Congress pushes back on healthier school lunches

[Giggle Goose]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=142329746

Not sure if this has been posted anywhere else. It would be ideal, of course, if parents actually were involved enough in their kids' lives to pack them a healthy lunch every day. Unfortunately, that's not the case in most public schools...when I was a substitute teacher, many kids would have their breakfast, lunch, AND an afternoon snack provided by the school. So does the government really have ultimate responsibility to look out for these kids' interests? If it could be handled on the local level, what would you suggest?

[HYHYBT]

Well... they've got one point right, at least. Whole grain crust just doesn't work on pizza.

[Amanita]

And in some cases, forcing healthy food on kids doesn't always work. They find other ways to get what they want, either bringing it from home or leaving the school to get it. Here in town, when a high school cafeteria banned anything remotely junky, the students just migrated to the cafeteria of a local hospital. In essence, they traded one government cafeteria for another. At the hospital they could get the stuff they liked, at least.

Unfortunately some of the kids doing this seemed to think that because they were off school grounds, they could get away with anything, and there started to be lots of problems with loud noise, horseplay, and even food fights. So the hospital cafeteria put security in there to keep the teens out.

I suppose schools could forbid students from leaving for lunch at all, but that would just screw over the kids who go home every day for lunch.

[bara]

Like many things, eating healthy is a habit. If kids arent doing it by the time highschool rolls around it woul dbe tough to force them to change. Which of course brings us back to parenting in the formative years, or rather lack thereof.

[AdminAssistant]

At my school no one was allowed to leave for lunch except high school seniors. I imagine that's the general norm instead of the exception. A lot of schools are placing restrictions even on lunches brought from home, which I think is a bit silly.

My school started instituting some of these changes ~2000 thanks to Gov. Huckabee. He dropped a lot of weight (the Little Rock rumor milled claimed a combo of gastric bypass and diet pills), so the rest of us had to as well. The soda machines were gone...never mind that only teachers were allowed to use them. Nothing could be fried anymore. No more hot rolls. What happened in that case was that more high school students chose to eat in the high school lounge, which only had snack machines, instead of the cafeteria. So they traded in a hot meal of a small hamburger, tater tots, and corn for a Snickers bar and a bag of chips. So which is really worse? But no, the Gov was looking out for our welfare.

I saw him on Daily Show recently and laughed my ass off. Guess all those wonderful diet plans that he instituted didn't stick with him, did they?

[Andara Bledin]

A lot of schools are already closed campus. We survived just fine without be allowed to leave the grounds during lunch, and we had decent lunches without pizza ever being on the menu.

Although, the tater tots were the absolute best of the side options, so a restriction on potato items would rankle. Plus, most potato goods can be baked (ours were) and the salt can be kept to a minimum (ours was), so I'm not sure the restriction is going to do what they claim it's supposed to.

^-.-^

[AdminAssistant]

A small piece of pizza served with side vegetables every now and then isn't going to hurt anybody. If I remember correctly, we had pizza every two weeks or so and every Friday was hamburger day. There was also spaghetti, goulash, the mystery meat in gravy, chicken patties...aw man, now I'm hungry! Point is, we survived. I think it's because, in elementary, we had 2-3 recesses and we didn't have a buffet. Everybody* got the same plate of food, with relatively small portions. I've seen schools on TV where 5 year olds are presented with a bounty of different choices....that seems wasteful.

*Barring those on special diets

[Andara Bledin]

The spaghetti at our school was actually pretty awesome, and probably loaded with more salt than a week's worth of fries, too. I seem to recall that it was only served once a week, and we always had more kids come through, then. I worked the lunch line, so I know what the kids were offered every day of the week, and what they actually took.

^-.-^

[Gravekeeper]

I find this all kind of surreal because I've never been to a school with a cafeteria. Up here, you brought your own lunch. The school only provided milk and recess snacks. Which were not free. So your parents were forced to be involved or you'd starve. -.-

[Racket_Man]

At my school no one was allowed to leave for lunch except high school seniors. I imagine that's the general norm instead of the exception. A lot of schools are placing restrictions even on lunches brought from home, which I think is a bit silly.

<snip>
No more hot rolls.
<snip>


:

I remember back 30 odd years ago my HS was also a closed campus. either you brought lunch from home or bought lunch in the cafeteria.

