Councilor: Schools kept buying meat even as frozen meat kept piling up in warehouse

City Councilor John Connolly launched a scathing attack on Boston Public Schools this morning, charging the school system's cafeteria system is rife with waste, poor planning and a warehouse in Wilmington full of expired frozen food.

At a hearing this morning, Connolly charged students at 48 public schools were served frozen food past its expiration dates and that school food officials have so screwed up the food requisition process they were ordering frozen chicken patties even as the federal government was giving BPS chicken patties for free.

Using BPS requisition documents, he said on Jan. 14, students at South Boston and Madison Park high schools and the Higginson and Frederick schools were offered Cargill grilled egg patties that had been sitting in the warehouse since September, 2009.

He said that the private warehouse the city pays for storing food in Wilmington already had 72 cases of frozen ground beef last year when the city ordered 14 more cases, he said. And then, in April, it ordered 73 more cases, followed by 24 more cases in July. The original 72 cases were simply allowed to expire, he said.

Connolly said the warehouse also has more than 5,300 pounds of expired frozen pork sausages as well as expired cheese. Although the food may not cause illness, it could have reduced or no nutritional value after all that time in cold storage, he said.

Connolly said that even if the school system can straighten out its "severely mismanaged" food system, he still wants to know why schools are expending so much money on frozen food instead of on fresh food.

City Councilor Mike Ross noted that he and then-Councilor Chuck Turner held similar hearings a year ago and said that nothing has been done.

School Superintendent Carol Johnson said "the problem with food storage, not food safety."

"Let's be clear: the food we serve to our children is safe, all of it is safe," and cafeteria workers would never serve stuff to kids they wouldn't serve to their own families, she said.

Nevertheless, she said school officials and cafeteria workers have taken steps in recent days to expunge expired food. Roughly $170,000 worth of frozen food stored in Wilmington has been set aside as expired, she said, adding another 280 boxes of food in school cafeterias has been removed.

She continued that, starting next fall, the school system will use a new "menu cycle" system at schools with kitchens to reduce the amount of duplicate food orders.