Jeffrey Boyce: I’m Jeffrey Boyce, and it is July 12, 2023. I’m here in Okolona, MS, and I’m talking today with Lonnie Burt of Hartford, Connecticut, director of Child Nutrition Services for Hartford City Schools. Is that right?
Lonnie Burt: Yes, it is.
Jeffrey Boyce: Okay. Welcome, Lonnie, and thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.
Lonnie Burt: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.
Jeffrey Boyce: Okay. Well, we’re here to talk about your long and illustrious career in child nutrition. Could we start by you telling me a little bit about yourself, where you were born and where you grew up?
Lonnie Burt: I can. I’m a real local girl. So I was born right here in Hartford, Connecticut, and I grew up in a town next door, West Hartford, Connecticut. I actually still live there. I have moved around a little bit, but I’ve always stayed in Connecticut. I’ve traveled but I stayed right here in Connecticut and I live literally about a block and a half from the street I grew up on, in my great aunt’s home. Real local girl.
Jeffrey Boyce: Wow! Wow! Connecticut is a pretty state. I’ve only been there a time or two, but I enjoyed it.
Lonnie Burt: It is a lovely state. I love New England, and I love the fall, so.
Jeffrey Boyce: What’s the weather like there right now?
Lonnie Burt: Well, right now the weather here is very hot and humid. I’m sure what you’re seeing, but in the fall it’s clean and crisp. And of course, we have all the leaves and the colors. We have winter. I like winter. It hasn’t snowed too much in the last couple of winters, and then we have, you know, a lovely spring, but right now it’s hot. It’s like 90 degrees and very humid out.
Jeffrey Boyce: You know, it’s about like that here.
Lonnie Burt: Exactly.
Jeffrey Boyce: Swelteringly humid, that’s what kills. I don’t mind the heat nearly as much as the humidity.
Lonnie Burt: Same here. The humidity just kills me, and as I age, and I am aging because I’ve had a long, illustrious career, I find that I can tolerate that less and less.
Jeffrey Boyce: I completely agree. What are your earliest recollections of child nutrition programs? Was there a breakfast or lunch program when you went to school?
Lonnie Burt: There was a lunch program when I went to school and my earliest recollections were when I was in elementary school. Of course, it was always exciting each year to have your own lunchbox and bring your lunch from home. What was the coolest launch box in the lunchroom? But I remember how big it seemed to me. It was huge and stainless steel and it was very scary to me. But I also remember how sweet the women were, and the staff was always very nice and smiling. And then, when I went to Junior High School, I have to admit this, on my way home there was the ice cream shop and the drug store that had all of the candy, so I would save my lunch money and not buy lunch so I could buy ice cream on the way home, except for when it was pasta day because if it was pasta and meat sauce day everybody bought, and the lines were long and nobody missed pasta and meat sauce. And honestly, it’s so funny that I am in child nutrition because then when I was in High School as a senior, I worked and I only needed 3 courses to graduate. So, my mother bargained with me. If I took typing for one semester, she would let me leave early and sign off on it, so I would leave high school at 1015 in the morning, after my third-period class, and go work from 11-8 every day. Honestly, my first job in child nutrition was in West Hartford Public Schools, and that’s when I started going into the cafeteria in the high school. It was where my office was, it was actually at my high school.
Jeffrey Boyce: Oh, okay. What was your job when you were in high school?
Lonnie Burt: I was waitressing and flipping burgers at the Farm Shop. I was a, you know, I waitressed. I was rich in high school because I worked full-time, like I had a car. It was really exciting. I’ve always worked in food service. So I started waitressing on my sixteenth birthday, and then I started running some shifts for them, and grill cooking. And then all through college I put myself through college waitressing and bartending and catering.
Jeffrey Boyce: Wow! You were one busy person then.
Lonnie Burt: Yeah.
Jeffrey Boyce: What about your post-secondary education? Where did you go to school?
