They aren’t healthy lunches. They have too few calories for an average kid.
My son cannot eat within an hour of sports, yes buying double lunches might be required, but triple lunches? He is not a big guy, they are giving 150 lbs kids (let alone normal weight bigger HS kids) one slice of Domino’s pizza and 4 oz. of skim milk and an apple for lunch. Is that normal?
It is wrong for the schools to cut calories and amount of food and fats because some kids are fat. Kids NEED fat. If you are uber healthy, send in a hot lunch in a thermos or a cold lunch. If your kid is fat, it is not the school’s job to give them a 150 calorie lunch. It is your job to not let them have free access to thousands of calories of cookies and donuts.
In my town, perhaps 20% of children are overweight in grade school. By high school it is 10%. I work in an urban environment, and the kids in that city tend to be heavier. Obesity rate is likely double. Why does my town have to suffer? It is $3.00 for hardly any food. Yes, I could make lunches, but they like to stand in line with their friends and buy.
The real problem is Domino’s pizza (or the like) should not be a daily lunch for skinny OR overweight kids. It’s unhealthy. Calories are not the only (and in my opinion not even the most important) thing that make food healthy or unhealthy. I am all in favor of whole milk, by the way.
Yes. Kids should not be served chain fast foods and soda as part of school lunches. Domino’s and Chik fil a? I suppose it’s easier than trying to cook something palatable that is also not complete junk.
I heard recently that the Cleveland Clinic removed the McDonald’s from their employee food court. There were some complaints from employees, though, that it was the only cheap and quick option available. Cheap, hot, filling, tasty, low-effort food is almost always junk. And that’s the problem.
Our school district manages to do it, and do it for the same price as the junk. They say the secret is a chef who is into it and cooking onsite. They also say it’s cheaper to cook many things from scratch, as well as healthier. So hardly anything is canned or processed. It’s doable, schools just have to want to do it.
Let’s not condemn an entire category of food as unhealthy. While I am certain that cafeteria pizza is fairly useless as nutrition, I wouldn’t be quick to say that a Wolfgang Puck-style pizza or even the fare from a modest pizzeria in New York or Chicago, is unhealthy. A reasonably-sized slice sans the cured meat (pepperoni) or topped with a green vegetable like broccoli or spinach, and/or eggplant, certainly provides a healthy sample of protein and vegetable nutrition. More than one slice may bust the maximum daily recommendation for carbohydrates, however.
Good and nutritious pizza is not all that hard (or highly expensive) to prepare and schools should look into it further.
Yep. that’s what I said earlier and is the reason some schools are having a hard time when districts buy and prepare some foods in bulk and distribute those items to individual schools in order to conform with more comprehensive guidelines. As I also said, it’s a tough thing to balance. Saving money important, but providing high-quality food can be expensive in labor and resources. There are places where local schools (and kitchens) have very little autonomy. No easy solutions, by any means.
@zoosermom it may be easier because our district is small.
Looking at my kids’ school lunch menus right now.
“A meal Includes: Choice of One Entrée, Two Servings of Fruits or Vegetables, One Grain or Bread and One Low-Fat Milk”
Entrees this week (for MS/HS) include beef and broccoli, burgers and veggie burgers, roasted veggie pizza (!), cheese or pep pizza, sides are baked fries, endamame and the like. Deli options as well, like Greek salad and various sandwiches. Always a fresh fruit and veg bar.
The elementary kids are getting pasta with cheese and veggies (Johnny Marzetti, I had to look that one up), whole wheat stromboli, salads, fruit, sauteed zucchini, black beans, corn. Something called “fiesta broccoli”. A “brunch for lunch” day with eggs and cheese.
Again, this is all cooked at the school more or less from scratch and using fresh produce, about half of which is local.
I respectfully think that does matter, as well as the availability of a functioning kitchen, which some schools here don’t have. It’s tough, it really is. I’m not criticizing Mrs. Obama because she is shedding light on a very difficult problem, but in a country this large and diverse, it’s hard to do a one-size fits all approach to something so basic, even if the intentions are the very best. If you just look at the different food items that are local to various areas of the country, they are very, very different. Also, in some areas, schools might have different schedules and different amounts of physical exercise, and even, yes, different genetic prevalence. One of my old friends was a nurse at a Native American reservation, and talked a lot about the pervasiveness of diabetes and obesity in the area. Maybe a school in, say, Florida might have more physical activity and less diabetes. Different ethnic preferences. It’s just hard and complicated. No bad guys here.
My son’s school food is very healthy and the chef offers an amazing variety of options. there is always pizza, but it might be whole wheat pizza with goat cheese and shaved beets. Sometimes there are things like cheese steak sandwiches, but involve shaved, roasted beef artisan cheese and fresh veggies. There is always dessert. Always. Sometimes it’s decadent, but sometimes it’s granite or home made sorbet. The chef has a kitchen I would die for and buckets of money, so there’s that.
