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Better Nutrition Equals Better Education
Cafeteria food has always been the brunt of kids' jokes. Many of us remember the grilled cheese sandwich that stuck to the plate when you turned it upside down, and the egg soufflé that jiggled when you poked it. But even that is a far cry from what's served now.
In the midst of a growing childhood obesity crisis, school food now means federally subsidized chicken nuggets, low-grade hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs and pizza. "Cooking" usually involves a centralized kitchen similar to a fast food assembly line.
According to Ron Haskins, senior fellow of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, "behind the overcooked vegetables and steam-table pizza that American children confront each school day is an industry that rivals defense contractors and media giants in its ability to bring home the federal bacon." That industry is agribusiness -- and, via the National School Lunch Program, it has a chokehold on our kids.
The commodities-driven National School Lunch Program, meant to feed 60 million children healthy food, has instead turned into a major public health threat. The most vulnerable in our society are suffering the most severe consequences, including epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses. While we need to be able to include more children in the School Lunch Program, we also need to be able to feed them higher-quality, more nutritious food, or else we are defeating the purpose of the program.
Over the past three decades, rates of obesity in the U.S. have more than doubled among children ages 2 to 5 and more than tripled among those ages 6 to 11. Today, approximately 9 million U.S. children over the age of 6 are considered obese. America's overweight teens consume an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than they are required each day.
The National School Lunch Program and its affiliated programs have unmatched size and scope, serving more than 35 million lunches every day in almost every school in the U.S., costing taxpayers more than $8.5 billion. Close to 20 million K-12 students receive up to two meals a day, five days a week. The program was recently expanded to include all children enrolled in Head Start and child nutrition programs. The summer food service program feeds 18 million low-income children.
Where does agribusiness come in? Schools participating in the National School Lunch Program receive cash subsidies and commodity foods for each meal served plus bonus commodities from agricultural surplus. The program's authorizing language requires that participating schools serve the most abundant commodities -- mostly milk and meat, with few fruits and vegetables. In fact, the ties between the government and the commodities industry, aided and abetted by poor nutritional choices by state and local food service officials, trumps federal nutritional guidelines resulting in menu offerings that resemble fast food.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases hundreds of millions of pounds of pork, beef, and other animal products as well as surplus corn and wheat primarily as an economic benefit to agricultural interests. This might have been a defensible idea a century ago, when a third of our population worked as farmers; now, only 2 percent of our workforce is in agriculture. However, to help 2 percent of our citizens, these commodities are donated to the School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. Unfortunately for our children, many of these foods are unhealthy.
Next year, The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, which includes school lunches, will expire and the renewal battle will begin. We must dramatically improve the federal nutrition requirements that guide this program, weaken the ties between the School Lunch Program and the commodities markets, revolutionize the quality of food in our schools, label the salt, fat, and sugar content of each meal served, and educate school officials, regulators and the American public about the School Lunch Program and its potentially disastrous implications for our children's health.
We need a Congressional mandate for higher nutritional values for the School Lunch Program to improve the quality and types of food that are served in K-12 schools, with an emphasis on local foods and organics. However, that's useless unless we complement it with revamped nutrition curriculums for children and parents so that they can learn the value of good nutrition in preventing disease.
Significant progress can and must be made in overhauling school lunches. It will take millions of voices to bring about this change. The cost to the next generation is too high for this battle to be lost.
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24 Comments so far
Show AllImproving school lunches is a worthy goal that fits in nicely with supporting local production of fruits and vegetables.
Joe
Resembles a fast food menu? Fast food restaurants have much higher quality food than public school cafeterias from what I remember.
The first difficulty is the actual definition of a "healthy diet" from the standpoint of a randomized, placebo-controlled, double- blind clinical trial. I'm not kidding! For example, nobody knows whether "organic" food really is any better than conventional ones or that the additives and residues allowable under present rules for organic are less harmful than those allowed in non-organic or merely "natural" foods. Fresh fruits and raw vegtables are great, but they often lack vital nutritional components found in canned and cooked items. Furthermore, the jury is still out on sugar, salt and the various forms of fat- at least within reasionable parameters. Even the official "food pyramid" seems to change quite frequently and most people now understand that the content labels on most food products are strictly "ballpark" figures taken from "representative" samples which rarely "pan-out" in the real world of mass markets.
If its hard to say what diet is essential for maximizing educational opportunities beyond such basics as calories and, say, enough fresh food to prevent scurvy, its even harder to construct a menu with enough appeal that most kids will actually eat it without the application of significant coercive measures; for example, diligent policing to prevent the buying and selling of prohibited food items on or adjacent to school grounds.
To my mind the problems with school lunches etc is much more a matter of Art than Science and should perhaps be approached from that perspective if any sustainable progress is to be made in the near term. God knows what we'll all be having to eat once we've reached the tipping point of global warming!
We know enough about nutrition to give kids something better than what most of them currently get. Nobody says a diet of only fresh fruits and vegetables is ideal. Even vegans would add whole grains and beans. I agree that food pyramids and other guidelines can be simplistic or alarmist, but that is not the main problem.