Lonnie Burt: I started at a community college right here in Manchester, so on the other side of Hartford, at a local community college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I couldn’t afford it. I was putting myself through school and I was a first-generation college student, so I didn’t really have a lot of support system of what college was about and how it worked, and all of that. I started at the community college and I took any course that interested me. I took marine biology. I took psychology courses. I took special ed courses. I took art courses; I took journalism courses. I took a lot of psychology, and then I always wanted to go to West Hartford. It was Saint Joseph College at the time. It’s now the University of Saint Joseph College, and I wanted to transfer in there, so I transferred from the community college to Saint Joseph College, when I was looking at the course catalog and trying to pick my courses for that first semester. I read about the dietetics program, and I had never heard of a registered dietitian, or what a dietician was. But when I read that short paragraph in the student book on picking my courses, I knew, I absolutely knew that I had found my niche and that I was going to St. Joe’s, to major in psychology and minor in nutrition, because I do believe, and I believed then and still that there’s a connection between nutrition and a lot of mental health issues. But when I read I just knew. I made an appointment with the advisor of the program, and I never looked back. And so when I got there, I didn’t have all of the science credits that I needed for that program, so I took an extra year at St. Joe’s to finish my science, and so I got a degree in dietetics. But again I was working full time, putting myself through school, so I couldn’t do the internship work. So, I graduated and started working, and then I went back and got my Master’s degree from the University of Connecticut in Allied Health but it still wasn’t enough. I needed to be a registered dietitian. So I went back to St. Joe’s while I was working, and they let me join one of their CUP programs, one of their coordinated undergraduate programs so that I could do the clinical. I needed to do a thousand clinical internship hours to be able to sit for the exam. At that time, I was the director of Manchester Public Schools and St. Joe’s, we all worked it out, and I was able to do it on this really kind of key basis. But I completed it and sat for the exam in 2000.
Jeffrey Boyce: Oh, Wow!
Lonnie Burt: I graduated college in 1983, so it took me a while but I was never, I just could never let go of that goal. I wanted to be a registered dietitian. I was always a dietician, but I needed to be registered.
Lonnie Burt: So that’s my long story of going to St. Joe’s. I’ve been blessed. St. Joe’s was a great school, and it was all women at the time. So my major courses had 12-14 students. I mean, it was really one on one education. I realize now how blessed I was.
Jeffrey Boyce: Well, that’s fascinating the epiphany you had to know what you wanted to do. But you’re lucky in that way, I think. How did you become involved in child nutrition?
Lonnie Burt: Again, thank you very much, St. Joseph College, because when I got into that program, one of the professors there had been a child nutrition director and now was teaching.
I you know, everyone gets into dietetics thinking you’re saving the world, and I’m going to get everybody to eat well, I’m changing your eating habits. You do a couple of rotations in the program that I was in. I started out doing some clinical rotations.
Lonnie Burt: And I quickly realized, ‘I don’t like this.’
Lonnie Burt: I love the science of nutrition, and I am a full-blown Italian. You can tell my hands are moving. So, I grew up in a family that ate vegetables and salad every night. So I ate. You know, I grew up eating healthy foods.
Lonnie Burt: And so I didn’t even understand that other people didn’t. Let’s start there and then repeating the same thing over and over, people at 50 and a 60, it’s hard to change their eating habits, and I realized that was not an enjoyable work area for me that I just really didn’t enjoy trying to get people to change eating habits that they’ve had for the last 50 years. So I was saying to my adviser, I said, and her name is Marilyn Ricky, and she knows this story to this day. So I said, to her, “What am I going to do?” Oh, my gosh! I was crying, “What am I going to do? I have just spent all this time and effort to graduate college and what?” She said, ”Lonnie, what are you even worried about?” I said, “Well, I don’t like clinical dietetics.” And she said to me, “Lonnie, you are going into child nutrition.” And I said, “I don’t even know what that is.” She said, “What do you mean you don’t know what that is? Didn’t you eat in the cafeteria at school?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Yeah, that’s what you’re doing.” I said, “The lunch lady?” She said, “You are going into child nutrition. You are fabulous in food service. It’s absolutely your skill set and your passion is nutrition. Why wouldn’t you want to merge those two together?”
