School Lunches and Child Abuse

I spoke to my son's preschool director about improving his school lunches about a week ago. Today, I poked my head in her office and she immediately said, "Did you see the menu change? We had fish today, not hotdogs." I thought, Hooray! A small victory for school lunches. She added that the catering company was quite understanding and willing to change. I am sure that I lucked out and that my experience is quite untypical. Even though my battle was won, changing school lunches is still a pressing battle for America.

Celebrities like Jamie Oliver and bloggers like Mrs. Q. show the terrors that comprise students' school lunches. Looking past the packaged and processed goods, another issue surfaces: the salt content in school food is unsafely high. As a perspective, lets simply look at add-ons, or condiments. In an effort to get children to eat tasteless, colorless fruits and vegetables, schools provide nacho cheese, ranch dressing and other junky condiments. (Peanut butter is sometimes an option, but the quality is debatable). These add-ons normally cost more, so poor students settle for adding straight salt and ketchup to their food. Aside from corn syrup or sugar, salt is a main ingredient in these toppings and once added to salty food, creates a horrifically high sodium content in addition to the salty food.

The sodium content of school lunches is unregulated. Back in 2003, The US General Accounting Office warned that although schools made improvements with regard to sodium, sodium in school lunches was "considerably higher than the 800-mg. standard." The report, "Efforts Needed to Improve Nutrition and Encourage Healthy Eating," mentioned other problems, such as vending machines, soda and fried food, In closing, the report's recommendation was that, "The Secretaries of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Education work together to identify specific strategies to help schools promote nutrition education and to encourage each state to identify a focal point to promote collaborative efforts that would further develop nutrition education activities for schools." That recommendation, issued over seven years ago and under a different administration, has not produced results for American students. Asking current Secretaries Thomas J. Vilsack, Kathleen Sebelius and Arne Duncan to hold that meeting almost a decade later is a reasonable request.

I have previously mentioned that healthy, low-sodium school lunches are a common sense measure to improve student learning. Money, laziness, laws or the snarled perplexities of years of mismanagement may be the reason for a lack of change. It is a shame that while I encountered such understanding people at my son's school, others involved with children's school lunches take advantage of students' silence and youth. To give minors such unsuitable food (many of whom cannot bring food from home) in an arena labeled as educational is child abuse.

Photo credit: latimes