A respected Twin Cities chef leaves the professional kitchen and heads back to school
Seth Bixby Daugherty is talking about hot chocolate and moderation. Daugherty tells people he uses half-and-half, but he’s a lily-gilder and, in truth, his cocoa often spiked with heavy cream. "It’s so good," he raves, talking a million miles an hour. "It’s practically ganache" — the super-creamy chocolate spread used to fill truffles and gourmet pastries.
The moderation part? That’s where Daugherty got started on this line of thought, talking about the dangers of becoming so obsessed with healthful eating there’s nothing tasty on the plate. "I moderate my hot chocolate intake in the summer," he explains, deadly earnest. "I drink so much of it in the winter that, if I drank it in the summer, I’d be 300 pounds."
This is hard to imagine. Daugherty’s metabolism apparently races as fast as his brain — think fantastically smart, hyperkinetic 9-year-old on a mission — as befits a white-hot talent who cooked his way through some of the country’s best kitchens, including two Four Seasons hotels, New York’s LeBernardin, Minneapolis’ D’Amico Cucina, and Cosmos, the restaurant at the Graves601 Hotel.
Two years ago, sharing an abysmal school lunch with his son Cole, now 8 (daughter Emma is 12), changed everything. Hot on the heels of being named one of Food and Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs of 2005, most people in his line of work would be parlaying their success into cookbooks or a cable franchise. Daugherty took off his toque and launched a crusade first to improve school lunches and, as if that weren’t a tall enough order, the way kids eat in general.
Less than two years later, the phone in the Daughertys’ Eden Prairie home rings off the hook. In addition to his day job as a culinary instructor at the Art Institutes International, Daugherty volunteers with the hunger-relief charity Share Our Strength and is working to try to bring Operation Frontline, the nonprofit’s effort to raise nutrition awareness by teaching inner-city kids to cook, to Minnesota. On top of that, Real Foods Initiative, the organization Daugherty started with his wife, Karen, has come to the attention of countless local and national politicians, educators, and national TV audiences.
But truly changing the way we educate kids about food is much harder than publicizing the problem, he tells Minnesota Parent.
Minnesota Parent: How did this crusade get started?
Seth Bixby Daugherty: When my son was in kindergarten, I went to have lunch with him and his friends, and he was drinking chocolate milk. We don’t have chocolate milk at our house. He had been making good decisions about food, and that obviously wasn’t one, but there wasn’t anyone there stopping him. I’m sure he was just, like, "This is my chance." The food was bad, and it got me thinking.
It took me a year and half to get out of my job. My wife and I had this vision. I put it out there that I wanted to work in schools, and Jean Ronnei [director of nutrition services for St. Paul Public Schools] contacted me. She had specific things she wanted me to do with tweaking existing recipes.
I removed high sodium, removed sugar, took out textured vegetable protein, added fresh garlic — made healthier recipes. We replaced the tater tots with roasted potatoes. I probably did eight to10 recipes and then Jean said to me, "We don’t need your help anymore. Our staff is empowered and can do it on their own." That’s key: Getting staff empowered so they believe they can make changes.
What I talk about with a school is focusing on what’s outside the center of the plate. You need to focus on the fresh fruit, the veggies. Is it frozen? It’s better than no veg; it’s better than canned veg, that’s the way I look at. School lunch is just a small piece of the big issue of educating kids about food and where it comes from and getting kids into farming.
MP: Your efforts have gotten a lot of attention. You were even on the "Rachel Ray Show" in March.
SD: And the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" did a thing on me last August. It’s a little overwhelming. I have hundreds of e-mails that I haven’t even begun to look at. Because, I mean, what do I do with these? Contact everyone and say I’m only one person?
And then I get weird requests from private schools: "We heard you’re the guy involved with all the cooking. Can you come do the food for our school?" They think I’m a catering company or something.
I think had I not won Food and Wine, people would still take me seriously, but maybe not on national scale. After the "Rachel Ray Show," I was contracted by school districts in 12 different states.
MP: And yet changing what actually shows up on kids’ lunch trays is agonizingly slow and expensive.
SD: They have to buy supplies a year or more in advance, so to make changes, you have to have some serious forethought into buying, [asking]: "Do we have the money?" Last year, a bag of flour was $9; now it’s $30. The schools aren’t getting more money; their [costs] are going up, but they can’t raise their prices. Yet if you were going to the store, you couldn’t buy a balanced meal for that amount.
Seventeen million kids in America are at risk of hunger. You can get a McChicken sandwich for a dollar, but supermarkets are leaving the cities at rapid rates. You don’t have a car? You’re probably going to SuperAmerica for breakfast. For some of these kids, it might be the only meal of their day.
MP: What can parents do to get involved? How can they put pressure on schools?
SD: They need to put the pressure on themselves to educate their kids at home. It’s easy to point fingers, but as a parent, you need to eat the right stuff, eat more meals at a table with the kids — and not in front of a TV.
I meet parents who think I don’t have the same troubles they go through cooking for kids. I’m still a dad. I still have to go shopping and figure out, okay, what are we going to eat for the week? One of the biggest pieces, especially for teenagers, is shopping. When you go [grocery] shopping, you don’t see kids.
We don’t have cable and we have a super-small house, 1,100 square feet, so we’re on top of each other. We eat at our table and right when dinner’s over, we do homework at that same table. When I start cooking, my daughter is like, "Daddy, what can I do?" My kids want to help in the kitchen. You want them to be as excited about food as they are about camp and their cell phone.
In the last 20 years, our skills were taken away. You have adults with kids right now who don’t know how to shop, how to eat. Mom opens up a box, or they’ll have takeout five times a week. Seriously, stuff shakes down with all the curbside-to-go. This vital skill of feeding our bodies, we just pass it off like filling up a gas tank, filling up our bodies.
If you would have said 25 years ago when I was in cooking school that this is what I would be doing, I would have said you’re crazy. The most urgent and persistent question I ask myself is how can I take this gift of cooking and help other people?
It will be slow. But what I do is effective. And if that’s all the change I ever do, I’m okay with that.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
Mission impossible?
One Minnesota district recently asked Daugherty to help put chicken stir-fry on the menu. Talk about your Iron Chef challenges: Both chicken and vegetables were canned, and because many districts are only equipped to reheat processed foods, there were no stoves. Then add to that a tangle of antiquated regulations that have more to do with agribusiness’ priorities than kids’ needs, lists of foods that must be served, dietary and religious issues, and budgetary realities.
Daugherty swapped the canned chicken for fresh, the canned veggies for frozen, and browned everything on sheet pans at the highest heat the reheating ovens could muster. The end product was so much better than the chow mein of yore everyone was thrilled.