Lonnie Burt: And again, I’m very blessed, and I never looked back. And so at that time, the director of Manchester Public Schools was quite elderly and close to retirement. Marilyn said to me, “You’re going to go to Manchester Public Schools, and you are replacing Mary Upland.” “You absolutely need to be the one to go there.”
Lonnie Burt: Fast forward. I get my first job in West Hartford schools as a satellite dietitian. I had some schools underneath me and helped with that. That was in 85. And then in 1987, I got my first director’s position in Trumbull Public Schools, and at that time Marilyn had left the college and was our State NET Coordinator. I got a call, a random call from her one day she said to me, “Now Lonnie, Manchester Public Schools just called me, and they said they don’t have any good applicants. Did I know anybody?” And she said, “Well, of course, you have good applicants, you have Lonnie’s application, and they rifled through them, and she said, and they told me they don’t have your application.” And I said, “Well, Marilyn, I didn’t apply.” She said, “Let’s stop right now.” I said, “Marilyn, I’ve got a great job. I love Trumbull. I’ve only been here a couple of years.” I didn’t think it was right for me to leave. She said, “I’m not having that. The plan has always been that you are going to go to Manchester Public Schools. I want you to put your resume in.” I’m like, “Only for you, Marilyn.” And the next day I sent my resume and they offered me the position, and I got it. So I went there. I was at Trumbull from 1987 to 89, and then I was in Manchester Schools from 1989 until 2004.
Lonnie Burt: And then I came here to Hartford in 2004, because I had always wanted this position here in Hartford. So that’s my career projection. So I’m one of those people that was very blessed. I haven’t had a change of career. I spent 38 years working in child nutrition, and I wouldn’t ever hesitate to encourage somebody else to do this. It’s been the best career. I’ve been so blessed, so blessed.
Jeffrey Boyce: That’s wonderful to hear. You’re blessed in that way. That was your first mentor, obviously. Were there others who helped you develop your career?
Lonnie Burt: Several along the way, and I hope that along the way I’ve been a mentor for other people. I know that I have worked to be a mentor for other people because I think it’s really important.
I had Priscilla Douglas, who was over it when I was doing my master’s degree at UConn, who was also a great mentor for me. And really, I think you don’t know your own skill level. You need people around you to help you understand that you are good at what you do or that you have the skillset. I’m not a person that brags about myself. Again, I’m first-generation, so I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was really a smart person, or that I could do this, and so I’ve been blessed with professors along the way who have really said to me, “You are good.”
Lonnie Burt: And it was Dr. Douglas who said to me, “You know, I need you to finish your Master’s degree. I want you to get a PhD. And I said, “I don’t want a PhD. Why would I want one?” She said, “Because I need you to replace me.”
That was the best compliment that I could get, and I didn’t, because I said to her, “I love you to death but what you do is not my passion,” and I didn’t. I love teaching, and I’m a really good teacher. I train for ICN, as you know, and I taught at Manchester Community College. I’m a full-circle kind of girl. I taught at Manchester Community College for quite a few years, over a decade. But I wouldn’t want to do it full-time. It wouldn’t be my passion if it was my job.
Jeffrey Boyce: What other positions have you had then? You started as a dietitian and then went directly to director?
Lonnie Burt: Yes.. As I said earlier, I’ve done everything in food service. I’ve always been in food service, either cooking or catering or waitressing, bartending any of those things. But my first position was in West Hartford Schools, and I was a satellite dietitian. And so what I did for them was I wrote menus, and we had a satellite program where at the two major comprehensive high schools we would do some of the pre-prep and ship that off to the elementary schools. We would make the meat sauce at the high schools and ship it off. We would get all the produce in at the high schools, and cut and chop the lettuce, so that when it went to the elementary schools it was already cut and chopped. All they had to do was cup it.
