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The Best of School Food (And What it Says About Our Standards)
By Deborah Lehmann —
Here’s what the USDA considers a gold-standard school meal:
Entree: Waffle sticks with sausage and syrup OR Jumbo Corndog OR Fiesta taco pocket with taco packet OR Peanut butter and jelly or yogurt with fruit and nut mix
Sides: Cheetos Cracker Trax or Shape Up, raisins
Fat-free chocolate milk or 1% white milk
Salad bar
That’s what students ate last Thursday in California’s Manteca School District, which recently won Gold certification from the USDA for serving healthy school meals. To win the award, schools need to exceed 70 percent participation for lunch and meet additional nutrition standards. For example, they need to serve a different vegetable every day, including dark green or orange vegetables and peas or beans.
The regulations are sensible enough. But I’m still trying to understand why America’s award-winning school lunches include Cheetos and jumbo corndogs…
May 10th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Sad to see so much processed meat in these meals versus healthy protein, but what is truly disturbing is the extent to which cheap carbohydrates rule in school meals. Even the protein is breaded, the milk flavored and sweetened. What we are serving our kids every day is nothing less than an insulin bomb. No wonder they are turning out obese and pre-diabetic.
May 10th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
The standards are, indeed, pitifully low. And we will ALL be paying for the astronomical healthcare costs of all the sick children (diabetes, heart disease, obesity, fatty liver disease, etc.) whose palates have been trained to enjoy this high fat, high sodium, high sugar diet. In Georgia, I am working tirelessly, every day, with an army of other parents who know how to feed children fresh fruits, veggies and whole grains, and proteins that haven’t been injected with antibiotics or hormones. Our children will not participate in the school lunch program until things improve. We are hopeful that with all the current science and research proving the validity of preventative medicine through better nutrition, perhaps we can facilitate change sooner rather than later! Will the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act reform school lunch enough for my daughter to participate? We will see. Yet again, I am making what have been described as “despicable” comments about the state of the NSLP. If that is the case, I feel I am in good company with folks like Marion Nestle, Susan Rubin, Alice Waters, Margo Wootan, Michael Pollan etc. I don’t think they are going to shut up anytime soon, either!!
May 11th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Sounds like food court at the mall food.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Check out Corporate Accountability International’s new Food Campaign, “Value the Meal.” It’s a multi-faceted attempt to combat the mechanisms that facilitate large-scale industrial food production and its consequences. A lot of our focus is on childhood obesity issues.
You can view our blog here: http://valuethemeal.blogspot.com/
And for more info on the campaign:
http://stopcorporateabuse.org/category/sitecategories/food
Thanks,
James Reddick
May 13th, 2009 at 10:19 am
A few years ago I worked intensively with my child’s school’s food service director on improving the quality, nutrition, taste, and desirability, of school lunches. I’m surprised to see “beans” listed as an additional nutritional component. The Director I worked with was adamant that beans were a food safety issue and would not serve them except for processed canned refried variety.
May 27th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I only wish my school’s cafeteria food was as varied and edible as this one. They use the same weird processed and heavily pepper-and-salted “chicken” every day of the week in some way or another. Most students end up opting for pop-tarts and fries or wait almost their entire lunch period to get a “healthy” option of, again, weird processed “tortilla wrap” and a lunch meat of their choice. Those kids with the wraps end up snacking on junk food all day long because the school cafeteria doesn’t dole out enough food per person.