I’m feeling fortunate that our school still has recess in the lower grades and requires a class in ALL of home-ec (cooking and more), health, personal finance, government and gym.
I learn a lot on CC about different school districts around the country and how different they can be.
Helicopter schools to go along with helicopter parents? It used to be that kids would just play in the street with other kids, or go to their friends’ houses or yards, etc… Now, parents schedule play dates for the kids…
Also, when I was in elementary school, kids would walk or bicycle themselves to school or the school bus stop. Now, parents won’t let their kids past the property line unsupervised. So kids today may never get around under their own power.
Hmmm, don’t remember home economics being a requirement decades ago, although it was available as an elective. High school civics existed and was required then and now, though these days there is the AP US government option as well.
School Lunches Becoming Healthier, Statistics Indicate
Substantially more schools are offering two or more fruits and two or more vegetables than in 2000, according to federal data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/health/school-lunches-becoming-healthier-statistics-indicate.html
UCB said , IIRC, that anyone could tell if they’d gained a few lbs by how their pants/belts fit. But if some women arent aware they’ve gained 40-50 lbs, they are wearing a potato sack, not a dress!
Indeed, lack of awareness of that kind of weight gain would take a whole lot of denial. Either that or fibbing to the doctor to avoid blame.
Well I do. I’m probably older than you. I went to Minnesota public schools in the 70s and we had to take home ec and shop in junior high (boys and girls together).
NJSue,
You must be young! In the latter half of the 70s I was in grad school!!! Home ec and shop were way in my rear view mirror!
In the book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”, Michael Moss explained how Kraft Foods blurred the lines between education and sales, bringing processed products to home economic classes. I think by the 1970s, home economics was already a marketing vehicle for Kraft and the other large processed food manufacturers.
If you want to read a good book about how we’ve been manipulated into our addiction for processed foods, this book “Salt Sugar Fat” will shock you. There is a free audio version on YouTube too.
Where I grew up and where I live now, it was/is the “relatively poorer kids” who did not qualify for free lunches but couldn’t afford to pay for lunches every day–who packed/pack their own lunches. The school lunches tend to be OK, or pretty good. I grew up in a big family and have a big family of my own, and it saves a lot of money to pack your own lunches. (It was a problem when peanut butter was completely banned from our elementary school a few years ago. Now it is allowed at lunch, but not in classroom snacks.) I still have one kid in elementary school. Just this week they started a new program where any kid can take up to two servings of fruit or vegetables from the “healthy food bar” without paying. Even kids who pack their lunches. My kid came home all excited about this. Our elementary school still has two recesses, or a recess and a “fitness break” where kids can exercise, walk around the track for 10 min. or so. Middle school does not have recess. (Maybe a good thing. I remember my middle school recess–mostly cliques of girls sitting around gossiping,violent games of dodge ball, kids sneaking off to smoke or make out in the woods. . . Not so healthy.) Fwiw, I also had home ec and shop in middle school in the mid 70s. And I took home ec in high school, too. In one cooking lesson they taught us to make macaroni and cheese from scratch. I’d never heard of such a thing–we always made it from a box at home. (Kraft tasted better, imo.)
I have always found this subject interesting, because I worked for the Food & Nutrition Service in the 1980’s, during the “Ketchup is a vegetable” years (I’m not a nutritionist. I was a bureaucrat). I really want to know what kind of nutritious meal can we offer these children that they will eat and that we can afford. My own kids (in their 20’s) were offered French Toast Sticks, Churros, Riblets (who knows), burgers, pizza, grilled cheese and some kind of chicken nuggets. So basically, fast food. What vegetables do children willingly eat, and what can be prepared efficiently for a large group?
When S was in elementary school I was impressed that they found reasonably healthy things to serve that little kids would actually eat, such as a turkey hot dog with carrot sticks.
One of the few things I could pack for lunch that S would willingly eat was sliced red peppers and hummus.
I think the vegetable thing is really influenced by the parents. The only vegetable my kids won’t eat is Lima beans (I hate them and have never served them.) My kids think fruit is snack/desert. They’d rather eat veggies than protein. We went to a cousin’s first b-day party and my kids at the time ages 5 and 3 asked for salad, SIL told them that the salad was only for adults!
Calling school cafeteria food healthy, at least when I went to school, would be something of a mis-statement, if there were vegetables they were pretty horrible canned vegetables, you had hamburgers and pizza and hot dogs, and not very good ones, the infamous "mystery meat’ and if you had pasta, it was more than likely canned (and this was suburban NJ, not inner city Newark). In high school it was a bit better, they had salads available, but still a lot of the food was heavy on fat, salt, and they had things like white bread.
What was even worse in a lot of schools fast food became the true staple, school districts made deals with the food purveyors, and you had things like chicken nuggets and the like, and they had things like Snapple Iced Tea and Soda as the main drinks, basically they outsourced the cafeteria to fast food.
I haven’t seen the school lunches they are serving now, but in some sense it does sound like what is typical, to create healthy menus they go overboard. So they take out salt, but they don’t replace it with other spices, and they start serving chicken franks and the like that basically are tasteless (I have tried many such items from the store, and what is worse, I would bet what they are serving is not anywhere near all natural, it is probably loaded with chemicals). Unfortunately, what I suspect you are seeing is schools in order to meet the guidelines have done so without trying to make it palatable, there is a reason that "health food’ often has a bad reputation, and it is frankly that it is often created with a goal of being ‘healthy’ rather than "tasty’ (Julia Child used to go off on that, and rightfully so, and she was proven right that a lot of the ‘health food’ was not very healthy, the whole no cholesterol/low fat to protect the heart, that salt was necessarily an evil, or even better, that somehow margarine and hydrogenated vegetable oils were
‘better’ than butter). I don’t blame Michelle Obama’s initiative, not when schools were serving fast food, but the problem is no one probably bothered to work on coming up with sample menus with recipes for healthy, nutrititious food kids will eat.
