If you’ve been a Lunch Tray reader for a while, you might remember this “Hall of Shame” post that called out a summer day camp for actually requiring campers to bring four liters of soda and two dozen cookies per week.
That was a pretty extreme example of a camp doing a poor job of feeding kids, but it certainly isn’t an anomaly. For example, here’s what my kids were offered every single day for “snack” at a local chess camp a few years ago:
I have some theories about why camps serve junk food. First and foremost, it’s cheap. Second, it’s instantly crowd-pleasing, even in a large population of kids who come from all kinds of backgrounds with respect to food. Third, when we’re speaking about sleep-away camp, kids can be anxious and homesick, and camps may feel that plying kids with junk is a way of offering comfort. And finally, sleep-away camp offers kids a welcome respite from parental oversight, and camps may play into that sense of liberation by offering junk foods that parents might not make available at home.
Nonetheless, what camps feed kids does matter, especially at sleep-away camp where kids are completely dependent upon the camp for daily nutrition, sometimes for a month or more at a time. And even at a summer day camp, daily junk food, particularly when used as a reward, can still teach kids all the wrong lessons about healthy eating.
That’s why I really liked this new HuffPo post, “Did I Miss the Summer Camp Junk Food Consent Form?,” written by Caron Gremont of First Bites. In it, she asks all the right questions about junk food at camp, and she tells us about a current campaign by Salud America to get sugary drinks out of summer camps. It’s definitely worth a read.
This also seems like a good time to share (as I think I wind up doing every summer!) a favorite post from the TLT archives: “Ethical, Sustainable, Healthful: A Summer Camp That Gets Food Right.” There you can read all about a camp that doesn’t just make good, healthy food a priority, but also tries to educate kids in a thoughtful way about where their food comes from.
So, what’s the food like at your kids’ summer camp? Has junk food at camp been an issue for you? Share your thoughts in a comment below.
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