That was my first position, but I knew I wanted to be a director, so that was why I was applying for positions, and then the current position at Trumbull opened up, and that was over an hour’s commute for me. I didn’t live anywhere near Trumbull, so it was a good hour one-way, but you know you go where the jobs are. And how blessed I was. I was only 25 years old in my first director’s position. I was a little kid. I think back now, and I think about how I knew nothing. I was just such a little kid, 25. Myself and this other woman, Sandy Sullivan, were the two youngest directors in the state, and we’ve been friends ever since. Because by nature of the beast, we were the two youngest people around all those people who were significantly older than us.
So, a little kid. I think back to how I was supervising people who were my mother’s age, and I will say to you, and I say this to people all the time, that my style of supervision has evolved as I’ve aged. And so when I was very young, my style of supervision was such that my staff at Trumbull wanted me to be successful because they viewed me as their daughter, like they wanted their daughter to be young and successful and do a good job. And if that’s what they wanted to do that was okay. I didn’t mind that they called me their second daughter. It didn’t bother me at all. I loved it. I saw it as a term of endearment.
But I supervised them a little differently than I do now at 60-something years old, and a staff of 200 and something people. I’m a little bit stricter now than I was back then.
Jeffrey Boyce: I think you would have to be. How do you feel that your educational background helped prepare you for your nutrition career?
Lonnie Burt: It’s 100 percent direct correlation, without any doubt, because I’m a dietitian. And so in the dietetics program, in the program that I was in especially – I try to find my glass half full. That’s something that’s really important to me. And so I look back at my education that I got, especially at St. Joe’s, and realized again how blessed I was, and how good that education was! I don’t think anybody really understands that while they’re in it and you’re a young 20-year-old. What do you know? I know now. That program was 50% food service and 50% clinical nutrition, whereas a lot of dietetics programs, especially back in that day, were much more towards the research clinical side of it and they really didn’t expose you to the food service side of it. And so how blessed was I because I did have a program that really emphasized quantity food, hospital catering, long-term care feeding, and actually the department head, when I was in college, was very good friends with the director of one of the local hospitals of the food service program. And so in college, I got my first position. I was working in the cafeteria kitchen. I was their tray line supervisor. So the patient trays come down on a conveyor belt, and there were heated stations next to that belt, so the vegetable person, and then to the person who puts the soup on, and all of those things. I was the person at the end, who looked at the menu to make sure that all the items were on the tray. If it wasn’t, stop the line, you forgot the peas, get the peas.
So that was my very first job in a dietetic-type program. I loved that job. I love that job. So again I had people around me encouraging me and helping provide me with some opportunities. And so I knew then I loved that. I liked the quantity. So the aspect of child nutrition was extremely exciting to me, because I could do the nutrition, but I liked the math. I liked making the 200 portions at one time and figuring all of that out. So my degree, without any doubt, got me there.
Also, it’s really about networking. I met the right people. Marilyn Ricky became the State Child Nutrition NET Coordinator to whom Manchester called. I’m blessed because I went to school in an area where I stayed to live. And so my professional connection started at a very early age, and I was really lucky, and then, in my Master’s degree what that did was really help me to get a broader approach. And one of the things that I say about being a dietitian and the decisions that I make here in my job in child nutrition is a lot of operations. You have to get the food out. You have to get the food in. There’s bidding. It’s very operational. I make decisions from a dietitian’s point of view, which I consider a blessing. I prioritize factors beyond just cost or convenience, such as the nutritional quality of the product. We buy crackers that have calcium fortification in them, because I know students aren’t drinking enough milk. I can make operational decisions that incorporate a nutrition component, which I believe is something people without a background in dietetics may not consider. They tend to focus solely on operational aspects. And I love merging the two. That’s where I think that my education has really helped me be extremely prepared for the business side of this, but this is a child nutrition program. It’s the business that keeps it running, but this is really about nutrition, and I don’t want anybody to forget that. And unless you chew it and swallow it, it’s actually not nutritious. And so that is how my brain works with what I do, and that absolutely comes from my education.
Jeffrey Boyce: Is there anything unique about Connecticut regarding the child nutrition programs?
