Thanks for the link, I loved it! What awful starchy food we're feeding to our nation's kids. No wonder obesity abounds!

Another thing that bothered me were the plastic-covered paper containers. What a waste of resources.
Lisa

Compumom, this phrase really bothered me..."What awful starchy food we're feeding to our nation's kids"...not to pick on you personally, but it made me think.

When did "we" start feeding our nation's kids? And why? When did Mom stop packing lunches and hand their child's diet over to the schools? Institutional food always degenerates into starchy, bland, edible-by-everyone but enjoyable-by-almost-no one carp sooner or later. What happened to a lunchbox (we did brown paper bags) with a sandwich, piece of fruit and thermos of milk? Oh sure, some kids had a bag of chips or cookies or something in their boxes, but that was their parent's choice.

Funny, when I think back, the fat kid was the rarity...rare enough that he or she was often the target of ridicule. I drive by schoolyards today and see that things have changed.

I watch out my office window in the morning, as kids walk by on their way to school. I see others being dropped off at various schools as I go about my work day mornings. You know what I see a lot of? Kids with Starbucks coffee (desserts in a cup) and cans of this or that "energy" drink that is mostly caffeine and sugar. After school, I see flocks of them at the local Taquerias, fast food joints, and convenience stores. Where do they get the money? Why is Mom driving through starbucks to buy her kid a $4 cup of sugar, cream and caffeine (and maybe a muffin or bearclaw) before dropping them off at school?

I don't think school lunches are the problem...no matter how unappealing. The problem is in the home.

rachelellen, I agree with you in part, although I know some families rely on the school food program because they are financially unable to feed their children otherwise. Sometimes that school lunch is the only real meal some of our kids get. I live in a remote and mostly rural community and unemployment is well above 20%. It's just a fact of life here.

However, I think we're also deferring to the schools to teach our children manners, sex education, social interaction, a lot of things that we should be teaching our children ourselves, but some parents have abdicated that responsibility.

Why? Beats me, but a lot of America is counting on the "government" or other agencies to teach their kids, feed their kids, make them good citizens. Plus, a lot of the adults aren't "educated" in healthy eating either, my daughter is in college in health care and was appalled when she found out the fat and calories in a Starbucks mocha, she never figured "just a cup of coffee" was that bad.

However, in spite of that, school lunches are awful, and catsup is considered a vegetable. A million years ago, when I was in school, cooks actually COOKED. Now they open frozen trays of stuff and heat it. More kids? Bigger schools? I dunno, but there sure isn't a homemade item in sight.

Ashley's high school did offer an "ala carte" salad bar, but no one ate it, they'd spend their lunch money on an ice cream bar and bread sticks, so I don't have an answer to that problem either.

I think Amanda probably has the right approach. She gets the school "menu" and Makayla decides which days she wants the lunch at school. She can choose two days per week, sometimes three if there's something like pizza that she really wants. The other days Amanda packs her a lunch, she chooses what she wants. It's usually a ham sandwich on whole wheat, canned mandarin orange sections or an apple, and sometimes a treat like a cookie or brownie or those goldfish crackers Interestingly enough, she thinks cheese crackers with peanut butter is a treat, so more often she takes those or a container of those mini wheat cereals, she likes the chocolate and the maple frosted.

So, she gets the high fat pizza or hot dog a couple of times and gets her own, much healthier, home packed lunch the remainder of the time and she's happy.

Annie

I read recently (can't remember where) that the US's school lunch program was started by the FDR administration, and was designed for kids who needed extra calories. Nowadays, I think that costs and scale keep school lunches from being healthier. Can you imagine trying to cook a fresh meal for 5000+ students? My kids' charter school was declared ineligible for the city's school lunch program. So we had to find a cost effective way to feed 350 students. We had to form a partnership with two other schools to have enough students and get better deals on food. Our lunches cost a dollar more than the rest of Atlanta Public Schools lunches, but they're healthier and have more veggies.

Annie, I do the same thing with my kids that Amanda does with Makayla. Now they're complaining that they get sandwiches from home, and their friends get salmon and pasta.

Scotland, that would make Makayla happy, no way would she eat salmon, LOL, and pasta must be plain with just parmesan cheese.

She won't eat about 75% of the school's food either, she'd far prefer that cold sandwich or some nice sharp cheddar with crackers and an apple.

Annie

Scotland brings up a salient point. The reason kids lunches aren't healthier is the cost. Cost of the food and cost of the staff to serve it. I too remember the days when the kitchen staff actually cooked the lunch and you could smell it cooking down the halls right before lunch. My wonderful little elementary school has since been torn down and replaced by a much more "efficient" behemouth of a building that looks like a juvenile prison. Actually, I have seen better looking juvenile prisons. And I'll bet they don't have much to speak of in the way of school food. Oh, and I also grew up where kids who lived close to the school, (which was most of us) could WALK HOME FOR LUNCH, which is what I did most of the time. Actually staying for school lunch was a treat for me, and BUYING school lunch an even bigger treat. I walked home and had lunch with my mom and often even my dad, who would come home from work for lunch. Now all those little neighborhood schools are closed and most kids ride a bus long distances to school. I walked to school every day of my life, uphill both ways. Now I ride the treadmill at the gym.

Lpink, my girls lived 2 blocks from school, but the campus was "closed", no kids were allowed to leave the school grounds for lunch or any time other than when school was out. Security reasons, you know.

Plus, my girls only got a 23 minute lunch "hour" so by the time they left class, put stuff in their lockers, retrieved their lunch and found a place to sit they had about 10 minutes to eat, less if they stood in line for school lunch.

