On the first day Greg Christian served lunch at Louisa May Alcott, a public elementary school in Lincoln Park, a student looked at his options and was appalled. “He said, ‘Ew, the peas are green,’” Christian says. “The teacher had to explain that’s the color they’re supposed to be. And a half hour later, another kid walked in and said the same thing. People who think this is going to be a quick fix are in la-la land.”
“There are a few kids who come through the line and say, ‘Is this organic? Is this organic?’” says Josephine Lauer, the OSP’s director of logistics. “They have an aversion to it. They somehow associate ‘organic’ with ‘healthy’–and ‘healthy’ having a negative connotation is very bizarre to me.” Christian says the trick is to make subtle adjustments to the students’ favorite foods over time: “We’ll start with what they eat now: cheese pizza,” only it’ll be from his own organic version. Within a year, he hopes, they’ll be ready to try pizza with wild mushrooms.
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After he graduated, in 1983, Christian came back to Chicago for a job at the legendary Gordon, where he worked under chef John Terczak, a progenitor of New American cooking who became his mentor. Christian followed Terczak to New York and stayed there for five years, working at Terczak’s Cafe Marimba and Safari Grill. He returned to Chicago to open his own restaurant but never got the necessary backing. “Most chef-owned restaurants, the first one is family money,” he says. “And I didn’t know that.” He cooked for a while at the late Star Top Cafe and in 1992 launched Greg Christian Catering, which has been his bread and butter ever since. In April, just as he was getting his feet wet at Alcott, he flew to Georgia to cater the Masters golf tournament.
Shortly after he set up the business, Christian and his wife at the time, Edita, had their second child, Britha. In 2000 the family took her to a specialist for asthma and was told she’d need to take steroids every day for the next decade. As an act of desperation, Christian says, Edita decided that Britha needed to go “all organic and alternative medicine.”
Christian says the Organic School Project wasn’t influenced by any of these prominent reformers. “I didn’t research anybody,” he says. “I just sat in my meditation room and thought about what makes sense.” His guide was Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, who he says inspired him not to judge the big companies and agencies that control the food industry. “There’s a place beyond right or wrong, like Rumi said.”
Christian began teaching occasional nutrition classes at Alcott almost immediately. But to get into the cafeteria, he had to get the blessing of Chartwells-Thompson. “I go in and say, ‘I honor you, Chartwells-Thompson,’” Christian says. “I volleyed over the net in the first meeting: ‘You’re doing the best you can do. I know that. And I could never do what you do.’ That sort of thing, you know.” Equally important, he says, was not calling his food healthier. “It’s more positive,” he says. “To the big companies, their food is healthy.”
Each school day, 634 CPS schools serve an average of 299,139 lunches and 84,200 breakfasts, dished out and eaten in periods as short as 20 minutes. Eighty-five percent of those meals are free or discounted. “It’s a very complex operation,” says Louise Esaian, the district’s director of food services. She just started three months ago, and as the person with final say over what 300,000 children eat almost every day, she’d like to see improvements as much as any activist. “I would love to see longer lunch periods,” she says. “I’d love to see breakfast become a part of every school day.” But “we have very limited funding for this program.”
