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Free Lunch, Nachos and Junk Food: A Few Interesting Links
A sampling of today’s school lunch news from around the internet:
Student participation in free or reduced-price lunch programs is at an all-time high, with almost 20 million kids eligible for the subsidized meals. In the past year, enrollment has jumped over 10 percent in Utah, Arizona, Vermont and New Jersey. California has seen a 17 percent increase. The rising number of American students who eat at least one meal at school is just one more reason why it’s critical that we improve school meals.
The Chicago Tribune reports that nachos, a bestselling meal, are here to stay in Chicago schools, even though the district will pilot new healthy choices next year. The article echoes my recent post about healthy options in the cafeterias I visited in Ohio and Massachusetts. Cafeterias are increasingly making healthy items available, but they’re not removing the high-profit junk foods that keep them in business. Presented with a choice between nachos and a garden salad, guess what most students take? The Tribune article also includes a great quote, which sums up what I have found to be the underlying problem with the National School Lunch Program: ”[The cafeteria is] the one place in the school where adults are not in charge,” said Liquori, who heads School Food FOCUS, a coalition of big-city school districts working for change. “In the lunchroom we let children make the decisions about whether they will eat healthy food or nachos today, but teachers don’t ask kids if they want to study history or play video games, today.”
In a state audit of New York City public schools, two-thirds of sites visited violated city and state nutrition regulations, selling items like gummy bears and soda throughout the day. The report states that school principals generally knew about the violations but were hesitant to scrap the junk food because revenue from vending machines provides funding for after-school activities and athletics. During site visits, auditors saw students head to the vending machines for lunch to bypass the long lunch lines. One student told auditors that her lunch that day was gummy snacks and a bottle of water. The report’s recommendations focus on bringing competitive foods into compliance by changing package sizes and ensuring through DoE contracts that the items in vending machines meet certain nutritional requirements. That’s certainly necessary, but it won’t ensure that students buy a complete meal for lunch instead of gummy snacks. As I saw in a Rhode Island high school (scroll down to the end of the post), they’ll just buy smaller packages of school-compliant gummy snacks…
June 11th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Looking back at your post on the RI high school, I was reminded of the years I worked in a local high school. Whenever I walked through the halls during lunch time, I would observe the students’ lunches: bags of BBQ Fritos, Doritos, sodas, energy drinks, cookies, bowls of ramen noodles. Within one hallway I might find one student who brought a sandwich or yogurt from home.