NO MORE HOT ROLLS>??????????? there would have been riots in my HS if they had done that. take away the 95% soy filler "hamburgers" (meat????? what meat???), the "pizza" that was a hint of sauce and maybe something that "might" have been cheese or "meat (again with the MEat??? what meat???), or some of the other "food" they served

BUT

for some reason my HS had the BEST hot rolls on the planet --- light fluffly puffy warm great smelling bready goodness --- absolute HEAVEN

for years people on Classmates have been trying to get or figure out the receipe.

[Kheldarson]

At the school I taught at, over 80% of the student body was on free or reduced lunch. Every child had to go through the lunch line in order for the program to be allowed to continue. Where did most of their food go? In the trash. What were most students eating? The chips, candy, and gatorade served in the canteen. So...they had money enough to buy junk food every day, yet were throwing out good-for-you food that was free through tax payer dollars every day. Even on days where the canteen was closed. Hurts my head.

[Andara Bledin]

Wow. Did you ever eat the school lunch? I can't imagine just throwing out food, even (or especially) free food.

I went to school in a fairly mixed area, with some notably affluent families, and some not so much (for comparison, Tiger Woods attended the same school, while I and a number of my peers had subsidized lunch cards). Our school lunch was good enough that I'd guess that at least half of the school ate at the cafeteria and most of that food was paid for with cash. We also had a "snack shack" where one could purchase junk food, and while it also did brisk business, most kids didn't eat just that for lunch but used it to buy hot drinks and sodas.

^-.-^

[bhskittykatt]

My schools all served fairly healthy lunches. I can't recall my first two elementary schools, but the third one had the "daily hot lunch", a salad bar, and a pizza bar. I usually went with the daily special or the salad since their pizza was nasty. My fourth elementary school I think had a burger bar and a daily hot lunch special.

Middle school had a sub sandwich line, the daily special, a burger line, and I think a pizza line. I usually had the daily special until 8th grade when the head cook went to the new high school, after which point the food went downhill so I started going to the sub sandwich line there (mmm...meatball subs!). High school had all of those as well (and my old middle school cook... yay! She was seriously awesome and the food was seriously tasty!).

ALL the schools had menus you could take home, so you could see what was coming. If you didn't like what was on the menu that day (or Mom and Dad didn't like it), then you could pack your lunch.

Of course, I came out fat, and I ate school lunches. I don't blame them for my weight at all (I blame $5 pizza dinners I survived on whilst going to college, which I started going to when I was still in high school), but I have to confess I'm not exactly a poster child for the school lunch. All I can say is that we seemed to always have pretty healthy options to match the unhealthy ones.

I don't know if you can eliminate pizza and fries from a school lunch program. I think there should at least be healthy options to offset them. (I'm not sure pizza sauce counts as a vegetable, either.) Give the kid a choice between pizza and salad. (In my elementary school, the salad bar was the most popular option!) I can understand being upset if there's only junk on the menu, but as long as there are healthy options, I see nothing wrong with keeping pizza and burgers as well.

[Lace Neil Singer]

At my school there was a choice between junk food (chips, burgers, beans, hot dogs etc); a healthy meal or salad. Only problem was, the healthy meal was disgusting; the gravy had fat bubbles in it, the veg was rarely cooked thru and the meat was rubbery... and the salad was always brown and wilted. X_x So you either bought a meal of junk food, or you brought your own lunch. The cafeteria staff were supposed to stop students from buying junk more than three times a week, but they never bothered to enforce this rule.

Now tho, the school I went to doesn't serve junk food at all... resulting in students leaving the school at lunchtime and going to get McDonalds instead. -.-

[Kheldarson]

Wow. Did you ever eat the school lunch? I can't imagine just throwing out food, even (or especially) free food.

I went to school in a fairly mixed area, with some notably affluent families, and some not so much (for comparison, Tiger Woods attended the same school, while I and a number of my peers had subsidized lunch cards). Our school lunch was good enough that I'd guess that at least half of the school ate at the cafeteria and most of that food was paid for with cash. We also had a "snack shack" where one could purchase junk food, and while it also did brisk business, most kids didn't eat just that for lunch but used it to buy hot drinks and sodas.

^-.-^

No, I didn't eat the lunch (it cost teachers nearly $4 per meal so I packed), but it didn't look any different than stuff I got when I was a student. Well, they had more variety of fruits than I did. Simple fact was that the stuff we served wasn't the stuff they got at home, so they had no interest in expanding their food horizons. And since it was free, their parents (those who paid any attention) didn't care one way or another. >.<