Thursday, April 15, 2010

the battle against school lunch

During Spring Break, I caught a rerun of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC. Apparently, Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef, is trying to raise awareness about childhood nutrition (or lack thereof) in America's public schools. He's doing this by going into schools in Huntington, West Virginia, and implementing his own line of school lunches.

The episode I saw was shocking. Elementary students (probably first graders) could not identify a potato. They also couldn't identify tomatoes, eggplant, onions, and just about every other vegetable that exists! They could, however, identify pizza, hamburgers, and french fries. They almost fainted when Jamie told them that french fries are made from potatoes.

This tells me that something is definitely wrong. I'm not sure I could have identified an eggplant at age six, but you'd better believe I knew what a potato was. And you'd also better believe my parents were force-feeding me foods I refused to try because they "looked icky." (Sometime soon I'll tell you the story of how I came to love pumpkin pie!)

A few weeks ago, I also discovered a blog called Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project. The blog is written by an anonymous teacher, Mrs. Q, who has committed to eating school lunch every school day during 2010. Before she eats her lunch, she takes a picture of it. Have a look around her blog. Then wonder to yourself how anyone in good conscience can feed this to any living human being of any age!

I'm not trying to advance any agenda with this post. I just wanted to share with you a new issue I discovered. I guess I never realized how bad school lunch is because my sweet mother packed my lunch for me every single day until I graduated high school. (Thanks, Mom!) What do you guys think? Did you eat school lunch as a kid? Is it as bad as Jamie Oliver and Mrs. Q make it out to be? I'm interested to see whether I'm overreacting.

10 comments:

  1. I always had to eat school lunches. They were gross and by high school I hardly ate anything. From my experience as a teacher, I feel that school lunches have gotten even worse. Especially for the kids that eat breakfast and lunch at school. The vegetable choices are usually canned and mushy. Yuck! I had 2 diabetic students one year and since they had to monitor their carbs they only got to eat a couple of things for lunch everyday, otherwise their blood sugar would get too high.

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  2. Check this out. "My Two Year Old Eats Octopus." Written by a mom at my church. Its about teaching kids to eat REAL food, HEALTHY food, etc. http://www.mytwoyearoldeatsoctopus.com/nancy_piho.html

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  3. I could die a happy woman if I could convince any two-year-old to eat octopus. Maybe it'd help if I tried it first.

    Hi, Michelle! Good to hear from you!

    One thing I didn't mention in the post was the complete lack of nutritional planning, especially at my public school. Certain combinations were always served together. The one that sticks out in my memory is chili, tater tots, and a cinnamon roll. So, sodium, carbs and carbs!

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  4. I ate school lunches sometimes and I remember wondering why my hamburgers always had little colored specks in them (yellow, blue, red) - that can't be a good thing. But, let me tell you - those lunch ladies could make a mean hot roll!

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  5. I know!! I LOVED the hot rolls. Sometimes I would take an extra 20 cents and buy one from the a la carte line. Those were very good days.

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  6. I think schools have been trying to do better lately--we've been having fresh fruit almost every day and a lot of salad (with that inedible non-fat dressing). But some days it's still mystery meat and instant potatoes! And we do still have the same old combinations over and over--no creativity whatsoever.

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  7. Leah, you were luckier than Tonia. I hardly ever made lunch for her after she got to high school. Instead she got a double dose of lunchroom food because she usually ate her tray and half of mine, too!

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  8. All the school lunches that I remember were either A) Unhealthy and disgusting or B) Unhealthy and delicious. The one I miss most are chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes (with bright yellow gravy!), and delish rolls. Yum. I do remember though that in elementary school we would have "salad bar day" about once a month, and though I hated salad, everyone else was really excited about it. By high school, we had a lot of options (I'm guessing some of them were healthy-ish?) but everyone I knew chose the really unhealthy stuff. I ate a giant chocolate chip cookie everyday for lunch and some cheese stuffed breadsticks. I wonder why I was overweight?

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  9. Lunch room chocolate cake. Still the best.

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  10. I'm with you on this! Our public schools should be providing our kids with food that is healthy instead of the complete garbage they are getting. Our eating habits are formed during childhood and if we aren't getting positive reinforcement at home OR at school, we are more or less doomed to do what we know, since that is how we were raised.

    I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother who cooked every meal when I was a child. It was out of necessity because we were broke but I could identify vegetables, even eggplant and I even ate foods like liver. As a society, our relationship with food is scary. We eat "foods" that the ingredient list looks like a chemistry experiment and we eat them in such large portions! Its not really very surprising that this generation of kids is the first ever in history to be born with a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

    Sad, really, that we all recognize the problem but are incapable of making changes.

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