<p>Our food services is under pressure to stand on its own with respect to the school budget. The revenues they get from school lunches should cover the cost of staff and supplies. The goal is that no tax dollars (except federal subsidies for poor children) should go into our food service.</p>
<p>Consequently, they provide what sells: french fries, pizza, burgers, and sugary desserts. A salad bar is a money loser. And they make school lunches for elementary schools exactly like what is being served in Huntingdon.</p>
<p>Our school’s cafeteria food always looked like Huntington’s too. My kid’s (boys) always took lunch from home until they hit h.s. The packed lunch lived a brief life freshman year but they quickly decided it wasn’t the “thing to do”. So they became part of the lunch line crowd. Since I gave them money for lunch they rarely got in the expensive ala carte line. They stuck with the reg. lunch line which cost $2.00. They called it “the 2 dolla holla”</p>
<p>A friends son was trying out for the football team this past fall, the coach told them if you have any desire to perform durning tryouts after school DO NOT EAT the school lunch, a few boys did, they were on the side-lines expelling the lunch during practice. Greasy fries/pizza do not mix with strenuous activity. After that, they brought lunch from home.</p>
<p>Jamie started with the schools because that’s an environment that can be controlled. He can’t interact with as many kids if he tries to do it on a family by family basis. And kids go home and teach the parents. You’ll notice in last night’s show, he moved out of the schools.</p>
<p>While it may not be the school’s “responsibility” for nutrition, I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to believe that if schools are going to feed the kids, it should be nutritious food.</p>
<p>I remember when I was in high school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had good lunches, but they were about twice the amount of the neighboring towns’ school lunches. It turns out that our school board decided that it didn’t like the menus, they weren’t good enough. So they turned down the Federal funds and gave us real food. I have a new respect for that school board.</p>
<p>I’ve been enjoying this show but have to admit that I had to go to our schools website to see what our school serves for lunch. I’ve made each of my kids their lunches for their 12 years of school (still making them for junior son) - none of them wanted to buy. If we run out of lunch fixings I give my son $4- $5 and he buys something. That happens about 5 times a year.</p>
<p>Anyway, looking at our schools menu it looks not-so-great, but not horrible. Lot’s of chicken. The most popular item (even my kids know this) is chicken turnovers made with puff pastry. I got the recipe and made mini-ones for a Superbowl party this year, but I knew that each one had a full days supply of calories so didn’t eat them myself.</p>
<p>Our schools teach nutrition in both the middle and the high school. The kids can tell you what’s healthy but apparently it hasn’t gotten through to the administration.</p>
<p>Lafalum84, corn is often labeled as a vegetable, but is actually a grain. However, corn is not “a carb.” Though we tend to label grains as “carbs,” that’s not quite accurate. It is a grain which contains carbohydrates, though not as much as you might think. Corn contains 2g of carbohydrates (per ear, I believe). Compare that to potatoes, which contain 15-25g, peas with 10-15 g, carrots and onions with 8g per serving, brussells sprouts with 4g, broccoli with 2g, and spinach with 1.5g.</p>
<p>These days, “carb” has become a dirty word, yet it is a critical component of a healthy diet. It’s the processed carbs like white breads and other grains and pastas, cookies, cakes, candy, processed crackers, etc. which we need to stay away from. A fresh ear of corn on the cob from the farmer’s market is something I treat myself to occasionally, though for the most part I stay away from corn in favor of other more nutritionally dense options. It sure wouldn’t hurt kids to do without corn in their lunch programs as corn tends to be more and more processed by the time it lands on the school lunch tray. If you could get a hold of fresh ears of corn and avoid the temptation to drown them in butter and salt, it wouldn’t be a bad option for the kids, and they would probably really like it. </p>
<p>From WiseGeek:</p>
<p>"Corn, also known as maize, is one of the most successful cereal grasses of all time. It has been under human cultivation for over 10,000 years and has spread itself into every niche of commercial agriculture. Like most grain producing grasses, corn is an annual that must be replanted each year. While corn originates in the New World, it is grown all over the world and used for a staggering array of products. Corn is far more productive than most cereal crops and able to sustain a higher population than relatives like wheat, rye, or rice. "</p>
