by Joe Miller
Over Columbus Day weekend, I made the season’s first batch of chili.
Chili is one of my favorite cold weather comfort foods. It’s one of the first things I learned how to make when I started cooking for myself. I followed my mom’s recipe—even made it in her old slow cooker.
It’s evolved a fair amount since then. Soy protein replaced the hamburger. Chipotle chilis replaced much of the chili powder. I rarely make it the same way twice. I’m more a season-until-it-tastes-good kind of cook than I am a follow-the-recipe guy.
This time around, I added a couple of new ingredients from a recipe that my wife’s cousin passed along—unsweetened cocoa powder and soy sauce. I plan to keep adding both.
The one part of chili night that hasn’t changed: a peanut butter sandwich to scrape up the last few bites. No jelly. Just peanut butter on ordinary sandwich bread.
It’s a combination I picked up from school lunches.
Because the amount of meat in chili can vary from ladle to ladle, schools couldn’t guarantee that chili met the minimum guidelines for protein content. A peanut butter sandwich was a quick (and cheap) way to hit the required standards.
The combination was especially popular from the 1950s through the 1980s, an era when the federal government directly supplied commodity foods — mostly cheese, ground beef and pork and huge tubs of peanut butter—directly to school districts.
Peanut butter sandwiches with chili was a popular combination across the lower Midwest and central Appalachia.
Other regions had very different traditions.
In the Great Plains and upper Midwest, kids mopped up their chili with cinnamon rolls. Students in the upper Southeast paired chili with cornbread and cheese. Texans dumped theirs over corn chips. In the deep South, the chili shifted to black-eyed peas and ground pork with greens and cornbread on the side.
These regional differences arose out of necessity. Mid-to-late 20th century school cafeterias prepared most of the food they served from scratch. Schools received bulk commodities directly from the government, and kitchen workers transformed those raw ingredients into meals.
Because cafeterias relied on in-house cooks, menus reflected what local food service workers knew how to prepare. So, Southerners ate a lot of cornbread because every Southern cook knew how to bake it. Students in Jackson County, where I grew up, ate a lot of yeast rolls because that’s what cooks in the Ohio Valley make with wheat flour.
A wave of budget cuts to school lunch programs starting in the 1980s made it increasingly difficult for schools to staff full kitchens.
The USDA lifted its long-standing ban on for-profit food service providers. Companies like Aramark, Sodexo and Sodexho stepped in, providing packaged meals that required reheating rather than full preparation.
A later program allowed schools to divert their commodity foods to these food service management companies, who used the free ingredients to produce even lower-cost foods.
Most school cafeterias today operate on a heat-and-serve model, with large convection ovens to heat frozen food and holding cabinets to keep it hot until lunchtime. It’s less expensive.
But it also means a lot fewer regional variations. Kids across the country eat a lot of fast-food style meals—chicken nuggets, pizza, hamburgers and French fries.
Schools do still provide some meals from scratch. Across West Virginia, the ratio is roughly 60% heat-and-serve to 40% cooked from scratch.
Staffing limits the amount of scratch cooking a school can do. State law limits the number of kitchen staff a school can hire. A school that serves 90 meals per day can hire one kitchen worker. Schools can add (roughly) one half-time position for each 45 additional meals it serves.
There are still some regional differences in school menus. But these days, those differences mostly boil down to whether your school reheats the pepperoni rolls it bought from Sysco or the steak poblano rice bowls it bought from Aramark.
