Everybody knows the horror of school lunch. The weird food combinations, the odd smells, finding things in your food that aren’t supposed to be there, it’s all a part of the school experience. However, the one component of school lunch that makes it bearable is having tablemates who you get to experience all of the horrors of what is school, including school lunch. One day they might be eating gross salad while bonding over how hard the math test was, and another day be eating some peculiar chicken nuggets while talking about what you’re going to do over the weekend. Despite all of this, there are serious problems with school lunch.
School lunch wasn’t always as under par as it is today. There was once a time when school lunch was freshly
For example, a picture of mac n’ cheese looks immaculate, but when you get the food, it looks like wallpaper paste on noodles. Whole health should be a primary factor in school lunch, the food being appetizing should be a main factor as well. When a student has a below par lunch it affects the rest of their day. In article “Dietary Needs” on Chartwells website chartwellsschools.com it states, “it is also about providing safe, tasty and nutritious meals…” While there may be the select few tasty meals at school, most of the meals are majorly under seasoned, look unpresentable, and lack any sort of planning. Another article from the Chartwells website says, “Supporting farm to school programs and local farmers is important to our teams.” If that is true, than why does the produce used at school always come in frozen, or looking like it fell off the back of the truck? What the readers of these articles may not know is that they prioritize healthy over anything else, but the food itself isn’t all that healthy either. If supporting farm to school programs is truly important they should focus on local farms, and having the produce look
While this may be tolerable for a while, but the intolerance will slowly continue to build until it becomes unbearable. School lunch not only affects the the atmosphere of school, it also dampens the overall mood of the students. It’s natural that students default reaction to school would be dismal, but the overall unappealingness of the food like substance lowers the students general attitude to an astonishingly low rate. If this pattern continues who knows what students will be like.
However, there are ways to take action and make school lunch better. For instance, Chartwells has a spot on there page where you can contact them by twitter, email, or by phone. This way you can voice your opinions about the atrocity that shcool lunch is to help make shattuck a better
Janet Poppendieck is a professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York, and additionally she is the author of several books including her most recent Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. This book centers on America’s recent interest in whether or not our school lunches are healthy. This issue has been put into the spotlight recently through shows such as Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution and in the news because recent changes in the Nation School Lunch Program’s dietary guidelines. Poppendieck’s book looks at the in depth reasons into why school lunches have turned into what they are today, what challenges need to be faced in order to fix school lunches, and ultimately how our the system should be fixed. She accomplishes this by interviewing her current college students about their previous school lunch experiences, working in a school cafeteria, interviewing current school employees, and looking at the history and policies of the National School Lunch Program.
In the United States the daily public school lunch consists of pizza, cheese burgers, Chef Boyardee ravioli, fried chicken fingers, French fries and it gets worse. Most American students hate the lunch that their school provides, which means as soon as they are able to drive, they leave school and go to the nearest fast food restaurant. "Critics say that school lunches contribute to the fattening of the United States." (5) The most controversial argument about US school lunches happened when "David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, proposed classifying ketchup as a vegetable to meet dietary requirements while also slashing costs." (5) Honestly, what's next? American school lunches have to meet the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines, which obviously is not good enough considering "30% of individuals calories come from fat, and 10% from saturated fat." (5)
I don't think our school lunch is healthy because it has fat and too much sodium. Although it is good it is fattening it is the reason for much of the obesity in the U.S. Many kids have no other option to eat the unhealthy school lunches or they will be hungry.
Since the beginning of time, schools were always a place we could trust. A place where we could send our kid(s) off to without worry of what they may be learning, doing, or eating, but perhaps we should be. As the craving of fast food is growing, so is the demand for it. Some schools have taken advantage of this and brought fast food into their schools, providing it for lunch. A high school in California serves McDonald’s, Subway, and even Quiznos to their students for lunch (Lehmann). The school claims the kids are more likely to buy school food when they see brand foods (n.p.). Schools get money from the National School Lunch Program for every meal they serve, but that money from the government only covers so much (n.p.). To pay the rest of the lunch staff, facilities costs, and food, schools turn to the money they make by selling lunches and breakfast to their students (n.p.). Another school in California has even tried to mimic Round Table, a brand name pizza in their area, with healthier ingredients, but was only able to sell 250-300; when they sold Round T...
The average school lunch has about 900 calories, which is about half of the amount of total calories a child should consume daily. Many schools attempt to serve healthy lunches for students, but sometimes they are not aware of what "healthy" is. Other times they do not feel it necessary to spend a large amount of money on healthy food. If schools knew how healthier food would affect a child academically, they might be more inclined to pay. The American government must increase school funding, so that the schools can make this change for the students' benefit. School officials must also look at the percentage of children who are obese, and consider how providing a healthy school lunch will help to lower that number. Healthy school cafeteria food is essential for school aged children in the United States because it will help them pay attention in school, improve their learning capabilities, and minimize childhood obesity.