<p>^^^nrdsb4, see my post #37. It was the Reagan administration that decided that, for the purpose of the National School Lunch Program, catsup was a vegetable. Thanks for the info on corn, though! We can now get frozen “corn cobettes” from government commodities, so we ordered them and are going to serve them instead of oven fries on some days. We’ll see how the kids react to that… I just think that serving corn and rice at the same time, which my boss does on Taco days, is basically serving two of the same thing. She says one is a vegetable and one is a carb.</p>
<p>^^^Well, she doesn’t understand that all vegetables and fruits are partly composed of carbs. We really don’t eat a “carb” in isolation. She may also not know that plant foods can also be high in protein (some people think that only animal products have protein). And you’re right, I probably wouldn’t pair rice and corn. I’d sure be looking to replace one or the other with a green leafy vegetable.</p>
<p>I did miss that post #37. That whole catsup thing just kind of blows my mind.</p>
<p>Remember the “how chicken nuggets are made” demo? Does anyone else think that the producers coerced the kids into saying that they would still eat a chicken nugget after knowing how it was made (on a side note, using the good meat has become commonplace)? There’s no way they would have actually wanted to eat that. Many kids don’t even want to eat meat for a little while after they find out that it comes from animals.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, the kids in that community seem to live on chicken nuggets, pizza, and french fries.
To them, the look of chicken nuggets is comfortable and familiar. They’re used to the little golden colored roundish nuggets. That’s why they still ate the nuggets after the demonstration. It’s what they consider “normal” food. Sad.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t make them very different from many other kids. Most kids are very familiar with meat in the form of chicken nuggets, hot dogs, hamburgers, and ground meat. Children would not want to eat a hot dog immediately after seeing how it was made due to the “shock value” of knowing. I’m very skeptical of everything I see on reality TV since much of what is presented isn’t what actually happened.</p>
<p>What’s so interesting to me about “Food Revolution” is how times have changed in West Virginia. Fifty or sixty years ago, many West Virginians were too poor to buy convienence food at the grocery store. Everybody had a garden and you ate out of the garden until late fall. Then you canned like crazy and stored your potatoes and onions in a cool cellar. You either bought or picked apples and pears from an orchard and made preserves. </p>
<p>For meat and eggs, many families kept chickens and a hog or went hunting. A big buck could keep a family fed for months.</p>
<p>And West Virginians were and are still huge fans of baking. They pride themselves on made-from-scratch biscuits and pies.</p>
<p>Appalachian cooking certainly isn’t low-fat but there is strong tradition of farming and hunting. My SIL cans and makes preserves, eats deer meat, and buys her eggs, milk, and chickens from a neighbor. She goes to the grocery store once a week to stock up on toilet paper, detergent and baking supplies and probably spends less than $50.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen the show, but I saw it featured on Oprah. I loved how he refused to give up on the mean DJ. Rather than fume impotently or ratchet up an adversarial war of words, he figured out that he really needed to get him on board with the program and utilize his ability to influence his community. His persistence paid off, and that truly benefits everyone.</p>
<p>That DJ had cold, steely blue eyes that made him seem really really mean. It was great to see him touched by the extra large caskets-we finally got to see his humanity rather than his defensive posture. It takes a big man to admit maybe he was wrong, and he stepped up to the plate (no pun intended).</p>
<p>I’ve seen the Jamie Oliver menu and I have some concerns. Some of it seems a little bit carbohydrate heavy (but I can’t really make any conclusion just by looking at it). There’s also a “cheesy pizza” (there are a couple “cheesy” items). I looked at the “old menu” and it did not look that horrendous. It seems to meet nutritional guidelines and some of the main components didn’t seem that different from what Jamie was serving.</p>
<p>i think the issue may have been more how the stuff was made; I only watched the pilot but the chicken being served on the school’s original menu was heavily processed and contained very little “real” chicken as I recall.</p>
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. After all, it’s a menu - he has to make the dishes sound enticing to his audience. What is he supposed to call this stuff so that kids will still want to eat it? That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t snuck in 3 servings of veggies into the sauce on the pizza, or used whole wheat flour in the crust. But we all know that coming straight out and telling kids that there’s spinach in their pizza is the kiss of death, even if you’re not growing up in Huntington, West Virginia!</p>