<p>Better than pink slime!</p>
<p>I think the menu looks delicious. I would love to have such options. People who want to eat meat still have plenty of opportunities to do so - we’re only talking about lunch five times a week at the most. Anyone is free to pack a lunch as well. Most Americans would be healthier with less meat in their diets. Go NYC!</p>
<p>Looks way better than the food I got during middle school, which included french fries at every lunch.</p>
<p>I love meat. I think it’s delicious. Mmm, bacon.</p>
<p>But just because I love meat doesn’t mean I have to have it at every meal. I’m a person, not a lion. I can eat lots of different things. I love artichokes too, and avocados, and crab, but if a school never served those things, I’d be fine, and I imagine everyone else would be fine with that decision too.</p>
<p>Those pictures of school lunches look better than most school lunches. They look quite yummy, in fact. If this school has found a way to serve inexpensive, nutritious food that kids like, more power to them.</p>
<p>If you want large soup, order 2 servings. As for the school not serving meat, I am fine with it. You don’t have any choices with what the schools serve anyway. Whether there is meat or not, you eat what they have that day. The meat ban might force them to start serving healthy meals. Our fat kids will either eat it, or survive a few more hours on the pounds of excess fat they have stored on their bodies.</p>
<p>I would hate an all vegetarian lunch. There is no protein in vegetables when compared to meat.</p>
<p>“Vegetarian” doesn’t mean eating only <em>vegetables.</em> Cheese, eggs, beans, tofu all have protein.</p>
<p>This is amazing! Healthier, cleaner and greener. Wish more schools would join the movement</p>
<p>So much for diversity :(</p>
<p>Black bean and cheese quesadillas with roasted potatoes? Yeah, that’s pretty balanced… provided one buys into the government-peddled idea that eating huge quantities of carbohydrates is good for you. I suppose that’s why ham and cheese sandwiches are being thrown away so that kids can keep eating their vegetables (freeze-dried reconstituted pizza shingle with a side of canned yellow corn).</p>
<p>Whatever. As long as schools still let parents send kids in with lunches, this isn’t anything aside from an ideological sideshow.</p>
<p>
As long as the schools “let” parents?</p>
<p>^ Yeah, you don’t remember the story about a school confiscating a kid’s lunch because it wasn’t nutritious enough? The backlash was probably severe enough to keep them from trying it again… for a time.</p>
<p>And let’s not act too shocked about schools telling parents what they can and can’t do for their kids. Plenty of public school districts enforce uniform policies. We can all rightly point out that this represents an unacceptable intrusion into how parents choose to raise their kids, but we’ve let school districts get away with that. If people still exist in a hundred years, I bet you and I’d be scared by what society looks like, let alone what public school looks like.</p>
<p>Oh yeah! I had forgotten about that.</p>
<p>I am a vegetarian, but this seems shocking and dangerous to me. Although I trust the school will manage the nutritional aspects of being a vegetarian, there are significant nutritional dangers to becoming a vegetarian and you risk not receiving the proper nutrients.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The school lunch program can probably afford to buy better quality vegetables and vegetarian meals on the same budget that it would spend on low quality meat meals.</p>
<p>Look no further than budget pressures for the reason behind it. Given what passed for “meat” in some school lunches, not having it does not seem like any big loss.</p>
<p>I’m not a vegetarian, but I applaud what this school is doing—providing tasty, healthy, nutritionally balanced meals that completely work in a complicated cross-cultural setting where many students have religious/cultural dietary restrictions. And providing a better-balanced diet at a lower cost even to omnivores.</p>
<p>Just for comparison purposes, I looked up the current week’s menu at a randomly selected local public elementary school here in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I will say they’re trying: there are far more fresh fruits and vegetables on the menu than when I was a kid, they’re using whole grain breads, the meats are relatively low fat, they’re keeping fried food to a minimum. But every breakfast this week is a muffin and fruit, except Thursday when it’s an egg-and-cheese tortilla and fruit. And every main dish at lunch is meat—chicken 3 days, turkey hot dogs another–except Friday when it’s “Italian dunkers,” which is apparently bread, marinara sauce for dunking, and cheese (I had never heard of this & had to look it up). At lunch there are also side carbs (whole grain bread or brown rice, depending on the day), steamed or roasted vegetables, fresh fruits, and green salads. There is no alternative main dish at lunch.</p>
<p>So what’s a vegetarian supposed to do with that? Or someone who could eat chicken or turkey, but only if it’s halal or kosher? The fruits and veggies are great, and the whole grain breads are a plus, but the only legitimate protein source for these folks would be the Thursday breakfast, and possibly the Friday lunch if they loaded up on enough cheese in the “Italian dunker.” For meat-eaters who don’t have religious/cultural dietary restrictions, it probably works pretty well, and is a huge improvement on past school meal offerings. For vegetarians, Muslims, and Jews who keep kosher, it’s a disaster; these groups could get very sick on a steady diet of menus like this, with plenty of fresh fruits, veggies, and whole grains, but not nearly enough protein or B vitamins.</p>
<p>And this isn’t “imposing someone’s dietary preferences”? The fact is it’s much easier for the typical American omnivore to eat a tasty, healthy, nutritionally balanced diet in the NYC school, than it would be for a vegetarian, Muslim, or kosher-keeping Jew to do so at the school in Saint Paul.</p>
<p>Most of us are pretty blind to the degree to which the dominant culture imposes its preferences on cultural minorities. And when someone takes affirmative steps to accommodate those minorities—even in communities where the “minorities” are in fact a majority, as in parts of Queens, and for that matter, in parts of Saint Paul—many in the dominant culture get indignant, and immediately start complaining about how their rights are being trampled on.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Could this be an accommodation for Catholics during Lent (though done year round because it may be less expensive and does not require keeping track of when Lent begins and ends)?</p>
<p>^ The accommodation to Catholics occurred to me. There are some conservative Catholics around here who, following the old rules, still refuse to eat meat on Fridays, even in “ordinary time” (i.e., not Lent/Easter, and not Advent/Christmas). In my childhood, most Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays, and that was a year-round practice; Friday was a day of “fasting and penance,” which as a practical matter in most families meant no meat, but fish was OK. </p>
<p>Saint Paul is historically a pretty Catholic town, unlike its neighbor Minneapolis which historically was pretty Nordic. But I find the continued willingness to accommodate the most conservative Catholic elements (if that’s what it is) quite ironic in light of the public schools’ apparently obliviousness to the sensitivities of vegetarians, Muslims, and kosher-keeping Jews, all of whom live here in quite substantial numbers.</p>
<p>Of course, we don’t know if the cheese is really cheese, or something else masquerading as cheese. </p>
<p>The meateaters can bring their cans of Spam from home.</p>
<p>This boy illustrates that printed menus & actuality are not the same things.
[Yuck:</a> A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch](<a href=“HugeDomains.com”>http://yuckmovie.com/)</p>
<p>If a school or district is bringing better food to students, we should applaud them!</p>