<p>As for the health issues…</p>
<p>Our district never had soda machines where kids could get to them. We went to whole wheat bread, whole grain pizza crust, and got rid of the fry-o-laters years ago. Our meals never came with dessert, they always came with a piece of fruit instead. We stopped selling french fries (which were actually oven-baked) a la carte, and our snacks were low-fat and met a whole bunch of guidelines. </p>
<p>In addition, we met federal guidelines which stated that over a course of a week, meals could not average more than 30% of calories from fat, or 10% of calories from saturated fat.</p>
<p>BUT - the federal guidelines also mandate minimum calorie levels meals had to meet. And these calorie levels seemed to assume that all kids were varsity athletes who were burning a lot of calories. At the high school level, meals had to be something like 800 calories! Even at the elementary level they were supposed to be about 600 calories! Wanna know why kids are fat? They don’t know what a serving size looks like, and school lunches that are required to be 800 calories are not helping that trend. And when you’re mandated to provide 800 calories but limited on fat, guess where those calories are going to come from? Carbs. Lots of carbs. (Carbs are usually cheap and easy to provide, too.)</p>
<p>There are lots of difficulties in switching to “healthier” meals made from scratch, rather than serving processed foods (ie chicken nuggets) which are simply being reheated:
- When dealing with raw meat, you greatly increase the chance of food-borne illnesses.
- Labor costs. Cooking from scratch is labor-intensive.
- Most school kitchens in the past few decades have been built with the idea that food would be mostly re-heated, rather than cooked from scratch. Our district, for example, has lots of ovens but very small stoves. </p>
<p>Again, not saying we can’t and shouldn’t improve nutrition in the schools. We can, and we should. But if it were easy and cheap it would have been done already.</p>