Good School Lunches

En re school lunches, which entered into a previous debate, here's an article about a promising experiment:

Link to article

Note, though, that healthy, appealing food costs more than we've yet proved willing to spend on school lunches for low-income kids. Maybe change is in the air.

My new position requires K-2 lunch duty.

Visionary article. Unlikely "universal" scenario here.

Time is a factor. Many urban public schools are on survival mode and pretty much race through the day( I run from the library to the lunch room and back to the library to teach again, then I get to have MY 20 minute lunch). Ever try to get a pre-k to eat a meal his caregiver didn't make or provide? I bought plastic gloves to open ketchup packs that the little ones try to open with their mouths. I squirt myself and the kids with ketchup. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm complaining...

The schools serve breakfast and lunch. We feed 900+ students a day. Unless the school board hires a quality outsourced caterer to provide such a meal would it work.

There is little time to make that much food in house. Everything I saw children eating this last week came from an outsourced company and was pre-packaged, microwaved and/or ready-made. You wouldn't believe the amount of garbage. Many schools do not provide recycling. It is a school by school budget decision here. It usually doesn't float to the top.

I opened at least 50 watermelon apple sauce containers that were filled with green applesauce. That was an intelligent choice for 3 year olds.

It would have to be reinforced at home: a healthy diet.
Our urban school children are more overweight than ever.
Factors contributing to this fact: lack of exercise, no recess, lack of instruction on subjects other than tested material, cuts in physical education programs, working parents, fast food companies, and so on.

Wouldn't it be great to just be able to serve kids at urban schools a healthy meal?

I could easily write a thesis on this topic but I will limit myself on this topic.

It is not difficult to prepare a nutritious meal for 900 people at a very reasonable cost. I spent ten years of my life operating a commercial kitchen in a healthcare setting serving 3-4 meals per day, 365 days a year etc.

However, several factors in the school setting make it a lot more difficult.

1) In many cases, you are forced to use inferior products which are available from the USDA. When I worked at a public hospital, the hospital received commodity products from the federal government as the hospital served an indigent population. The quality of food was miserable.

2) Many of the public school systems bid out all of their purchases. That is good in that it reduces costs. However, in the bidding process, the low bidder is the low bidder because the food is complete garbage. The purchasing authority within the school system does not enforce the quality standards.

When I talk about quality, we would pull out over 1# of pits and stems from 6 #10 cans of fruit cocktail. if I legally could, I would have bought from places like Sysco or Gordon's Food Service but that was not an option.

3) I have never seen a school with a $5+ per pupil budget. WOW! You could do a lot with HALF of that.

4) As most schools serve a small number of meals, the great move has been to go to central commissaries where the food is prepared and distributed. That can be done right. However, if it is not done right, the food quality is pretty poor.

5) Personally, I did not attend a school with a cafeteria until junior high. And the public school lunches were pretty good - good enough that I put on 15# the first year. And this was REAL food not the pizza, hamburger, fish sandwich, chili mac - that you see today. And 50-60% of the food was thrown away.

What are you going to do, force-feed good food to students? Or have a lunch room monitor make sure that everyone eats their peas? Dietary choices start at home with the parents.

Moderator note:

Toni, I edited your link to be hidden behind some text. The link itself made the page stretch out.

Thanks for pointing out an interesting article.

Aaron

Thanks, Aaron, for improving the link. My technical prowess in such areas leaves much to be desired.

I'd just like to concur with the other comments above. The school lunch program, in terms of people served, is the government's biggest food subsidy program. The program has dual functions, expressly stated in the legislation: to help ensure nutritionally adequate diets for low-income children, and to serve as a outlet for the disposal of price-supported excess agricultural commodities (which is why it's a USDA program and not one under the purview of what was once HEW.) Needless to say, these two purposes don't always fit together well, as jlawrence01 notes. The current reimbursement level to schools from the feds for fully-funded lunches is $2.24, well below the price paid for the attractive-sounding lunches described in the Times article. The public would have to be willing to commit some more money to this program to provide kids with something enticing and healthy. For-profits are moving into this arena, though they're generally most interested in schools that have lower participation rates in the subsidized programs, and profitable food isn't always the healthiest food, as we all know. But it's true, as Food Nut says, that there's much more going on here than just costs. I've served as lunch monitor in my kids' public school, and a more unappetizing experience is difficult to imagine. Eating is merely functional, something to get through with as quickly as possible, as actually enjoying it seems pretty impossible in so many school lunchrooms (I do know it can get somewhat better in high school.) Is it possible, these days, to imagine integrating food into a school curriculum, so that kids would learn not just about good nutrition, but also how to enjoy eating as a rewarding social experience? (Not to mention all the other curriculum-based lessons -- science, history, etc. etc. that you could spin off of a focus on food.) I'd dearly love to see this happen, as I think teaching how to eat and why it's such a fun thing to do is almost as important as teaching what to eat. But since it's hard to fit "sociable dining" onto a standardized test I suspect this won't happen soon.

Maybe I'm spending too much time in schools, though. I'm sounding like I'm in lecture mode here. So I'll stop.