Chicken Sandwich Changeup
East Hampton School District officials have acknowledged that an experiment done on a breaded chicken patty sandwich by an eighth-grade student was the catalyst for change.
The school district recently announced that it would begin serving a fresh version of its breaded chicken menu items, including chicken fingers and a chicken sandwich, following the discovery by Tycho Burwell, an East Hampton Middle School student, that a breaded chicken patty from the school cafeteria did not develop much mold after being left out for a few weeks. By comparison, in the same experiment, an organic chicken sandwich from Harbor Market in Sag Harbor almost immediately grew big splotches of blue mold, while a similar sandwich from McDonald’s barely showed any signs of decomposition.
Richard Burns, the district superintendent, and Isabel Madison, the assistant superintendent for finance, said yesterday that while plans were already in place to eventually change the chicken served in the school cafeterias, Tycho’s experiment “expedited” the change.
Whitsons, the school’s food service vendor, “very willingly came up with this solution,” Ms. Madison said.
At the East Hampton School Board meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Burns said the middle school principal, Charles Soriano, actually thanked Tycho “for a bit of student activism in a positive way because it brought some issues to the table.”
Tycho purchased a sandwich from McDonald’s on March 23 and the next day bought sandwiches from Harbor Market and the East Hampton Middle School cafeteria. He placed them under glass bowls and waited. On April 9, the Harbor Market sandwich was unrecognizable, while the McDonald’s sandwich looked unchanged, and the school sandwich began to show a slight sign of discoloration. By Monday, the school sandwich had developed a little more discoloration and some mold.
And on Monday afternoon’s school lunch plate, the new chicken fingers and chicken sandwiches appeared. Tycho said they looked much more appetizing.
“They looked a lot better. They didn’t look like compacted, pushed-together chicken,” he said, adding that he may, in fact, try them at some point, rather than avoiding all school food as he previously thought he would do.
The experiment was part of a follow-up assignment related to the reading of the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan in Meredith Hasemann’s English class. Tycho documented his project in photographs and a seven-page essay.
His reaction to the school’s chicken swap?
“I thought it was kind of funny,” he said.