Annie

I actually cannot believe they let us do that, and I know it didn't go on like that indefinately, at some point even before they tore down the school kids stopped being able to go home for lunch. And I'm sure part of it was they made the lunchbreak shorter. I only lived one block from the school, but then a lot of us did. Now it seems to be mostly old folks in my old neighborhood. People don't want the older homes, no air conditioning, horror of horrors.

Lisa,
Thanks for linking that blog. So much "food for thought". Like Annie described, I give my son the choice to pick a school lunch once in a while if he wants. As he gets older, the less he wants anything to do with it. But then again, I spend the time packing lunches, lots of variety, anything from sushi to tamales to stuffed pita sandwiches with fresh fruit or veggies from our garden and always focusing on making sure there's enough protein to get him solidly through the day.

But from what I've seen through the years, the school lunch program is often superior to what the parents send (ie lunchables and cheetos and sugar rollups). And in my son's urban LA school, where over 1/2 the students are on a government subsidized breakfast and lunch program, it's what I suspect is one of the better meals some kids get in any given day.

And as for time to eat... today they got 20 minutes. When I was a child, I could sometimes go home for the lunch HOUR. So much has changed in basic quality of life issues... way beyond the school lunch program. It makes me sad.

I agree, for some kids this is the only "meal" per day, but for other, there is a very simple solution. Pack the kid a healthy lunch. Even budget wise this can be done. One easy way is to plan leftovers for lunch.

Annie, I just don't buy the oft brought up story about kids whose parents can't afford to feed them relying on school lunches, and I'll tell you why. I grew up with a mother who had to feed, clothe and keep a roof over the heads of two children on her own, working at the kind of low-paying jobs women could get back in the 60's without special training. For most of my early childhood, I wore my brother's hand me downs for play clothes to save my few dresses for school. We kids had one pair of shoes at a time, beds were mattresses on the floor, and toys were limited to a few stuffed animals, several board games and the contents of one cabinet. We got a tv when I was about 6...it was a black and white the size of my computer screen and my mother had gotten it from some sort of contest at work. There were times when meals were sparse, but she always managed to feed us, and mostly fed us healthy food. We ate things many of my friends never ate, like "specialty meats," bread from "day old" stores, and cheapie brands of frozen veggies or marked down produce, but our meals were balanced, if not exciting.

When I was around 9, she got a paper route early in the mornings and on weekends on top of her job as a bank teller, and managed to save enough money to put a down payment on a small, run down two bedroom house. Somehow, she managed to keep fairly balanced meals on the table and pack us lunches for school. I had many friends whose families were on welfare whom I was often jealous of because they got treats like convenience foods, sodas, store bought snack foods and restaurant visits. My best friend was from one of those Welfare families, and she qualified for half priced lunches from our school cafeteria, but she had more clothes than I, her own tv in her bedroom (we did have a better tv by then, but it was in the living room), her Mother was able to afford her 2 packs of cigarettes a day, and she got money to go out to movies and other entertainments.

With all the safety nets already extant in our country, if there are people who cannot feed their children but for the free lunch programs in schools, then they have made and are making the choice to do other things than feed their children or are too mentally ill to have the responsibility for children.

Now, before everybody comes down on me, I'm not suggesting we shouldn't feed these kids. The children are innocent victims. I remind myself of that every time I take a donation of food, clothes, household items etc to our local Community Sharing and see the drunks, meth heads and illegals lined up waiting for the doors to open. I know that they are collecting the donated goods so that they can feed and dress their kids, thereby saving money to feed their bad habits. But the kids still need to eat.

Okay, that's my rant.

In any case, if there are kids who are actually dependent upon the school lunches as their only food source, they are not contributing to the statistics on childhood obesity. School lunches may not be the healthiest meals in the world, but neither are they so packed full of calories that they will turn kids into little porkers if the rest of their meals are reasonably healthy.

By the way, the "ketchup as a vegetable" thing is a myth I grow so weary of. Way back in President Reagan's administration, a proposal that ketchup and relish be reclassified as a vegetable was made and rejected. Partisan outrage was generated that ended as an urban myth that President Reagan himself had said ketchup was a vegetable...which he never did, and the policy was never implemented. A stupid proposal, bandied about by stupid politicians for their own purposes, and here we are, almost 30 years later, hearing about it again.

Here is a link that might be useful: Straight Dope on Ketchup/Veggie myth

It's interesting that this came up-- I saw a preview for a new Jamie Oliver show that's aimed at revamping school lunches. I'm a huge fan of his and very interested to see how it goes.

Here is a link that might be useful: link

rachelellen, I can tell you where I heard it, from the school lunch lady! She told me that catsup was a vegetable and so they counted it as a serving of vegetables when they served french fries. So it may or may not have been made a law, but the lunch ladies are following it, at least they were here 4 or 5 years ago.

As for the children who receive school lunches at cut rate, I can say that as a single mother I never once collected any government assistance nor did my parents. I grew up eating whatever could be shot or foraged or grown. As an adult I always had at least two jobs, sometimes three. There were times when I could not afford to buy school lunches and my girls took peanut butter sandwiches more times than I can count simply because there wasn't anything else, but I became a single mother when Amanda was an older teen and could stay with her sister while I worked. Even when I was still married I kept books for a local business as a second job and took the girls with me evenings when I worked and I was working full time and had both girls at home when I went back to school and got my degree.

BUT, and it's a big but, some parents are unwilling or unable to work two or three jobs and in today's economy they may not even be able to find the first one. And that's without factoring in the drug addicts, the alcoholics and the mentally ill. And, as you recognize, the children still have to eat, no matter what the parents do or do not do.

Annie