lunch is the corn dog, assured, “It’s gross. It tastes like a burrito and pizza.”

Savannah admitted sheepishly she had thrown hers away.

“I poked it to make sure it was disgusting first,” she said.

Patty Kosek, a food service assistant at Lowrie, said, “I think if they would just try it, I think they would like a lot of the food.”