The School Lunch Project
Just read up on this blog, created by an anonymous high school teacher in the midwest. To illustrate how wretched the quality of school lunches can be, she’s eating them every day and blogging about her experience. I’ve just started clicking and reading through, and some of this stuff looks awful. And not that unfamiliar from when I was growing up. It’s crazy to me - in elementary school, we didn’t have the internet. Cellphones were called “carphones” and were about at easy to handle as a 5-pound handweight. Apple was best known for the Macintosh II (just weird to even type that), a beast of a computer that displayed two colors - green and black. We’ve obviously come a long way technologically since then, but we’re still giving kids melted, processed cheese and Ragu on french bread, calling it pizza, and calling it nutrition. Really sad.
The good news in all of this is that vocal people like “Mrs. Q,” Michelle Obama, and Jamie Oliver (his new show, Food Revolution, starts this Friday on ABC) are finally bringing the issue of school lunches to light. Hopefully one day we can look back at the turn of the millennium as a time of change with regard to childhood obesity and proper nutrition. Until that day comes, it’s up to parents to fuel their children with the healthiest lunches (and breakfasts and dinners) they can, so that when confronted with poor eating options, their kids will have a preference for healthy, clean, but great-tasting food. No one, no matter how young or poverty-stricken, should have a craving for foods like Mrs. Q is eating, unless that’s all they’ve ever been given.