Lonnie Burt: Well, we have some great state agency people. Let me just be the first to say they are very awesome and very supportive. Over the years they’ve come up with some really great tools, like when we go through an admin review, we have what’s called the AROT document (Administrative Review Organizational Tool), I think it stands for, but they give us this great tool of this is what they’re going to come in and look at. You need these things together. This we need a copy of, this we want to have, so I’m not scrambling to try and figure all of that out. I find them to be very forward-thinkers.
I will say to you that in the past when USDA Foods and Commodity Food program really started to expand and get into processing, Connecticut was one of the first to really embrace the processing of commodities and having the power for the districts to determine what’s best for their district. And that’s huge for me. I think there are still states that don’t really do a lot of processing.
And so you understand what I mean by that. Anyone who’s watching this who’s in child nutrition will know that you have your entitlement funds from USDA, which are to be spent on commodities. When I started in this industry, my entitlement funds and what we actually received in commodities were maybe 50 percent, because the quality of the items didn’t match my priorities and criteria. So we would leave a lot on the table. Now, we have our specifications, we determine what’s best for our students. So we use all of our entitlement funds and then we are always looking for a little more. That’s the difference. And so, I find that to be one of the unique things about our state is that they’ve been incredibly supportive and really open to growth.
Our state director understood – right before the pandemic – that one of the priorities that was out there was for CEP and direct certification is to be able to use your Medicaid, that there’s a pilot to be able to include Medicaid. But what that did, and he was smart enough, and he did it, was he got us into that pilot.
It allowed districts to go CEP to be able to do universal feeding that just didn’t have the numbers. Even here in Hartford it was another 5 percent. It made a difference. Our Commissioner of Education here at Hartford is a registered dietitian. She was our summer feeding coordinator way back.
The beauty of Connecticut is, we have some people who understand nutrition because, let me repeat it again. This is a child nutrition program, and it really is about nutrition. And remember how this started because our World War II recruits were not passing their physicals. And I just saw something on the news last week. I think it might even have been on one of those Sunday morning shows. Recruits are still not passing those physicals and it is all nutrition-related, whether it be obesity and diabetes, or whether it be the vitamin B deficiencies that they saw in World War II. Either way, nutrition plays a role in this, and so I love that we have some state leaders who really believe in and understand the importance of feeding children good quality, healthy food. So I think that’s what makes us unique.
Jeffrey Boyce: It sounds like you are unique. What is a typical day like for you, or is there such a beast?
Lonnie Burt: When I saw that question I cracked up, and I thought to myself, there is not a typical day, which is what I love the most about this industry. When I was in a smaller district, a typical day for me was to come in, and you know whatever I had on my list of things to do. But then the phone would ring, and either it’s some food didn’t show up or somebody didn’t show up and now they’re short-staffed, and when I was in the smaller districts that was me, if I needed to move food from one school to the next I was driving in my car and putting that chicken in the backseat and driving it to Point B. Or I was going in to help them cook. In a larger district, this was the one thing we didn’t say here earlier is, I deal with 50 schools, and so I’m no longer the front-line person I am the person who’s kind of making sure that the front-line people are there, and so when somebody is out sick, if I’m cashiering, and I did cashier quite a bit during the pandemic.
And I cashiered because I don’t know where everything goes in your kitchen at 50 schools, so I don’t know where you keep your scoops. I don’t know where you keep all of your sheet pans. It’s easier for me to do something that I could stay stationary and get out of your way with and still help.
But I kept saying to them, “When you see me cashiering, we know we’re in trouble,” because, I’m the last line of defense now at Hartford. In Hartford, a typical day for me is when I come in and check what’s on my list. But then with my open-door policy, someone’s always coming in with a problem and then I find myself having to solve it. If they’re short-staffed or a delivery didn’t come, there is an emergency, we have a Code Red, then there is a little bit more. Today, my day began with a stop at some schools to see my summer feeding staff. Then I came here to Hartford to work with my director of operations to finalize our paper award to determine who’s going to get the bid, and who’s going to get awarded.
I have a grievance hearing that I have to go to this afternoon, so I do a lot more in this level. I do a lot more of the HR stuff, the Union stuff comes on my desk much more than it did in smaller districts. But what I do love is that every day it is absolutely, it’s different. And every day I can come in, and something changes my day because somebody’s crisis now becomes my problem.
