Statement of Ms. Linda Green, Illinois food-service worker, at the USDA listening session in Chicago, Illinois. September 10, 2008.

Good Afternoon. My name is Linda Green, and I am here today on behalf of the Chicago Public Schools food service workers, our union UNITE HERE Local 1, and the Campaign for Quality Services.

I am here today to say that we need more funding to provide healthy, nutritious meals to kids who need them. I am also here to say that school food service workers like myself have an important role to play in ensuring kids get the meals they need.

I work as a cook for the Chicago Board of Education at schools throughout the City of Chicago. With more than 650 schools and 400,000 students, I know the Board does all it can with the resources available to make nutritious meals available to students.

I have been a food service worker with the Board for more than nineteen years and have had a chance to do just about everything - cook, lunch room attendant, porter, everything. I have had the opportunity to work at a number of different schools around the City.

I love my job - it's great to work with the kids and to feel like I am doing my part to make sure they get the food they need. Working with the kids everyday, food service workers like me know what works - and what doesn't. We want to provide healthy, nutritious meals, but the way things are now, our ability to do so is limited.

For some of the students I work with, the breakfast and lunch they eat at school may be the only meals they eat all day - they may not get dinner. Kids depend on school breakfast and lunch, so they need to be healthy, balanced meals.

It seems like everywhere I go, I see the same thing - prepackaged, frozen food that we reheat for students. Most of the food we serve is not fresh and is full of sodium. Also, the reheated food is often too bland - so the kids don't want to eat it. The way things stand, there is not much we can do. There is no seasoning to make the food more appetizing to the kids.

I think it would be better for the kids if there were more fresh fruits and vegetables. Right now, we only get to serve salad about once per month. Fresh fruits and vegetables should be a more regular part of what we serve to the kids.

If they don't fit into the budget now, we need to find the money to make sure our kids can have fresh food. That is one reason why we need an increase in the reimbursement rate of at least fifty cents, with regular increases that match increases in the cost of food.

But I don't think just providing more fresh food solves the problem. Another area I think needs improvement is training. While many of my coworkers have been working to provide food to students for a long time, there are also a lot of new people. When I started years ago, I remember getting specific training for each job I was supposed to do - when I learned to be a cook I spent time in a school training to be a cook. Now, new people starting don't seem to get the same training I did. Because we work directly with kids, school food service workers can play an important role in making sure food is prepared in a nutritious, safe manner - but we need the training to do so.

As you work towards the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Programs, I hope you'll take my recommendations into account. Please keep mind my words come not only from my 20 years of providing food to kids - but also from the experiences and concerns of millions of UNITE-HERE and SEIU members and their children who are directly affected by the program.