Three Appetizing Ways To Serve Vegetables To High School Students

If you're a high school administrator who oversees the food services department, you have several goals on which you need to focus. While you'll undoubtedly be trying to keep the budget of this service under control, you also need to be conscientious about your students' nutrition. Vegetables are common items in a high school cafeteria, but their preparation can often result in them not getting eaten. For example, if a cafeteria only serves boiled vegetables, they may seem soggy or otherwise unappetizing, and the students won't want them. Talk to your food services department about changing up the way that it serves vegetables. Here are some options.

In Smoothies

Smoothies are extremely popular, and one of the best things about this type of blended drink is that you can use it to consume vegetables without necessarily having a product that tastes like vegetables. Talk to your food services department about having a smoothie station. Kale, celery, spinach, and carrots are vegetables that are conducive to mixing with fresh fruit and serving in the smoothie format, and there's a good chance that many students will be interested in ordering these beverages throughout the day. In doing so, they'll be getting nutrition from the veggies.

Raw And With Dip

A simple way to serve vegetables in the high school cafeteria is raw and with dip. Raw veggies are desirable because they have a longer shelf life, unlike boiled veggies that quickly begin to get soggy after they're cooked. Your food services team can put together small containers of assorted vegetables — carrot sticks, celery sticks, and broccoli florets, for example — and have a selection of dips that the students can place in small cups to enjoy with their veggies as a healthy snack.

Fried

On one hand, you might be trying to limit the amount of fried food that the cafeteria serves to the students. However, frying vegetable sticks — zucchini, for example — can be an effective way to get students to eat their greens. You might not find a lot of high school students who are keen to order plain zucchini in the cafeteria, but when this veggie is breaded, fried, and served with a dipping sauce, it immediately becomes more appealing. This is another good way to get vegetables onto the plates of students who might otherwise stay away from them. Plus, you can make this serving relatively healthy — for example, by using light breading and trans fat-free oil.