Melissa Bailey Photo
Mary Lou Mignosa is still selling her wares in the Metropolitan Business Academy cafeteria, but she has no more cheese puffs — just water and cartons of milk.
“They do miss the snacks” said Mignosa (at right in photo) of the students at the business-themed high school on Water Street.
That’s because an effort that started last year to get the junk food out of New Haven’s schools has spread to the most difficult terrain — high schools, where students have stronger opinions about what they will and won’t eat.
Mignosa has worked in New Haven school cafeterias for 31 years. As recently as last year, she would roll out a cart of snacks through the Career High cafeteria after students picked up their hot meals. On her cart, she offered cheese puffs, sour cream and onion potato chips, and Cool Ranch Doritos, as well as more healthful options like Nutri-Grain bars. She also offered fruit punch and orange and apple juice.
The foods were the only semblance of junk food in a district that had already eliminated vending machines, fried food and sodas in accordance with state regulations.
The snacks were popular, Mignosa said. They were meant as a supplement to the standard kitchen fare.
When students returned to the school in the fall, they found no snack cart rolling through the cafeteria. The district got rid of snacks, following a city-wide effort to get kids to eat more healthful foods.
The city’s nine high schools stopped selling snack foods this fall, according to food services director Tim Cipriano. Snacks were removed from elementary schools in April 2009, he said.
“We want to focus on the meal of the day,” Cipriano explained. The hot food line provides “a better quality meal than snacks.”
The district also stopped offering chocolate milk in all schools this year, Cipriano said. There’s no dessert except about once a month. Even then, there’s no chocolate in sight — just fruity alternatives such as apple crisp.
Now Mignosa and her kitchen team have only two items up for sale: Marcus 1 percent unflavored milk, and Crystal Geyser “natural Alpine spring water,” bottled in New Hampshire.
“Where are the snacks?” students asked Mignosa at the beginning of the school year, she said. “I don’t know — we’re not allowed to sell them,” she would reply.
In two lunch waves last Monday, cafeteria worker Doris Highsmith (at left in photo at the top of this story, with Betty Isler at center) sold six bottles of water, she said.
Other than the reduced milk choices — “they’d rather have chocolate milk” — most kids don’t complain, Highsmith said. The snacks of yesterday are “out of sight, out of mind: They don’t see it, they don’t ask for it.”
The district bought about $75,000 of snacks last year, and sold them basically at cost to students. The district probably lost money on the operation, he said, because unlike the school meals, snacks aren’t eligible for federal reimbursements.
“Kids miss the snacks,” said Cipriano, “but we’re looking at it from an educational standpoint. We shouldn’t be in the junk food business when we’re trying to teach kids [how to eat] good food.”
Nixing Doritos is part of a citywide plan to get kids to eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, to tackle childhood obesity.
In high schools, changes to the food menus are taking place more gradually. Last year, all elementary schools rolled out Meatless Monday, where no meat was offered on the first day of the week. The point is to offer “lighter fare” that’s “healthier,” Cipriano said.
High schools followed suit this year, sort of. On Metro’s Meatless Monday last week, the main entree, cheese lasagna, was vegetarian. Mignosa also put out some new spinach salads, packed neatly in plastic boxes.
But students could still pick up hamburgers and meat at the deli bar.
“High school kids make up their own minds” about what they want to eat, Cipriano said. So he makes sure there are traditional favorites, such as Chicago-style pizza, so that kids won’t skip the meal.
One student was spotted buying a bottle of water Monday — and nothing else. Jermaine Young, a senior on the school basketball team, said he was forgoing lunch that day.
“I’m an athlete,” he said, “so I can’t be slacking.”
Nearby, ninth-graders ZioMary Vazquez and Shawna Bobbitt (at left and right in photo) both skipped past the Meatless Monday lasagna and grabbed more standard fare: A ham sandwich and a slice of cheese pizza.
They had their own solution to the dearth of portable junk food. Vazquez said she packed her backpack with Kit Kats and M&Ms leftover from Halloween.
Over by the window, senior Elliot Velazquez brought one item that had been removed from his school this year: A bag of nacho cheese Doritos. He said he brought it from home.
“I used to eat lunch” from the cafeteria, he said, but “they give you the same options every day.”
Whatever choices adults make for kids, he said, “it’s up to the students, regardless,” what they want to eat. “We can still bring our own lunch,” he said.
Cipriano said in the year ahead, he plans to introduce more healthful options, including beans and a mac and cheese recipe with cauliflower and sweet potato hidden in the sauce.
He predicted that over time, high-schoolers would adapt to the new options. If students’ diets change in the K‑8 schools, he said, “their palettes will change.”
By the end of five years, he said, the new way of eating will reach high schools. “They’ll be used to it.”