When I started writing The Lunch Tray in 2010, an actual week’s menu in Houston ISD included breaded chicken sandwiches, cheeseburgers, chicken fried steak fingers with cream gravy, beef taco nachos, beef taco salad, pepperoni pizza and Frito Pie (fried corn chips topped with chili and cheese). The latter two entrees were served with mashed potatoes, dessert was offered on most of those days, and it could all be washed down with chocolate milk. Indeed, that same year I shared here a mathematical experiment in which I proved that a child could easily gain weight from eating HISD’s school meals.
Those highly caloric meals made perfect sense, though, when you understand that the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was instituted to combat hunger after too many World War II recruits were found to be malnourished. But given the growing concern regarding childhood obesity, in 2012 the NLSP’s old calorie minimums were replaced with common sense calorie limits on each meal served.
Unfortunately, though, common sense doesn’t always prevail into discussions of school meals.
Though it had a long history of bipartisan support, the NSLP has become highly politicized ever since First Lady Michelle Obama made its overhaul one of her signature issues. So when much-needed reforms were instituted two years ago, one of the first complaints from the political right was that big, strapping football players were going hungry due to Mrs. Obama’s Nanny State school meal calorie limits. (See, “The Right Wing and the School Food Calorie Kerfuffle.”)
But is the specter of of the “starving student athlete” real? And even if very athletic kids need an usually high number of calories, should their unique needs dictate calorie limits for the rest of the student population, which is unfortunately quite sedentary?
I urge you to read Dana Woldow’s excellent piece in today’s Beyond Chron, “Are School Lunches Starving Student Athletes?,” which asks and answers those very questions.
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mommm!!!! says
It’s not a one or the other proposition. With kids, all of whom go through growth spurts, need more calories than most adults and more calories at growth spurts. That’s not even to mention the literally tens of thousands of kids who need more calories because thy are playing sports.
When I was a kid we were told by soccer coaches to eat a big plate of pasta before the game. So we carb loaded because we would need that energy to get through the game. You have kids in school now that go straight from school to practice sometimes several times a week that have had their caloric intake cut via smaller portions at the school lunch to avoid giving too many calories to a sedentary child and I think that’s the wrong approach. And it’s going to fail. It is failing. We can’t set standards at the school level that’s A.) based strictly on calories and B.) based on kids being overweight because that only addresses less than half of the kids in the school system. To dismiss the idea that there are kids who are not overweight and who are playing sports and need more food simply because “not all kids play sports” is not helping the issue.
And to have this conversation without addressing the actual food itself is spinning this conversation into a the light that you wish to view it in. The bottom line is that the food being served is still heavily processed garbage. Almond milk might seem healthy until you get into the nuts and bolts of the products ingredients. And then you discover that the otherwise seemingly healthy product you thought you were getting is in fact just more heavily processed garbage. It’s the same with the crap we’re still serving kids at lunch.
And really, low fat anything doesn’t translate to healthy because those products are loaded with added sugars. In fact, 80% of all products in grocery stores right now are loaded with added sugars. And yes, that includes everything labeled as “healthy”. And that’s not even getting into the fact that all the added chemicals in any given product or so prevalent that the gram weight of said chemicals actually account for anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of any given food product. Consequently, people have to eat more of any processed food product to feel satisfied, which has the added bonus of eating even more sugar.
The conversation about “food” and what “food” actually is needs to change. Otherwise, we will continue to argue in circles about what’s healthy and what isn’t and on and on. The bottom line is that processed food is not “food”. It is an ingestible product. “Food” is an apple, a steak, a stalk of celery. An ingestible product is a Dorito, a twinkie, kraft mac n cheese, fruit loops. There’s a reason why Velveeta is called a cheese “product” and not cheese. This concept should be applied to everything processed.
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Sorry for the long delay in posting your comment and thanks for sharing your views here, mommm!!!