It’s easy for us to heap scorn on the food served in school cafeterias. But are the lunches we’re packing for our little ones as wholesome as we’d like to think?
These stats represented below are from the United Kingdom but I’d wager that the situation here in the U.S. is not that much different–particularly in terms of the percentage of brown bag lunches including cookies, chips, and sweetened drinks.
What do you think? Are we guilty of a double standard?
Courtesy of: OnlineSchools.com
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I love the visual presentation, though I’m not sure that American schools have as stringent of a healthy school lunch policy as the U.K. seems to. In my experience as a middle school teacher (which was short-lived; I now teach college, thank goodness) the public school lunches were absolutely disgusting. Pizza was served every day and whatever the hot lunch was for the day, it was served with some kind of gross looking dessert and juice pouches. I hardly ever saw vegetables on kids’ plates and the ones I did see looked pitiful and depressing. Small servings in Styrofoam cups, overcooked mush–yuck.
When I was in elementary school (20 years ago) we had a salad bar in the cafeteria. On the rare occasion that I didn’t bring my lunch from home, which was usually a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread with no mayo, an apple, and some kind of yogurt or low-fat pudding, I’d hit that salad bar with gusto. I wish kids still had that option. Children thrive on choices and one of the only choices they really get to make on a daily basis is what food they put into their bodies. When the choices at school are unappetizing and unhealthy, what can we really expect from them but to choose pizza and chicken nuggets? Those foods have the fat-sugar-salt combo that keeps the reward centers in the brain coming back for more and kids get trained to seek these foods out by school lunches and uneducated parents. I really applaud local nutritional education volunteers who are working to educate schools, parents, and teachers about how to eat better.