Thirty one million kids nationwide eat school sponsored meals twice a day for a hundred eighty days and on average for twelve years. In this sense school lunches are an important and critical component of childhood nutrition and development. Yet these meals are highly processed and filled with chemicals and preservatives. School lunch rooms are essentially fast food restaurants; they unload shipments of frozen food then heat it up in glorified microwaves and serve it hot and ready. This is the same basic principle of fast food restaurants and people all know how terribly unhealthy fast food is for them. Still America feeds this toxic material to kids every day. This has been a tremendous issue for years but it is more devastating now than ever before.
We have definitely improved school lunches in America, however they still leave something to be desired. This is something that seems so simple to fix, but why is this problem so prevalent in our society? Mark Bittman explores this issue in an article “Serving up School Lunches of Tomorrow.” Bittman builds credibility by “joining forces with researchers from the Department of Agriculture and the University of California, Berkley’s School of Public Health to evaluate a program to increase school lunch participation, improve nutrition, reduce waste, and ultimately counter tendencies towards obesity.”(Bittman par1) And what they are doing to improve school lunches for their students. This article makes the claim that America needs to make an effort to make school lunches healthier and a lot more accessible for all of its students.
I feel like there should be a change in the school lunch menus. I did some research regarding school lunches and other people agree with the fact that school lunches should be changed. The school meat is very horrific and i feel that it is not safe for students to digest it. For example the government found out ingredients in the chicken sandwich had dozens of ingredients including MSG. MSG is very bad for students because it causes allergic reactions, upsets the stomach, and it causes muscle tightness and fatigue. Toxic GMO or Genetically Modified Organisms are all over school food. The corn that they feed students are mostly GM corn, which the purpose of it is to kill pests by bursting the stomach of bugs who feed on the corn. By letting
I walked into the lunchroom, and they handed me my lunch tray. They gave me a scoop of orange looking spaghetti with 3 meatballs that were the size of a tennis ball. The school should change the school lunch menu because the food looks raw and like different color, also the food looks disgusting, and its really bad for your health. I believe they can change the schools lunch preparation.
before the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, school lunches tasted terrible to me and I
The United States spends $15 billion a year for food programs and serves 32 million children (Kelly & Stier, 2015, para. 2). Unfortunately, the school lunch program ends up wasting a lot of that money. Although the United States spends billions of dollars on school lunches, a lot of the money goes to waste, and lunch at school is not liked by students which makes them go to class with an empty stomach.
Imagine that you walk into a cafeteria and you see children in line to buy lunch. The lunch is burnt and cold. You see the kids who bought lunch sit down and start asking people for food, they say no. At the end of the lunch period the kids lunch trays still have all the food on them. The children are starving and a lot of food was wasted. You don’t want that right? I believe that our school should get a new lunch menu because many students do not like the food served, there are not many options, and there are many problems with the food.
Having to eat school lunch is not the best. Eating school lunch is like eating in prison. People may think that eating off school campus is a bad idea but it's not. Although some students will come back late for school, they will have enough energy to get through the day. If they are to come back late then only the students that come back on time should be allowed to leave the second time.
The increase rate in childhood obesity urged Michelle Obama to improve school lunches. In result of First Lady Michelle Obama addressing the issue, nutrition standards were raised in the Healthy Food Act of 2010. Sources show that this law caused a heated debate among parents. The question still stands, is the food actually healthy? the food system in the United States is making it very difficult for students to receive the nutrition they need to grow into healthy adults. The National School Lunch Program plays a huge role involving school lunches. I believe that the National School Lunch Program has influenced school lunches in a few positive ways. Their program is great for low income families and they also promote healthy eating and physical activity through changes in school environments. The National School Lunch Program is the reason behind schools serving breakfast, as well as the increased amount of fruits and vegetables. The National School Lunch Program, Michelle Obama, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, another contributor in school lunches, have been fighting to improve school lunches, but they are not doing so well when it comes to improving the food served on the
First of all, students aren’t motivated to eat unhealthy, not-tasty food. If you observed students buying lunch in the cafeteria, you don’t often see them buying these kinds, but not limited to, foodstuffs: burritos (which are just beans wrapped in tortillas), “burgers” (meat slapped on two slices of bread), etc. Even the chicken nuggets aren’t very popular. And the prices! $3.75-$4.75 is not worth such “garbahge”, as a teacher would say. Out of the twenty five students I surveyed, 56% stated that they would like to see their cafeteria changed. The reasons being were, “The same stuff everyday – it gets boring”, “Tastes like plastic”, ...