Improving Nutrition in School Lunches

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According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years,” meaning that America’s children need to start eating healthier, including healthier school lunches. The National School Lunch Act is a fairly recent addition to American society. For, as the world waged war a second time, the United States began to worry about the strength and health of the country’s soldiers. However, in the beginning, selling excess agricultural goods was more important than building a healthy, well-balanced meal for students. Unfortunately, many children coming from poorer families could not afford well-balanced school lunches, so in order to compensate, the School Lunch Program changed its focus to help these students. This program, however, decreased schools’ lunch budgets, and schools had a hard time keeping up with the amount of free meals they had to provide, so they came up with some extra ways to increase revenue. However, in a small town in Massachusetts, one chef makes a difference in the health of the school lunch students eat each day, and proves that hiring a trained chef to cook real, healthy meals can increase profit. Unfortunately, that is not the case in most schools across the nation. The quality of health of the food being served in school lunches is extremely poor and was allowed to decline even more with a new set of rule changes. However, there are some improvements currently being made to increase the quality of health of the food being served to students, including teaching them all about food and its nutritional information, both good and bad. In order for students to eat healthier lunches at school, the USDA needs to implement healthier ...

... middle of paper ...

...ut food and its nutritional information, both good and bad.

Works Cited
Christie, Kathy. “Stateline: Even Students Are What They Eat.” The Phi Delta Kappan 84.5 (2003): 341-342. PDF file.
Kalafa, Amy. Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children's Health. New York: Jeremy P. Tacher/Penguin, 2011. EBook Reader.
Levine, Susan. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.
"National School Lunch Act." Poverty and the Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Credo Reference. Web. 21 January 2014.
"School Meals." fns.usda.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Feb. 2014.
Wu, Sarah. Fed up with Lunch: How One Anonymous Teacher Revealed the Truth about School Lunches--and How to Change Them! San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 2011. E

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