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Michelle Obama: School Lunch Should be a Lesson
Legislators and USDA officials are slowly starting to talk about school meals as a health initiative. They see school meals as an opportunity to ensure that students are getting the proper nutrients in the proper amounts — at least for one meal of the day — and they say an investment in nutritious school meals will be a down payment on healthcare reform.
I’m sure Michelle Obama agrees with them. But she also sees school lunch as much more than a pit stop for nutrients. In her eyes, school lunch is a learning opportunity — a way to instill lifelong healthy habits in American children and American families.
On Friday, the First Lady made a visit to Bancroft Elementary School to talk to the students who helped her plant the White House vegetable garden, and she once again stressed the importance of healthy eating. As she has said before, Mrs. Obama told students and parents that she turned to take-out and processed foods during the campaign, and that she “started to see that taking a toll on our health.”
So she began making changes — buying more fruits and vegetables, eliminating processed food and “[engaging] our children in the process of understanding what foods do to their bodies.” In fact, Mrs. Obama said, Malia and Sasha “ate up that information and they started schooling me and lecturing me about what I should be eating, and what a carrot does, and what broccoli does.”
What that showed her, she said, is that “kids can lead the way for us.” And school lunch can help them do that. We need to make sure that “the food that our kids are getting in school each and every day is as healthy as it can be, so that we’re bringing some of these lessons home and we’re also expanding them in the classrooms and in the schools,” Mrs. Obama said.
Michelle Obama sees that school lunch has the potential to shape children’s eating habits, to introduce them to foods they don’t eat at home, to teach them that chicken doesn’t have to come shaped into a nugget and breaded. Once students try and accept new, nutritious foods, maybe they’ll ask their parents to serve those foods at home. Maybe they’ll spur some changes in the way their whole family eats.
That’s a beautiful thought, but it means that Congress is going to have to do more than enact stricter nutrition standards for school meals. Low-fat chicken nuggets and pizza with whole-grains hidden in the crust may be a down payment on healthcare reform, but that down payment will only last until those students graduate from high school. An educational school lunch would raise a generation of children with lifelong healthy eating habits — habits that will reach not just them, but their families too.
The First Lady really gets it. Let’s hope Congress will start to catch on.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
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May 30th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
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