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Corn Refiners to Ann Cooper: Keep HFCS in Lunch
The Corn Refiners Association really has its eye on school lunch these days. For one thing, the association was one of the sponsors of the School Nutrition Association’s 2009 national conference (posters throughout the hall read, “High Fructose Corn Syrup: Making Healthy Foods Affordable for America’s Schoolchildren”). The association is also touting the benefits of HFCS to individual schools — or at least those with high-profile meal programs. In late June, the corn refiners sent a letter to Ann Cooper, my co-editor and the interim director of nutrition services for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, warning her that many foods and beverages currently on the district’s menu could be “jeopardized” under her plan to ban the sweetener.
“We would like to share science-based information with you concerning high fructose corn syrup so that you and members of the Board of Education can be made aware of its nutritional equivalence to table sugar and the important role it plays in foods offered by the Boulder Valley School District,” Association President Audrae Erickson wrote to Cooper. At the end of the letter, he warned that there is “no sugar-based alternative to replace many of the foods that now contain high fructose corn syrup.” The sweetener is found “in many school foods, including breads, cereals, pancakes, waffles, muffins, cheese spreads, crackers, yogurts, flavored milks, hamburger/hot dog buns, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, breakfast bars, deli meats, spaghetti sauces and taco sauce.” Eliminating these HFCS-sweetened foods could increase costs for the school district, he wrote.
Let me be clear: I have no intrinsic problem with HFCS. My problem with the sweetener is that it is a marker of highly processed food, which tends to be less healthy than “whole” food prepared from scratch. Cooper knows that too, and that’s why she’s banning the sweetener and moving the Boulder meal program entirely over to scratch cooking. And despite the dire warnings, I don’t think she’s going to miss any of those common HFCS-sweetened foods.
The corn refiners are right that HFCS shows up all over school menus. Corn syrup keeps costs low for everything from cinnamon-glazed french toast sticks and country breakfast jammer sticks, to buffalo-style breaded chicken patties and WonderBites chicken dippers with bbq sauce. Companies even take schools’ government commodity apples and turn them into artificially colored applesauce sweetened with — you guessed it — HFCS.
The Corn Refiners Association claims that HFCS makes healthy food affordable for America’s schoolchildren. What it really does is make junk food and fast food affordable for America’s schoolchildren.
July 29th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Banners stating “High Fructose Corn Syrup: Making Healthy Foods Affordable for America’s Schoolchildren” These people are on drugs!!