Kids love spaghetti, but spaghetti doesn’t always love kids — at least when it comes to being served in the strict amounts dictated by school nutrition standards across California.
“Scooping spaghetti is kind of hard,” explained Hannah Carroll , the director of food services for the Goleta Unified School District . “The long noodles fall out of the scoop, and they can’t get very accurate portions.”
Carroll, who came to this job in 2021 after similar roles in Virginia and Lompoc, ran into this conundrum when the district’s students requested spaghetti on an annual food preference survey. She thought back to her own childhood in Pennsylvania, and remembered SpaghettiOs, the tiny, circular noodles popularized by cans of Campell’s Soup.