I definitely agree. We had to build that kitchen in our schools. As a result of that the cost per lunch went up 10 cents per lunch, but with the increased volume and economy of scale (buying almost tripled that year), that was the only cost increase (it’s been nearly 7 years now).
I think one-size-fits-all guidelines are OK but it should be possible to use avocado in areas where that is cheap and fresh, and beets where there’s that, apples vs oranges, and so on. Our area definitely uses what is cheapest and most available at a given time.
I really think anything that gets rid of reheated mystery nuggets and the like is a step in the right direction. That stuff is barely food even if it does contain calories.
Lots of things are doable in theory, but there are tradeoffs. Personally I think that having an artisanal school lunch kitchen with a trained chef in every single one of the 12 elementary schools in my district would be a misallocation of resources when other needs are more pressing. Most school districts don’t have enough money to prioritize lunches in this way over other expenditures.
Ironically the districts that are most likely to spring for this sort of thing and pay for it are probably the ones that need it the least.
It’s unreasonable to think that a school lunch would be sufficient food for a kid to do after school sports some 4-5 hours later. My kids bring lunch and they bring snacks if they will be after school for long.
That said, what I saw with many of the organized sports for kids growing is that parents were pretty much required to provide junk food snacks and sugary drinks whose calories generally exceeded the calories being burned. I felt bad for families who were trying to get their overweight kids to lose weight by doing these activities.
79 There is no evidence that weighing yourself daily causes eating disorders. It definitely has not caused an issue in any of my kids. Eating disorders may lead to daily weighing but not the other way around. It is as normal for my kids to weigh themselves daily as brushing their teeth twice per day; that's all they've known. So, when should they weigh themselves? When they are overweight or not healthy? Just asking, not trying to be rude.
Periodic weighing is critical for people to know their health status. Most people gradually gain weight as they age and report a surprise that they are 40 - 60 pounds overweight.
The obesity issue we face in this country is a problem having to do with food. We have access to too many calorie dense foods and drinks. I have patients’ families eating and drinking while they are in my office; it’s as if they can’t wait. Wasn’t there a time that eating outside of the dining room was considered impolite? But my patients have no idea why they are overweight and in most cases they honestly don’t know.
However, when we talk about healthy eating and consulting a nutritionist, I inevitably get into an argument. There is a new paradigm shift that eating cholesterol, saturated fats and eggs are good for you. I just want to drop to the ground and have a seizure when the patients refuse to listen to reason. They’ve bought into the junk science behind the headlines. I seriously just want to give up.
@frugaldoctor, don’t you think a weekly or even monthly weighing would be sufficient to catch creeping weight gain? Daily weighing sounds pretty obsessive to me for a normal child. And BMI of 14 is awfully low–below the 5th percentile unless you are ages 3-10 in which case it’s still very low.
Seems to me that there is quite a bit of ground between a healthy child weighing herself every day (or an adult, for that matter, since weight fluctuates according to premenstrual bloat, etc.), and not weighing at all until you think there is a problem. Even Weight Watchers will tell you not to weigh yourself more than once a week when you are trying to lose weight because it’s demoralizing and deceptive. Daily fluctuations are often meaningless so I guess I don’t see the point. With all due respect, it seems obsessive to me. You don’t need to weigh daily unless you are a jockey or a coxswain.
The healthy lunch specifications are 600-700 calories for grades 6-8. Kids that age need about 1800 calories a day. That leaves 1100-1200 calories for breakfast and dinner, not to mention snacks.
I may not belong here, but I’m going to comment anyway. I go to a medium sized public school in a city that, in 2009, was visited by the Obamas themselves because it had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Things have improved, but the schools are poorly funded (in this district, at least). The lunch quality has gradually gone down since my freshman year (I’m a senior now). The pizza used to be average, but now it is made with some sort of supposedly healthy, cheap, gooey bread and is loaded with grease. They require us to have at least one vegetable or one fruit.The vegetables are slimy or undercooked or sometimes both. The fruit are usually bruised and the oranges look moldy. The lettuce is wilted and sometimes brown. The chicken is sometimes undercooked. I have no idea how many calories are in these foods, but they taste bad and are probably aren’t healthy either. Full priced lunch costs $2.50. It isn’t worth it. Reduced price is $.40. The kids who couldn’t afford to bring their lunches would be the ones on free lunch most likely. Yes they deserve to eat food, but the food should at least be of better quality.
The cafeteria staff at the two high schools make lunches for the three middle schools and 13 elementary schools. So they get the same poor quality food we get, except a day or two later.
Another dumb thing the district did, was have the elementary kids go to school from 8:30-4 (HS and MS go from 7:30-2:30 for comparison)with a 30 minute lunch and 20 minute recess because tests are more important than these kids being active. I am unsure what time the lunches are for elementary schools or if there are any snack breaks, but if not then that is a really long time to be going with one meal and 20 minutes of playing.
This probably had a point at some time but it sort of turned into a rant.
TLDR: If they want kids to be healthy, serve food that is worth eating and let the young ones have more than 20 minutes of recess.