The Many Roads to Idaho Agriculture
When we imagine hazards to the environment, we tend to imagine pollution or litter, not dinner. However, in reality, our need for food poses one of the largest dangers to our planet. In the world we live today, the population is rapidly increasing and will soon reach nine billion people.
The young child stands looking up at the tall machine filled with every food he could want and more, stuffed behind the thick glass. How likely is it that he’ll walk past and instead choose a nice crunchy carrot over his Cheetos? Simple choices like these add up over time to make up a lifestyle of habits. A child’s diet is the building block to their health and the nutrition that they intake at school is vital to the rest of their life. Despite previous efforts to reduce the abundance of junk food within school lunch programs, there is still a great need to rethink the availability of caffeine and snacks, saturated in fat that could potentially lead to an array of health issues.
Foods in Schools: Leading the Way Toward Healthier Youth. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2007. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 6 Nov. 2013.
First of all, an increasing amount of kids are becoming overweight because their schools pressure them to eat sugary, fatty, and high-calorie foods. Not only do many schools promote consumption of harmful foods, many schools also actively serve them in school lunches. In 1963, 4% of kids were obese; currently, approximately 17% of kids are obese. Some might argue that kids themselves are the reason for the increase, because school lunches also provide healthier foods. Unfortunately, most kids do not have much of a choice - healthier foods are priced much higher than their unhealthy counterpart, consequently many parents do not want their kids to buy the more expensive, yet healthier product. In my 3½ years ...
Many have heard the phrase, “Where would we be without agriculture? Hungry and Naked.” Ye,t the understanding of this phrase seems to be very limited. Knowledge of agriculture, as a whole, is very limited, to the point where people think that food comes from the grocery store instead of from the farms of hard working men and women who spend their days working in the fields and pastures. The combination of unrealistic legislation, corporate greed, and an ignorant consumer, that is today, four generations or more removed from the farm, has led to a huge gap in agriculture literacy in this country. Basically, people don’t know where their food comes from and as we’ve all heard, “we fear what we don’t understand.”
It was lunch time and students walked into the cafeteria to purchase lunch. A wide variety of food was placed in front of them to choose from ranging from pizza to burgers to bags of chips and chocolate bars. Their choices were endless up until a new reform took over and enlisted new changes. The Healthy Food for Healthy School Act was placed on September 1st, 2008. Its policy entailed schools to practice healthy eating where they would be “dropping trans fat from food and beverages sold in schools and establishing mandatory nutrition standards for food and beverages sold in schools” (Ontario Ministry of Education). While this reform plays a significant role in the health of students, it also has a great impact on other sectors.
This is a typical portrayal of school lunches all across America. Sadly, it is for this reason that American children suffer from rising cases of obesity. Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. The prevalence of obesity among children aged 6 to 11 years increased from 6.5% in 1980 to 19.6% in 2008. (Healthy Youth!, 2010). These figures are more than alarming and need to call attention to the situation. Obesity amongst children is a huge problem that can be easily prevented by offering alternatives to current situations. One leading cause within this epidemic deals with schools and the nutrition they provide to students. A study of Michigan sixth graders published in December of 2010 found that regularly consuming school lunches was a greater risk factor for obesity than spending two or more hours a day watching television or playing ...
Moreover, the controversy over cafeteria food is whether or not it is healthy for all students from elementary schools to colleges. Numerous factors lead to unhealthy eating in schools and on campuses. Sometimes options with better nutrition are offered, but when there are, they tend to be less appealing than the unhealthy foods which turns to obesity. Many schools are undergoing budget cuts and changes, and healthy food tends to take a back burner when deciding where the limited amounts of money should go (Gupta). Unfortunately, when schools do have healthy ingredients, the food is usually prep...
School children groups are important parts in society, so it would make sense to feed them the best lunch as possible. However, people realized that they are probably feeding their children “junk” because childhood obesity became one of the most significant public health issues. In U.S, the overweight prevalence increased from 15.4 to 25.6 during the study periods from 1971 to 1974 and 1988 to 1994 (Wang, Monteiro and Popkin,
As the population of Earth continues to increase, more food production is needed than ever. It is ridiculous for people to think that no one wants to be farmers anymore. They may also believe that farming is an “old style” of living. This idea may have occurred because the human population is over-reliant on technologies in today’s world. In reality, farmers are still incredibly relevant and people should not belittle the role they play. Farming should not be considered outdated because there are people in this world that want to be part of it. It is their desired lifestyle and choice that no one should label as “backward” or “savage.” No one should generalize the whole global population by understating that no one wants to spend his or her lifetime farming.