And I like that. I’m a high-energy person, so I kind of like that. I like the quick thinking and the moving, and I like juggling all of the different aspects of this work.
Jeffrey Boyce: What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced over your career?
Lonnie Burt: Well, we all are going to say the pandemic without any doubt. I’ve never been through anything like that. But I would say to you, let’s go. Let’s take the pandemic out of it. Some of the challenges have been, in terms of staffing, have been, I think, when I first got into this industry, you know that was at a time when women could find work because their husbands were working. And these were pin money jobs. You were not surviving on a school lunch person’s 4-hour a day position. That’s different now. And certainly, where I am now, I’m in an inner city. And so for my workers, they are the household, and this is their income. This is not just let me augment my income. This is their income. And so, I think some of the challenges that I see for me now are about making sure that we can keep our workforce, that I have enough hours for them, that there’s enough work for them. We try and find ways during the school vacations to get them to come in and do some of the training and the production.
Even though we don’t have any income source coming in. I need to make sure that they don’t go get another job. I’m in an inner city. There are three hospitals and there is long-term care. There is a whole bunch of jobs around here that are 12 months with full-time benefits. And so how do you make sure that you have an opportunity for your staff who want to stay working with you, but truly do need to be able to run a household on this kind of income? I think that’s some of the challenges.
I will say to you, we went to Michelle Obama and changed it to all the whole grains. That was incredibly challenging because there was so much changing at once, and things were coming at us, and I didn’t know if we were coming or going. There were days when I would get 4 or 5 different emails on the same subject. Well, this is a grain. This doesn’t count as a grain. And back then we had minimums and maximums. You couldn’t go over the maximum, which was really challenging because manufacturers hadn’t caught up, so we didn’t have what we needed. Finally, I started saying to my colleagues, because I’m the one that people call. So they’re calling me. And I say, “Okay you guys, let’s take a breath here because this is what we do for a living. We feed kids. I’ll figure out the menu compliance second. But I’m not going to lose sight of that you feed kids. Okay, so get lunch out, and if you’re missing a grain you’re missing a grain, and I’ll slap your hand. But get lunch out and get out a good lunch, and then we are going to figure this out.” So I would say to you I’m grateful. So let me be clear about what I’m saying to you. I think that those changes were as a registered dietitian some of the proudest moments of my professional career in child nutrition because I truly believe it is about nutrition.
And we’ve always been focused on balancing the budget. I was very proud of the days when I was in Manchester Public Schools, and I took over a program in December of 1989 that had lost $250,000 that June 30th prior, and that was a lot back then. And my superintendent said to me, “Young lady,” because at that time I was only 27, “Young lady, you will fix this.” And so that first year I had to pay back the 250, and we still had $200,000 profit on top of all of that. And so I was proud of that. But how I did that was I was so proud because we got a self-cleaning fryer later, and we deep fried 5 cases of French fries every day, and 2 cases of chicken patties and sold it a-la-cart, and I made the money but as a dietitian that broke it for me. It was never right for me. So I love that we are now focusing on nutrition, and we need to focus on nutrition and not just about the money. And so circling back, that is why I think my education, and being a dietician has just made this so perfect for me because I do understand the business side of it, but I want it based on the nutrition side of it. And that to me is what I think. So that was my answer there.
Jeffrey Boyce: Well, that leads into my next question about changes you’ve seen in the profession. Are there other big changes?
Lonnie Burt: Tons. I can go on and on and on but I will say to you that one change is that I started prior to the requirement of production records. They weren’t even a requirement.
Okay, so think back. They came out and became a requirement. And I’ve seen the changes in what they’ve been used for over the years. So when they first came out, they came out because of what had happened in administrative reviews, not in Connecticut, this was a USDA regulation.
They were finding that people were claiming more meals than they were producing food for and that they weren’t able to justify where the commodities were going.
There was a lot of rumbling back in the late eighties about all that. I was in Trumbull when the production records came out in the late ‘80s and we had to start doing production to show we were producing enough food.
