Pizza As A Vegetable For School Lunches

On Monday, Mira came home from school and immediately pulled a bag of potato chips from her backpack. When I asked her where the chips had come from, she told me her teachers gave them to her at lunch because they had extras in her class. Her preschool class has lunch brought up to their room from the school cafeteria, so they often have leftovers that Mira happily takes advantage of, even though she has a packed lunch each day.

Potato chips are one of the few things she brings home as leftovers, but I hear about the other things she occasionally eats when her class has extra food. French fries, pizzas, flavored applesauce, nachos – these are all regular school lunches served to little kids?

The answer is yes, they are, and if Congress gets its way, they will remain the staples of the American school kid’s diet for some time to come. Despite the USDA pushing for healthier school lunches, Congress has released a spending bill that rolls back the new standards to cater to special interest lobbyists in the food industry who insist that kids don’t need less salt and processed foods in their diets, and that two tablespoons of tomato paste on a pizza would be perfectly acceptable as a serving of vegetables.

(We’ll forget for a moment that tomatoes are actually a fruit.)

It’s horrifying to read that article and realize what our elected officials consider acceptable for a school lunch. Whole grains are considered unnecessary. Processed foods and cheap, artificial food-like products reign supreme in the lunchrooms.

Beyond the lobbying, some claim that the government shouldn’t tell children what to eat, which is ridiculous when food standards have been around for decades. But by not providing proper guidelines on what constitutes a nutritious school lunch, Congress is still telling children what to eat, and the message they are sending is that your kids aren’t worth better food.

For many underprivileged children, a public school lunch is their best chance at one complete, nutritious meal all day long. One chance each day to have proper nutrition. Some possibly get a school breakfast as well. And our elected officials offer them nothing but processed junk high in fat, sodium and sugar. Pizza as a serving of vegetables. (Don’t forget the *breakfast* pizza served each morning, too!) We should be ashamed that this is the best we can offer to our most vulnerable in the United States.

I’m thankful that Aaron and I have the time and resources to prepare lunches for Cordy and Mira each day. Our daughters aren’t limited by the choices available to them in the cafeteria, and have parents who are actively involved in finding better foods for them. As a result they benefit from better nutrition, especially Cordy, who can’t tolerate artificial food additives. I can’t imagine how much worse her behavior would be if she had to eat school food each day.

Before anyone tries to knock me down from my pedestal, I should take a moment to pause here and point out that my family is far from being a model for perfect nutrition. After all, we ordered pizza last night for dinner and we love McDonald’s now and then, too. And we always need more vegetables.

However, we try to keep a balance of healthy foods in their diets. Both girls have packed lunches that consist of whole grains, real fruit and cheese, peanut butter (that is only made from peanuts & nothing more), and water, 100% juice or plain milk to drink. 

But they’re the lucky ones – what about the kids who are at the mercy of the school cafeteria line each day? The ones who regularly depend on those potato chips for their nutrition? Who’s there to advocate for whole grains and fresh produce for them? Who’s speaking up to insist that we raise the bar on the necessary requirements for a nutritious lunch? It’s not the American Frozen Food Institute, that’s for certain. And it’s not their friends in Congress, either.

I genuinely had high hopes that the USDA would be able to create some real change in the way we feed our school-aged children in this country, even if that change was small. Any change for the better is at least a start. Now I’m left more disappointed than ever at the corruption in our political system and the politicians who claim they care about our children, but really only care about their corporate donors and dollars.Why strive for quality when there’s big bucks to be made serving up the cheapest food materials possible?

It’s no wonder so many conservative politicians are against national health care – they don’t want to pay for the obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure they are actively helping to create by profiting at the expense of our children’s future. If I was actively working to create a generation of fat, disease-stricken citizens like they are I’d try to avoid the issue, too. Hell, they’re probably investing all of their money in the pharmaceutical industry right now, knowing what’s ahead for these kids and anxiously awaiting the profits they’ll make from all the medications these kids will need.

It’s no secret why this country is facing a health crisis. Part of the answer can be found right in our schools, where we’re creating our national health crisis one substandard school lunch at a time. 

Our kids are worth more than this. They deserve better than two tablespoons of tomato paste and salty, high-fat, processed lunches each day.