If you haven’t taken a good look at your kids’ school lunch menu lately, Fed Up: School Lunch Project may literally shock you. This blog chronicles the lunches of one Illinois schoolteacher, who orders, photographs, and then eats the school cafeteria lunch daily, and reports on the results. They’re not pretty. Cheap, empty carbs galore, a desperate lack of vegetables, mystery meat, a tidal wave of sugar: Is this what we’re feeding kids just before they’re expected to absorb algebra?
The National School Lunch Program is administered by the USDA under the Child Nutrition Act. Every four years, the act is re-examined, and reauthorized. Even now, Congress is poring over a budget that allocates $10 billion towards improving the nutrition content of school lunches. But will that be enough? After all, we have built a program that’s a dumping ground for commodities purchased by the USDA, including meat rejected by fast food operations. It’s no surprise that horrified parents are banding together to fight the power, through groups like Better School Food and Edible Schoolyard.
One thing’s for sure: today’s group of informed, annoyed parents would never let the President get away with classifying ketchup as a vegetable.
I want this revolution. Three children, thirteen years apart. Memories of school lunches and a vegetarian child made me start making all my kids’ lunches. Instead of it being easier, my kids’ healthy lunches pale in comparison to the fat filled (678 average calories at our district’s elementary schools) foods piled on to “get the kids to eat something.” I hate tax money being spent on white flour, fatty rubbery chicken, and greasy fries. I want my kids’ peers to have a healthy meal and a productive learning environment. And I want my kids to have healthy food modeled for them–even if it is not the same as mine.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:05 pm