Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the centrist Democrat from Southwest Washington, has taken on bright headlights and salmon-gobbling sea lions. But today, she shared a clip of her in Congress aiming, like William Tell before her, at bad apples. Not metaphorical. Actual apples.
“I think we all remember being presented with a really gross Red Delicious apple in school cafeterias. Maybe you like them. But if you do, you’re wrong,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “Then people argue, ‘the kids just aren’t eating fruit because they don’t like it.’ Well, yeah, if you gave them an old boot leather to eat, they won’t eat that either. It’s important that we offer a quality fruit that can compete with Cheetos or whatever kids are eating these days.”
She elaborated on social media:
“Given that Red Delicious are the worst apples, have you ever wondered why they’re in every school cafeteria?” she wrote. “It’s because there’s a list of ‘approved’ apple varieties allowed in schools, and it hasn’t changed since Kmart sold firearms.”
She’s right about one thing: Your typical Red Delicious apple catfishes you with its glistening red appearance and its sexy name and then leaves you with mushy, mealy, disappointment. It’s a big contrast from, say, one of the best recent apple varieties, Washington State’s own Cosmic Crisp.
At first glance, it’s the kind of story about obnoxious government regulation that could make a swing voter shake their head. But Gluesenkamp Perez’s fruit-related government-regulation anecdotes have previously turned out to be a bit more slippery when you peel away the layers, so it was worth a second glance.
Asked to share the source the representative used, Gluesenkamp Perez's communication director, Vince Morris, said he'd try to find a link and encouraged RANGE to interview the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the issue.
A public affairs officer from the USDA said they were looking into the question. We will update the story if the agency or Gluesenkamp Perez comments.
In the meantime, an email to RANGE from Vancouver Public Schools, the district serving the biggest city in Gluesenkamp Perez’s district, said “there is no federal restriction on the variety of apples served in school meal programs.”
A quick look at the US Department of Agriculture site list shows that the government helps provide schools with Red Delicious apples, but also Empire, Gala, Granny Smith, Fuji and Honeycrisp. Several are more recent triumphs of apple engineering.
Apples don’t just grow on trees. They get invented. Some of the tastiest varieties of apples, like the Fuji and the Honeycrisp, didn’t start getting released until the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Just like Brussels Sprouts went from bitter and gross to one of the tastiest vegetables because scientists literally fixed them, the modern apple was upgraded to be bigger and better.
But if these types of apples have existed for decades, why would inferior apples be served so often in school cafeterias?
My last name is on Spokane’s Walters’ Fruit Ranch. Apple juice runs in my veins. If there’s an apple story here, it’s up to me to get to the core of it.
So I called up the Battle Ground School District, the school district that covers the most territory in Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s congressional district.
Laura Fiksdal, the director of dining services for Battle Ground, can talk a lot about apples.
“We can serve any apple,” Fiksdal said. “We just have to get it at the right size and the right price.”
There really are a lot of Red Delicious apples available at the Battle Ground school cafeterias, but not only Red Delicious.
“A lot of Fujis, a lot of Galas,” Fiksdal said. “When we’re lucky, we get Granny Smith.”
She’s always on the lookout for variety.
“We’ve had Pink Ladies come through,” Fiksdal said. “I will jump on any fun apple we can get.”
Kids, after all, can be extremely picky. Some kids will only eat red apples. Others will only eat green apples. Most kids prefer apples in a pink-ish hue, Fiksdal said.
So Battle Ground tries to swap apples when they can.
“These kids eat at our restaurant 180 days a year,” Fiksdal said. “That could get really boring if we just had the same apples.”
Here’s where the federal government comes in. Most schools are participants in the National School Lunch Program, which helps subsidize lunches and breakfasts for students. Part of that funding can be spent through the USDA Department of Defense’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. They often only have certain varieties of apples available, Fiksdal said, and it can change week to week, depending on the season.
To be clear, schools aren’t banned from purchasing any kind of apples from other sources, so long as they stick to federal rules on nutrition and calorie counts. Battle Ground sources its produce from three different vendors — and it’s always a scramble to find the right availability and price. And size.
The size of the apple is one of the most important factors.
Standard apple sizes are based on how many apples can fit in a standard apple box: And Battle Ground schools want to stick to the smaller apples that come 163 to a box. Often those are Red Delicious.
Honeycrisps may be delicious apples, but — as anyone who shops for Honeycrisp at a grocery store knows — they tend to be huge. They typically come 80 to a box. It’s about the same with Fujis right now, Fiksdal said.
The issue is partly about cost-control: It doesn’t do a lot of good for a kid to take a few bites out of an apple and then throw the rest of it away. The gigantic apples we love as adults don’t work for a kid’s smaller appetite. Ideally, Fiksdal said, the apples would be small enough that kids could easily take them home if they need to.
Then there’s also the issue of calories: federal rules are often more targeted on how many calories kids can have and their nutritional balance, rather than the variety of balance.
There’s another big factor: Apples contain sugar. A larger apple can contain twice as much sugar as a smaller one.
And so when it comes to children with diabetes, the amount of sugar can have serious ramifications for their health.
“Our nursing staff, we put the menus online,” Fiksdal said. “They know what the child had for lunch. They know how much insulin the student should receive.”
So knowing what size of what they ate, she noted, is “extremely important, specifically with fruit.”
Ultimately, she said, finding the best apples are just part of the messy art of serving school lunch.
“If you talk to any nutrition director, we are doing as much as we can with as little we are given,” Fiksdal said. “School lunch is never going to be Whole Foods, unfortunately.”