Then when the nutrition standards started coming in, and they had so much sodium and fat and calories, they were then used to determine if you were meeting the nutritional requirements that were required. So not only are you producing enough food but are you doing the nutritional requirements as well? And now they’re really a part of the whole administrative review to show that that you’ve met the meal pattern, and that you must have a fruit or a vegetable on every tray at lunch and breakfast. Right? One of the things the administrative review does is, they will look at those production records, and say, if you served 300 meals, they’re adding up the number of portions of fruits and vegetables you serve to make sure that’s over 300, so they really have evolved quite a bit over the years. The commodity program, like I said, is huge. When I see what we’ve done, and the processing and the vendors that are available, those foods are just beyond unbelievable to me, what we are able to do with that.
But I’ve seen a lot of changes, a lot of behind-the-scenes paperwork changes. We used to have to depreciate all of our equipment but we don’t now. You used to have to keep a separate inventory for commodities, now you can keep it as your purchased food. Little things like that over the years have streamlined and helped us. But the nutrition impact, there’s nothing that tops that for me, nothing.
Jeffrey Boyce: Well, I’m going to put you on the spot now. What do you think has been your most significant contribution to the field of child nutrition so far?
Lonnie Burt: I have pretty high standards, so I’m going to say to you that it’s probably the incorporating huge options of fresh fruits into our programs. I’m big into local foods. I’ve been doing this for a long time when other people were putting out one fruit way back. That’s no longer the case, people have realized they need to do better. But I was doing this long before anybody else really thought that was the thing to do. One of my schools said to me the other day, “We’re going to miss you pushing us. We’re going to miss you always saying, “How can we do this better? What more can we do?”
And so I hope that my biggest contribution has been getting, both here and in Manchester, to take a program that was operating just okay and to put it into a very sound operational process with a lot of choices for our students. Both in Manchester and when I came here to Hartford, students didn’t have choices, so I’m hoping that my biggest contribution is providing enough choices so that I have improved the nutritional quality of our students’ lives, because they’re eating it. If you don’t like peaches and peaches are the only fruit that’s out there for you today, you’re not eating fruit. But if you have peaches, watermelon, grapes, strawberries, and blueberries, you’re going to find one you’ll like and consume it, and the goal is for you to chew it and swallow it. I really can’t say that enough. I’m hoping that my other contribution is that I’ve mentored enough people and gotten enough people into this industry who wouldn’t have thought about it before. I taught in the hospitality program at the Community College and so I’m thinking to my field supervisors, that I have here now five of them were my students and were on a trajectory, thinking that they were going to go work in restaurants and make high salt, high-fat foods. And I kept saying, “No, come here. You need to come talk to me because there are no nights, holidays, and weekends in what I do.”
Okay, let’s just start there. But I have the most honorable profession you could ever have, and that is feeding children. And so I’m hoping I’ve mentored, and that that’s a big contribution that I’ve gotten people to be as passionate about child nutrition as I am, that hadn’t heard of it before.
Jeffrey Boyce: Do you have any memorable stories about special children or people you worked with over the years?
Lonnie Burt: Probably a million but when I read that question, I thought, what’s the most recent for me? And I will say to you, I do have one that’s probably the most recent and it just happened this spring. The students at one of my high schools wrote a negative piece in their little local newspaper of how the food sucked, you know the typical- the food sucks, we hate it, the portions aren’t big enough, the fruit is blah blah blah. When they said the fruit wasn’t good and that there were no choices of fruit, I almost passed out because again, my thing is the fruit trays. They are, without any doubt. I’ve always been about the colors and the choices, so I called my friend who was the vice principal. I’m like, “Johnson, what’s happening?” So he said, “What, because I didn’t read the article.” So I said, “Well get the article, because I’m upset.” He called me and said, “Oh, no, we’re not having this.” He went right down to that class. It was a journalism club, and he said, “Mrs. Burt, you made her cry, and she wants to come in”. He got me in with those students, and so we did a whole bunch of work with them this past spring, and we brought them into the kitchen and all that. The boy who wrote the article, his name was XXX, came up to me after the first day and said to me, “I just want you to know that I wrote that article because I’m one of those students who doesn’t have food at home and I often have to make sure that I eat lunch here. I also need to make sure my siblings at school are eating lunch because we’re one of those families.” And that will never go away. So I said to him, XXX, you are the reason why I do what I do. And so that was really powerful for me. And I say to my staff all the time, like you don’t know what’s behind somebody’s story, just don’t know that, but I know that I need to put out food for him that he’s going to consume. Again, it’s not just about checking off the box. It’s making me cry. It’s not just checking off the box. It’s absolutely about getting them something that they want.
