In 2022, The Lancet, a British peer-reviewed journal with a focus on global public health, published a short article with the title: “Unhealthy school meals: A solution to hunger or a problem for health?” As the report laid out, providing school meals is an important measure in preventing food insecurity as nearly 30 million children receive a free or reduced-cost breakfast and lunch on an average American school day, and many of those students rely on school meals as their main source of nutrition.
Yet while those meals meet federal nutrition mandates, they are often simply composed of a smattering of processed foods — breakfast cereal, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, frozen pizza — served alongside a fruit or vegetable and carton of dairy milk. “In fact, the official meal dietary guidelines do not discourage serving pizza or corn dogs, as long as the nutritional specifications (total calorie, sugar, fat, and salt content) are met,” the report said.
While the often dismal quality of […]
Out of financial desperation (and curiosity) I started subbing in the public schools this past year. I am horrified: our schools’ children are served food by a multinational corporation linked to the fast food industry. You cannot imagine some of the autrocities I have witnessed … among the many: Word that the corp could not “afford” to buy kale; that somehow it (the corp) held sway over the development of school gardens, that they had a template and would be bringing it my town in two years. One day I refused the big plastic container being delivered to my classroom for afternoon snack: sliced raw mushrooms. How, why, what, where is this supposed to “relate” to intelligent delivery of nutritious food for our school children. …
Could you say more about the (corp) to which you refer and how that works in your school lunch program? I’m at sea as to what you are talking about as I understood that lunch programs operated as the article describes, prepackaged, highly processed “food” kids have been taught to love. Kale and mushrooms are not something I thought these corporate inspired programs included.
Sodexo is the corp that rules in my county in Oregon. The corp provides, serves the food, and rules the school gardens. In the case of my citing the “kale” issue, it was being harvested from a middle school garden. A creative corp employee took the lead in creating a self-serve salad bar (raw kale main ingredient) that was enormously popular with students and staff. When the garden kale ran out, the corp claimed that it could not replace with purchased kale because it was too expensive… huh? In regards to the mushrooms, the several pounds of sliced raw “treat” that were served as afternoon snack in the classroom, had no takers (are you fond of snacking on raw mushrooms) and therefore went in — you guessed it — to the trash, by commandment. With pressure from the outside to “improve”, the corp(s) seems to over and again bite itself in the butt and deliver stupid results even if the intentions are somewhat to the good. [from a former corp quality control dept employee and Permaculture teacher]
I see, your corp operates, except for the maxizising profits thing, on a different level than that described in the article. Was unaware that corporations had been created to provide real food even if imperfectly.