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Supply chain issues are forcing Southern California school districts to reimagine their menus to compensate for current and expected shortages of popular food items.
Hamburgers. Chicken patties. These and other lunchtime staples have been increasingly difficult to come by lately.
With labor shortages worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, the food production and distribution industries are hurting, and bottlenecks at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are delaying the offloading of all sorts of cargo.
As one San Bernardino County district puts it, with longtime vendors burdened with requests from multiple school systems, demand for certain items is currently higher than supply.
But there are mouths to feed today, tomorrow and every day — for the rest of this school year.
Since the start of the 2021-22 academic calendar, nutrition services staffers across Southern California have worked to ensure hundreds of thousands of students get the nourishment they need, even if what has been planned and what ultimately ends up being delivered changes from one minute to the next.
“We’re working magic to make it happen,” Riverside Unified School District spokesperson Diana Meza said. “But all schools are doing that. There’s a lot more preparation involved.”
Schools get creative with menus
The Riverside district serves about 32,000 meals a day, Meza said, and while certain shortages have made securing student favorites like hamburgers and chicken patties more difficult than ever, officials have been buying more local fruits and vegetables.
Click here to read the full article at OC Register
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