Within a year, Portland (ME) Public Schools plans to start offering daily meatless options at all its elementary school sites, reports the Kennebec Journal. Currently, about a fifth of the 14,500 weekly meals served in district schools are meatless.
One elementary site, Longfellow School, had already been serving meatless meals daily for the past eight years, ever since several students suffered allergic reactions to peanuts. To provide an alternative for vegetarian student who were no longer permitted to bring peanut butter sandwiches to the school, Longfellow began offering meatless standards like macaroni and cheese, vegetarian chili and cheese ravioli on a rotating daily basis.
Those options will now be extended to the other nine elementary schools as well because of the growth of the number of vegetarian students in the district. Meatless dishes such as cheese pizza and salads are already menued at Portland’s middle and high schools.