Move over sloppy joes, there’s a new lunchroom superstar in Durham Public Schools: the vegan “chicken” nugget.
DPS students are devouring the soy protein-based item — among the new additions to the district’s school lunch menu — at unforeseen rates, according to James “Jim” Keaten, DPS’ director of school nutrition.
The revelation came to light last week at a joint meeting between the Durham County Board of Commissioners and the Board of Education during a nutrition update presentation.
“We never in our wildest dreams could imagine the number of kids that were going to take those vegan nuggets,” Keaten explained to the local leaders.
“We were flying through those things so fast that we couldn’t even keep them in stock,” Keaten added.
Just how many of these nuggets are DPS kids plowing through?
Short answer: a lot.
DPS dishes out 1,500 servings of the vegan nuggets per month. At the recommended four nuggets per serving, that’s 6,000 nuggets and almost 300 pounds a month. If each oblong nugget is approximately 2 inches (sizes vary) that’s about 12,000 inches of nugget, or 1,000 feet. A single-file line of the vegan nuggets served per month would be more than nine-tenths as tall as the Eiffel Tower or taller than four Duke Chapels stacked on top of one another.
The rapid consumption has meant that the district has not been able to provide the vegan nuggets at some schools. One could even say that there haven’t been enuggh.
Prior to this year, DPS was serving none of these nuggets. The plant-based addition is part of DPS’s new nutrition program, which focuses on locally sourced food without artificial colors and flavors, among other priorities.
The vegan nuggets, described as “local” in the district’s presentation, are the Dr. Praeger’s brand available in grocery stores around the U.S. The district sources the nuggets from the Raleigh branch of Sysco, a multinational food distribution company.
Other popular new menu items include chicken and vegetable dumplings, spicy chorizo pork pasta, and “build your own” bars in DPS high schools, according to Keaten.
Alongside menu updates, the district has adopted the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a federal program in which all students, regardless of family income, can access free breakfast and lunch at school. At the meeting, board member Natalie Beyer raised concerns that CEP, which has increased the number of student meals in Durham, might be rolled back under the new administration.
With CEP, the district found that in the first 10 days of school, daily breakfast consumption increased by 918 meals and daily lunch increased by 2,114 meals since last year, on average.
And among those meals, a star was born.
Golden brown, crispy, and slightly more chewy than its non-vegan counterpart, the vegan nugget has stolen the DPS lunchroom show.
Pictured above: Vegan “chicken” nuggets, shown here in a Durham Public Schools presentation, are a runaway hit in local school cafeterias.
