Yesterday an interesting story in the New York Times NY/Region section caught my eye.
The new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Joseph J. Lhota, has come under fire for opposing a bill in Albany which would ban eating on New York subways. The goal of the legislation is to reduce the number of rats in the subway system, where riders currently report seeing the rodents on about one out of every ten platforms. (As a former New Yorker, I’d peg that number even higher – eek!) When Lhota served as Rudolph Giuliani’s deputy mayor, he was so active in combatting the city’s rodent problem that Giuliani christened him the “rat czar,” so why is he now opposed to an eating ban?
According the Times report:
Mr. Lhota said in an interview that he watched too many children eating breakfast items, like bagels and muffins, on the subways every morning to ban food.
“I do not support the bill,” Mr. Lhota said. “It severely hurts and impacts minority communities. I don’t want to deny the kid the only time that day he’s going to get food.”
These guys vs. hungry kids?
I was surprised – and pleased – that Lhota is taking the nutritional needs of impoverished kids into account. When you think of the long commutes many kids have to make between boroughs to get to school, the subway is the logical place to eat breakfast. On the other hand, with cuts to transit workers’ jobs, and therefore fewer people to clean subway cars, rats are a significant problem, too.
Maybe the real solution is to get more impoverished kids to take advantage of school breakfast.
Here in Houston ISD, we have a universal, in-class breakfast program in which free breakfast is provided to any student who wants it. The food is taken from a cart as the student enters the school, to be eaten at the child’s desk during the first few minutes of class. While the program continues to generate a lot controversy in more affluent schools (lost class time, sanitation issues and concerns about the nutritional quality of the food), our Food Services department has said that in poorer schools the program has been enthusiastically welcomed by principals who are seeing increased attendance, reduced tardiness and fewer discipline problems. And while I, too, have some concerns about the food offered, the meals (which include milk and fruit) are far more nutritionally well-rounded than the “bagels and muffins” Lhota sees kids eating on the New York subways.
Coincidentally, my friends at the Food Research and Action Center recently issued a comprehensive report on school breakfast, finding that while participation in the national School Breakfast Program is increasing (9.8 million low-income children took advantage of it last year), less than half of the low-income kids eating school lunch also take advantage of breakfast at their school. And, perhaps not surprisingly based on the above Times report, New York City was ranked lowest among surveyed school districts in breakfast participation.
According to FRAC, both kids and school districts lose when breakfast participation is low:
Low participation means missed meals for hungry children and missed dollars for the state and city. If states could increase participation so they reach 60 children with breakfast for every 100 that also eat lunch, FRAC estimates that an additional 2.4 million low-income children would be added to the breakfast program and states would have received an additional $583 million in child nutrition funding.
So maybe it doesn’t have to be a battle between kids’ nutritional needs and subway rats?
More on the FRAC report here.
Do You Love The Lunch Tray? ♥♥♥ Then “like” The Lunch Tray! Join over 1,600 TLT fans by liking TLT’s Facebook page (or follow on Twitter) and you’ll get your Lunch delivered fresh daily, along with bonus commentary, interesting kid-and-food links, and stimulating discussion with other readers. You can also check out my virtual bulletin boards on Pinterest and find selected TLT posts on The Huffington Post.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Bettina Elias Siegel
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I am writing on behalf of the MDPA Conference on Communicating Childhood Obesity Prevention and Policy. The conference is to take place March 20-21 in Silver Spring, MD. I came across your blog while doing research for our bi-weekly newsletter on childhood obesity called MDPA Minute. I think our conference something your audience would be interested in. Would you be interested in receiving some press passes for this event in exchange for helping to promote it to your readers and blogging about it?
Thanks!
Amanda – I’ll email you offline. Thanks for the info.
Good for him. As to raising participation in school breakfast, it’s a great idea. I wonder how it could be accomplished? I sat with this for a few minutes thinking about the reasons inner-city kids I’ve known might not eat breakfast at school, or at least why they might continue to feel that they need to eat those subway muffins and bagels. Just off the top of my head, I came up with:
1) Can’t get to school in time for the breakfast program because they’re making sure their little brother/sister gets to school safely
2) Has a hard time with the timing of public transportation that gets them to school (and let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to convince a 12-year-old to give up 30 minutes of sleep in the morning to have breakfast at school, when there’s a deli right at the bus stop)
3) Status/community; even for low-income and food-insecure kids, the idea that they can gather with friends at the local corner store for a bialy in the morning is powerful stuff. Might be the only real food “choice” they have all day.
4) They might be participating, technically, but the food might be going into the pockets of their jackets or into their backpacks for later. Hence, for just a buck or so (for the muffin/bagel on the subway), they get THREE meals for the day — the muffin, the free school lunch, and the stashed free breakfast food at dinnertime.
Just a few thoughts. It’s such a tough problem, but one we ought to tackle. In the meantime, I’m very much in support of the idea that we should be allowing children to eat on the subway. Heck, there are probably more rats in some of their apartment buildings than there are on the platforms.