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Can the Customer Always be Right if the Customer isn’t Given the Right Choices?
By Patricia Mulvey —
The Capital Times of Madison, WI ran an article last week exploring whether the food offered by the Madison Metropolitan School District is healthy. Our food service director, Frank Kelly, is quoted in this article saying that the food “conforms to USDA nutrition standards,” and that his service needs to provide food that the “kids will actually eat” because “the kids are our customers” and they don’t want to eat food “that’s perceived as ‘good for them’.”
My daughter entered kindergarten this year. She wanted to know why she couldn’t eat hot lunch like many of her friends. My explanations that our homemade foods were more nutritious didn’t sway her. She began to beg and obsess about it. So, rather than make school lunch a forbidden fruit, we began to read the menus together to choose meals she could have.
This proved to be complicated. First, she is lactose intolerant, and so she is unable to eat the mac and cheese, grilled cheese, and “smart” pizza-type meals without taking medication at mealtime. Second, I know that low-nutrient, highly processed junk food has a bad effect on learning and behavior, so out went hot dog and French fry days, along with any meals featuring tater tots or other deep fried junk that are served literally half the days of the month. That left us with about four days’ meals to choose from, and they generally included sugary sweet options like bunny cake, brownies, chocolate cake or French toast sticks — more complications!
We recently selected a hot lunch of ziti with marinara sauce, green beans, orange juice and bunny cake (what is bunny cake?!?). My daughter ate her cake, drank her juice, ate a bite of ziti and threw out the rest with the green beans. She was cranky and starving when she got home. She told me she loved hot lunch.
Were the choices made by this customer right? Are we right to offer her this choice?
My daughter makes different choices when other options are available to her. This week, I packed her a lunch that consisted of a few wedges of whole wheat pita, some carrot sticks, and rounds of cucumber along with hummus to dip these in. I also gave her an apple and a small juice box. When she came home, I saw that she had eaten her carrots, some pita, some apple, some hummus and she drank her juice. She hadn’t touched her cucumbers. She was in a good mood, but still hungry. I cut up what was left of her apple, and she dipped that in her hummus along with more of her pita. Still no interest in the cucumbers.
I don’t know if my homemade lunch met the USDA nutritional requirements, but I do know it was more nutrient-dense than cake, juice, a little ziti and uneaten green beans.
A 5-year old can and will make nutritious choices if the choice is a carrot vs. a cucumber to dip into hummus — but not if the choice is between bunny cake and green beans. We, the adults, need to provide better options so that the “customer” can always be right.
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