I think you’re right, 3scoutsmom. Some kids are never served vegetables at home. Some kids are never served anything other than burgers, dogs, nuggets, pizza, pancakes, and fries at home. Maybe mac and cheese from the box. Maybe spaghetti with sauce from a jar. No wonder they won’t eat much of anything at school!
My kid ate all kinds of things because he was served all kinds of things at home. He had friends who would literally gag and burst into tears if you gave them something with black beans in it, for example. Actually happened.
We had a one bite rule. He had to take one real bite of any new food. If he didn’t like it, he didn’t have to eat any more. No cajoling or threatening: a done deal. He could always have yogurt instead. Frequently, he found that he actually LIKED the new food. I vowed that I wasn’t going to spend every meal time arguing over what the kid was and was not going to eat. It worked out well.
I absolutely detest lima beans, and have never served them to anyone, ever. 
When I was attending Va. Public schools, EVERY school had it’s own fully functioning kitchen with cooks who made most dishes from scratch. There didn’t seem to be a lunch funding issue back then, so I’ve always been a bit mystified as to why it started to become one over the course of the last 20 yrs., which is when we increasingly began to hear of schools being built that didn’t have full kitchens, but rather just ovens and microwaves for heating pre-cooked entres (mostly fast food-like junk) delivered by food service companies. The quality of these offerings often were considerably lower than that which we use to be served. I remember how mornings in our schools would grow more and more redolent with the smells of food cooking in the cafeteria (with “fresh rolls and butter” and “fruit cup” being a part of virtually very menu). Spaghetti and lasagna, green beans, fried chicken, and pan pizza were common offerings also. Of course many of these foods were high in calories and fat, but two recesses, lasting at least a half hour each (teachers had a lot of desgression in deciding how long to keep their classes outside), were common practice for elementary schools, and gym class was part of the required curriculum in all middle schools and high schools.
Most of us would go home and run around outside while the sun still shone, putting off homework until after supper. We had to exert actual physical effort to ride bikes, scooters, and peddle cars, instead of sitting in motorized plastic rides meant to look like Corvettes and SUVs. We didn’t have a lot of television watching options, and we certainly didn’t have the ability to park our butts on the couch for hours on end playing video games. Back then also meals tended to consist of far fewer convenience foods (things like Shake’n Bake were still a relatively new idea), and dinner was still a family event that required much more labor and planning than the common “pick up Pizza Hut or KFC on the way home from work” phenomenon. I guess my point is that childhood has changed a lot for many kids over the past 40 or 50 yrs, and the way they eat and recreate is no exception. There’s no way to pretend these and many other changes haven’t directly impacted the weight and overall health of American children. Amending the offerings of school lunch programs will only partially address one of the factors contributing to the growth in childhood obesity.
The ‘large group’ is the problem. Kids will eat what gets put into their lunch bags sent from home. Mine regularly got jicama, bell pepper, cucumber, celery, daikon radish, and sugar snap peas. We eat a lot of sweat potato and they would get the leftover sweet potato ‘fries’ as part of the lunch. Turns out their table mates were often envious.
I don’t get this ‘what they will eat’ concern. They will eat what we expose them too as they are growing up under our roofs. D came home from kindergarten and asked if she could have a can of sardines as a snack. That’s because…she’d been exposed to sardines. She hated avocado but loved roasted beets (I told her they were very very special winter candy and I’d only share my portion if she ate her other stuff first). Why do we expose our children’s tastebuds to things like chicken nuggets and corn dogs at a young age? Why do some families cook make a special plate for their kids (oh, junior hates trout, I’m going to nuke a few chicken McT#$ds for him instead…he’ll love it)
S was pickier, both he and H are super tasters. But still, if offered 3-4 things at a meal, he would eat at least 1 or 2.
Teaching our kids to eat properly is at least as important as making sure they are in the right college grooming activities. And SES plays a part in the obesity epidemic, it in no way explains away the growing butts of the non SES challenged.
I wasn’t really asking what vegetables our own kids will eat. That’s never been a problem in my house. I’m wondering what would be included in a successful school lunch menu, in that most kids would eat it, and that it would be healthy and cost effective.
My point is that most kids will eat that to which they are introduced at a young age. The willingness to try different food stuffs can be taught early. So then it wouldn’t matter if the school offered carrots or jicama or bell peppers the young’uns would be flexible enough to give it a try. The trick is of course to simply not offer pizza, McAnything, hot pockets, fries etc. If we stopped offering those things kids would either - skip a meal, learn to eat what is offered or bring their own lunch bag.
I agree with you in theory @dietz199 but in practice there are limits. My DC are less picky than their father but DS is pickier than DD. If I have issues getting 3 to eat well I can only imagine how hard it would be to get a whole school–especially a culturally diverse one.
Research shows that it takes time, education, and repeated exposure to get schoolkids to eat a new menu. The parents also need to be on board. So the schools need to have patience and incorporate nutrition into the curriculum, AND educate the kids’ parents, to make the change work.
Public schools have to work with the realities of the population they have. If you’ve got a community of nugget-eating parents raising nugget-eating kids, the parents will undermine the school lunch program as long as they think there’s nothing wrong with that.