School Lunches Are A Mess

How lovely that the first lady carries the banner high – save our children through nutrition, and deliver it through public schools.

How lovely that the United States as a whole and a first lady in particular can plead for the  health and future health of children in a world dominated by politics and commercial interests that are simply not assailable with idealistic claptrap.

We may have actually achieved an amazing amount in the past few years, on this incredibly difficult task. Guess who has been saying, for a couple of years now, that any attempt to reform school lunches is in trouble?  Coca-Cola, and other large food companies that make things like frozen pizza a French fries.

Does anyone still believe these people are not fiercely lobbying to keep, or perhaps improve, their profit margin?
This problem has been fermenting for a couple of years now, and was caused by a system that seems to have once thought it had a “quick fix.”

My husband grew up in Kansas and can certify that parents with great intentions and minimal if any experience are trying to hold banners high and to get done a job that, in some places, may simply not be financially possible.

There has been plenty of research on the nutritional needs of children.

They are actually fairly well known. The problem is that getting children to eat what is good for them is a struggle that antedates my childhood. Parents have told tall tales often based on fairy tales they themselves believed to get kids to eat.

Me, I got “Eat — kids are starving in Europe” without ever being told (or figuring out) how my cleaning my plate helped the European kids.

Eating a school lunch is overlaid with psychosocial forces that may be beyond the normal parent’s imagination.

Me, I remember my parents and my school prohibiting trading of brought-from-home foods at lunch.

I remember getting skin tests on my back that all seemed to have gone red, so I seemed to be allergic to many things.

If that had not been enough to scare me off food-trading. I was told in no uncertain terms that non-Jews brought their children up eating poisons, in order to desensitize them from same.

I actually thought of this hypothesis exactly one, in public school when I got a whiff of a sandwich of smoked shoulder of pork being consumed by my (obviously non-Jewish) girlfriend Catherine.

In private girls’ school, I saw willowy anorectics refuse all food because it was simply “not fit for human consumption.”

My mother convinced the school kitchen to prepare me a special weight reduction diet, as I  was far and away the fattest kid in sight.

It did not work.

I never had to survive anything like the food fights that my father of blessed memory was charged — for over an hour one day a week — to prevent.

I guess that was equivalent to throwing food away.

I mean, it is hard for me to imagine eating something after it has been thrown.

It is hard to find academic research about how children can be fed, and could get healthy.

The namesake of the Ellyn Satter Institute is credentialed as a dietitian and as a therapist. Her writings make sense, and look like things that could actually be implemented.

WEBMD.COMpresents this very mainstream and highly simplified synopsis of the situation, and it is not without merit.

The problem is that I absolutely do not believe that we should make teachers on luncheon duty implement them.

I am trying not to be swayed by the fact I do not think my father of blessed memory would have done a very good job of implementing them.

I wonder if any teacher could.  They surely do not require that level of responsibility, and would have enough to do without learning this.

Teachers may not even be doing a good enough job of teaching.  Through (generally) no fault of their own, they seem to be stuck in a Victorian-era system that does not work terribly well.

For those so inclined, TED Talks has a wonderful selection of modern thinking on education – and the most-watched video of their 1,000+ free offerings online is a fascinating overview of how schools kill creativity.

We made a choice for the public schools a long time ago on what must have looked like brilliant expediency.

You got the kids for lunchtime and they may not be getting decent food at home — so feed them when you got them.

The fact that school lunch programs have a long history in Europe and the United States absolutely does NOT mean that they are the best way to address the poor eating habits of children — which may indeed be a precursor to obesity — in the present.

Surely, it must have occurred to somebody other than me that even if children can be magically made to ingest a healthy meal at lunch, their two other daily meals could be toxic, minimal, or non-existent?

Moreover, the parental family, as well as other children who live in the house, may be surviving in nutritional misery as well.

Will I sound too old fashioned if I invoke parental responsibility here?

It is amazing how many parents have told me they have conceived children “by accident.”

If parents had to take out a license to have children, no matter how minimal the standards would be, I have often figured that many such parents would not pass the requirements.  People must jump through arduous hoops to adopt children, yet can procreate ad libidum (Pardon my pun) and only face consequences much later – or when they get caught by authorities.

I remember when I was writing my book on “How to Locate and Marry Your Lifetime Love,” I learned that most people spend a lot more time researching what car they are going to buy than what kind of a marriage they want or what kind of a person they might want to marry.

I do not think anybody (except academics) researches much of anything.

I have never met a young mother who has done any research into child nutrition, although I will admit I have met a few who have picked up some basics in court-ordered parenting classes.

Oy!

Those who have an accessible mother of their own sometimes trust “tradition.”  This can be a dangerous problem in a world that is changing as fast as ours.

Even adopting pets requires an application for humans to fill out.  And if it does not work out, you can bring them back to the shelter.

Me, I have always believed in science to point some solution to my problems.

It helped me solve the worst problems of my life. I lost 200 pounds and saved my own life.

I found the perfect man to love and saved my life in a different way.

People who run poor school districts and cannot afford nutritional school lunches have been given a six month waiver on compliance with new school lunch mandates.

Nobody knows what kids are actually eating — it may be determined by parental culture and may end up in the garbage can.

If anybody wants to research any of this, I believe a school lunchroom — even more than the classroom — is a perfect place to use parental volunteers to come into schools at lunchtimes and gather data.

Betting on people to do the right thing is generally a winning proposition. I’m an optimist – at least in this regard.

Hitch up a volunteer parent monitoring program with a local academic institution, for these folks are always more excited than anybody can imagine to collect data in the real world.

Separate the problem from the schools — they have enough trouble trying to educate kids.

A lot of pediatric psych problems — things like alleged “attention deficit disorder” may be influence by child hunger.  Developing brains may be especially vulnerable.

What we need is for all the knowledgeable school lunch folks to help kids and their parents in surviving to make it to school.

This is not a political problem.

I cannot think of another species that destroys itself as systematically as we do.