They actually did this great survey for us and I kept asking, what flavor profiles, what’s not on our menu? Hartford is very culturally diverse. We have Hispanics. We have Jamaicans. We have some people from Africa, Bosnia. We have a very culturally diverse city here and so I want to make sure our menus reflect that. So we did this whole survey- What’s your favorite food? What food do you have at home that you’re not seeing on our menu? That was really important to us. And so they came up with some really good suggestions. They said, “My family eats stewed beans, they eat carne guisada.” They eat casadas and stews and stuff, and we have a little bit of that type of stuff. We have arroz con gandules on our menu. We have plantains. We have collard greens. We have Jamaican beef patties.
We have culturally diverse food, but never enough. Let me circle back to my staff, saying, “We’re going to miss you pushing us,” because the one thing that I got from college that my adviser said to me was If you’re going into food service, remember this: it’s never good enough. It can always be better. It can be served hotter, it can be served fresher, it can be served colder, and it can be served seasoned more. You can always critique food and find a way to do it better.
Those words have stuck with me, and so I do believe that and I want us to be constantly evolving with these menus. And so we have a list of foods. And the best for me is my students are a culturally diverse population, but so is my staff. I have staff members that we said, stewed beans you can make this. Figure this recipe out for us. Arroz con gandules recipe is Awilda’s. Awilda Cruz developed this recipe. We told about five of our cook managers to bring arroz con gandules recipes. They brought them in and we all taste tested each of them and Awilda’s was the one that we all said, “That’s the one.”
Then we developed it into a quantity foods recipe. And so we will do the same thing with the stewed beans and the casadas that they’re looking for because we know that’s what our students are looking for. I love that and all because XXX wrote this terrible article about how the fruit trays weren’t good enough, and now we’re going to get stewed beans. This was probably one of my favorite stories.
Jeffrey Boyce: They’re going to miss you. What advice would you give someone who was considering child nutrition as a profession today?
Lonnie Burt: Absolutely do not hesitate to get into this profession. It is by far the best! How blessed am I!
I feed children for a living. I cannot say that enough to you. It’s incredibly rewarding. I love the challenge of it. I love the satisfaction I get out of that. I love the diversity of it. But again, if anybody is in dietetics, this is the best industry, and to be quite honest with you, there is growth potential. You go into hospital clinical dietetics & unless the chief clinical person leaves, there’s no movement. I wanted growth potential. And that was important to me. I wanted a career, and I wanted to see growth, so my first district was five schools. My next one was 17, and now I’m in 50, and so that was me this is by far the most rewarding, the most collaborative field. People aren’t backstabbing. We all share. We share recipes, we share all of our forms. It’s just the most collaborative working group of people who all have one common goal and that’s getting children to eat good quality, nutritious food. So do not hesitate. This is absolutely the best industry to ever work in.
Jeffrey Boyce: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
Lonnie Burt: No, I think we pretty much covered it all. You bring it out. I can just ramble with you all day. I think you bring it out. I am just so lucky, and I have really had a great career. And the people I’ve met along the way have all been good quality people who are there to support you and help you. And I just love that about this industry. And I love feeding kids. What better role than being part of disease prevention instead of solely focusing on treatment after its onset?
My goal is to be disease prevention. And so I’ve worked my whole life doing that.
Jeffrey Boyce: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.
Lonnie Burt: You’re welcome. I always like talking to you, so hopefully, this was good and will meet your criteria for you.
