Let Them Eat Junk!
By Pat Racimora on February 24, 2009 at 8:10 AM in Current Affairs
(bumped up from yesterday morning, by our great NoQuarter cartoonist PatRacimora)
A Riddle: What is often poorly prepared, overloaded with unhealthful ingredients (and sometimes contaminants), costs the American taxpayer 9 billion dollars a year, and as much as half is thrown into the garbage before ever being touched?
Answer: The federally subsidized meals our kids get in schools.
The free (and low cost) meals operate in over 100,000 public and non-profit schools and serve up to 31 million children each day. But, of course, there really is no such thing as a free lunch, and that old saying applies in some shocking ways in this instance.
Although we acknowledge that there are exceptions, ask school teachers about what they actually see. Minimum nutritional standards are supposed to apply, but much of what kids get served is junk: cheese pizza, chicken nuggets (pre-fried), calzones (a lump of dough with some tomato sauce and cheese inside), hot dogs (on a bleached flour bun) and other low-grade meats, canned fruit, macaroni and cheese, and the like. Sometimes there are carrots (swathed in Ranch dressing) or little pieces of lettuce (which is essentially green water).
My friend who teaches at an elementary school in Los Angles is outraged by what she witnesses every day: trash barrels full of untouched prepackaged highly processed foods that kids don’t like. She estimates that more food is thrown out than is consumed. The kids complain about still being hungry after lunch, which makes them more challenging to teach.
My friend also reports that some items served to the kids make no sense whatsoever. For example, one day the “healthy item” was a kiwi. No, not a peeled or cut up kiwi, but a whole kiwi—thick brown fuzzy skin and all. What are little kids supposed to do with that? Another day their “fruit” was a small package of cut-up jicama and a wedge of lime. How many of her students consumed this off-beat offering? Not a single one.
Environmental implications are also huge. My teacher friend notes that it‘s not just tossed food, but tons of packaging. In the Los Angeles system, everything comes in little packets, foil for what will be warmed up and plastic for cold. Then that is all set into individual cardboard trays. This adds substantially to the mounds of daily trash that goes into our landfills.
Incidents of improper food handling and dirty facilities in many school feeding areas compound the problem by contributing to making the kids sick. According to a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest , not one school in the 20 jurisdictions surveyed scored above 80 out of 100, and only 5 above 75, when it came to meeting inspection requirements. The worst district earned a score of 37. Problems included improper food storage, poor temperature maintenance, contamination by food handlers, broken equipment, mouse droppings, and inadequate hand-washing facilities.
The report spells out the consequences:
Just one food-borne illness outbreak can have devastating consequences for the health of students, productivity in the classroom, and even financially on the school system. In fact, school districts have been held liable for the damage caused by outbreaks. For example, a school district in the state of Washington was ordered to pay a $4.6 million verdict when 11 children were sickened with E. coli 0157:H7 linked to ground beef in tacos. A 2003 report on federal school meal programs by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that two-thirds of food-borne illness outbreaks in schools involved federally subsidized meals.
To make matters worse, major incidents involving unfit-to-eat and contaminated food being brought into schools have surfaced recently. A shocking Associated Press story headline reads “An undercover video showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts has led to the largest beef recall in the United States and a scramble to find out if any of the meat is still destined for school children’s lunches.” Yes, an estimated 37 million pounds of that beef did end up being sent to schools.
Even the recent peanut scandal involves our school children. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle , 32 truckloads of toasted peanuts and peanut butter destined to our nation’s schools were sold to the federal government by the Peanut Corporation of America, even as the company’s own tests revealed salmonella bacteria contamination.
Perhaps the worst feature of this serious situation is that the little consumers are the very people whose health and well-being comprise the future of our nation. Sometimes we tend to think of our brain as something apart from the rest of our body, but it is an organ just like all of the others. It requires sufficient protein and other healthful fuel to develop properly. We have known the negative affects of poor nutrition on brain development and attention span of still-maturing humans for decades, and yet remain unmoved when it comes to feeding our kids.
Even Sam Kass , our President’s chef in the White House, is also outraged. He notes that the National School Lunch Program designed to provide low and free lunches to school kids (but any child can purchase these meals for very little) is influenced by what the government subsidizes. This means that the meals are low in veggies and overloaded with fat and additives high-fructose corn syrup.
One hopes that Chef Kass will corner the President after a dinner and get him to spearhead some changes. After all, these children will have to pay back the money being spent on the stimulus package. They will need healthy bodies and alert brains to carry that heavy load.
In an article titled “No Lunch Left Behind,” the authors offer some ideas. Implementing them won’t come cheap, but can we afford not to ensure that our kids are getting a decent and healthy school lunch?
by Ronald Scott
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