Perhaps now is the time to make sure that a student can not only cost out the ingredients but calculate the calories in each recipe they are taught to prepare and serve the dining public. A recent front page story in the Nations' Restaurant News makes that abundantly clear with a headline like, "Senate considers national standards for menu labelling: Members introduce LEAN Act to record crowd of NRA Public Affairs Conference." The acronnymn LEAN stands for the Labelling Education and Nutrition Act. The bill would essentially extend the legislation that was passed in 1999, known as the Nutrition Labelling and Education Act requiring packaged foods to contain nutrition information on all labels or packaging. That is why this bill makes a great deal of sense especially when the goal of the legislation then and now is to help American consumers to eat the right foods.
I bring this subject up yet again because it is in the news a great deal considering the obesity crisis in the US. I also bring it up because I have dined in countless student-run culinary and hospitality programs and the one thing I can never find is the nutritional information of the dishes on the menu. I find that unacceptable especially when many community colleges and universities have a dietetics program on campus, or a registered dietician at the local hospital. So the time is now long overdue to teach students to calculate the calories of the dishes they are going to serve to the public. Sadly we did not do it a long time ago because it was the right thing to do but will be encouraged to do so when it becomes the law of the land.
If your program is already doing it please add to the post and share your approach with others. If you are offended by the tone of this post then provide a response to it and defend not doing it. Lastly, I encourage us all to look around inside our programs and weed out the rest of the stupid things we are teaching students in lieu of those that we should be teaching to truly prepare them to live a life AND have a career. Go for it.
1 comment:
I wholeheartedly agree with this blogger. At J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College www.reynolds.edu/hospitality , our Culinary Arts AAS and Hospitality Management AAS students are required to complete HRI 224 - Recipe and Menu Management. This is a capstone-level course and students will have already completed HRI 119 - Applied Nutrition for Food Service. In HRI 119, they study metabolism, nutrients, nutrient sources and culinary approaches to planning healthy recipes. In HRI 224 they create a restaurant concept and develop an a la carte menu for the concept. There are multiple dimensions to the project, including market feasibility, ingredient sourcing, recipe costing, HACCP analysis of several recipes, menu engineering and forecasting of net income within the construct of a pro forma P&L statement. Along the way, students conduct a nutritional analysis. Students analyze 4 of their recipes. They are welcome to use any analysis tool of their choice, however we seem to have good success with http://www.nat.uiuc.edu/mainnat.html If they are displeased with the analysis of one or more of the recipes, they are encouraged to modify portion sizes and/or ingredients to provide a healthier result. We believe that if they can analyze 4 recipes, they are likely able to conduct similar analyses post-graduation in the field. We respect that legislation increasingly compels operators to provide nutrient information to their customers, but we prefer to enable these skills so that our students can be as knowledgeable as their clientele. Proaction in the name of public relations/marketing is always more virtuous and powerful than mere regulatory compliance.
Post a Comment