Problem is right now many school menus are driven by things other than nutrition. Among those things are support for agribusiness, contracts for convenience food suppliers, school buildings that are built without proper kitchens and the desire to lay off cooks and servers in favor of microwaved trays.
Salads, fresh fruits, cheeses, stews, soups, yogurts, good breads etc. should be served. In lieu of contracts, quality home cooking based on farm fresh food is better. It can also create jobs.
I know two widows who raised their children working as cooks or servers in school cafeterias in the days when food was cooked on site. It is honorable work as opposed to impersonal profit driven factory food delivered to schools on contract.
Joe
"from the standpoint of a randomized, placebo-controlled, double- blind clinical trial. I'm not kidding!"
Wow, what an aggressive lack of scientific evidence behind a poster making the above quote!
Ok, you have opinions. And you want to appear to be more scientific than others.
"Where's the beef?" How about any indication that you know anything about organic vs non organic?
By the way, do you know anything about scientific paradigms, including research paradigms? It appears you apply a Newtonian paradigm to nutrition science. Ok, that's a philosophy. Ok it's a few hundred years old. Ok, but these days you have to defend such a paradigm. I'll wait for your response.
RE: For example, nobody knows whether "organic" food really is any better than conventional ones or that the additives and residues allowable under present rules for organic are less harmful than those allowed in non-organic or merely "natural" foods. by johnshaplin
This above statement is incorrect.
We do have evidence to show that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food. We have evidence it is healthier. We can demonstrate it has no externalized costs, unlike conventional corporate—or agribusiness—farming practices. [Externalized costs are those borne later by the community such as expenses to clean contaminated water supplies and health care costs.]
The main reason for organic food being healthier is the interaction of soil microbes that extract nutrients from the soil and transfer them to the plant roots. Conventional agribusiness farming—especially monocropping or growing acres and acres of only one type of plant—destroys soil microbes through the necessary use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that change the soil’s make up and levels of acidity. New evidence recently has been announced on how our soils in the U.S.A. are being depleted through corporate agribusiness monocrop farming.
We also can demonstrate how the ‘additives’ found on conventional agribusiness monocrop farms not only change and damage the soil, but how they affect the workers, run off and poison the water supply, and outgas to poison the air. This data can be found in farmworker health issue reports, for one.
With evidence that demonstrates chemical fertilizers destroy the vitality of the soil and lower the nutritive value of foods, we have to ask, "Why?"
Why, then, do we use them?
Well, interestingly enough, most of those agricultural chemicals come from the petroleum industry. One—methyl bromide—has been banned in all other developed countries save one, and is a toxic byproduct of the refining process. If they couldn’t sell it to corporate farms, those petroleum folks’d be forced to pay for its disposal.
We need to educate ourselves as to the extent corporations are extracting or destroying resources for their own profits. We need to always question when someone says, “Well, nobody knows if organic food is better.” We need to be skeptical about claims that we couldn’t feed enough people without corporate farming. And we need to pay attention.
Seaseal
www.mixtla.blogspot.com
"The first difficulty is the actual definition of a "healthy diet" from the standpoint of a randomized, placebo-controlled, double- blind clinical trial."
Cough! Um...yeah.
The definition of a healthy diet may not pass the above trial, but the above statement doesn't pass the straight face test.
Hey, I've done a randomized, lobotomized, triple-blind test that concludes that since there are some pollutants in air around the world, it is better for people to hold their breaths their entire lives.
Other tests reveal that kids know when they are being fed garbage...and react accordingly.
"All Nature's difference keeps all Nature's peace." Alexander Pope
"Fresh fruits and raw vegtables are great, but they often lack vital nutritional components found in canned and cooked items"
This is complete BULL $HIT! Cooked and canned vegetables lose a lot of their nutrients in the cooking process not to mention the amount of additives and sodium added.
Every expert advises to eat as much FRESH produce as we can!
No wonder we have a obesity epidemic, most people are too ignorant and those stupid diary and meat subsidies only compound the problem, but our system just blames individuals.
A mixture between cooked and fresh vegetables is really best, cooking releases some nutrients that are harder to absorb in a veggie's uncooked state, but does destroy the value of some other nutrients. But yeah, canned veggies need to go.
One thing we're seeing here is cheap industrial food, so food service folks don't need to cook and schools save on staff and staff level of competence. It's the same thing farmers have been dealing with, cheap farming in a box without the need for management decisions. So it looks like efficiency, but there are all of these non farmers producing the food. So the farming sector has shrunk to under 8% as the farm input sector has grown to 20%. And, as here, the output or market sector has skyrocketed in their share of the food dollar.
But then we have all of these externalized (meaning paid by society later) costs. Health problems from poor nutrition, environmental costs, social decline, economic losses (less wealth creation, less jobs, less middle class, more low class, greater income gap).
"requires that participating schools serve the most abundant commodities -- mostly milk and meat, with few fruits and vegetables" What's most abundant is a management decision for USDA. They can manage supply any way they want (with proper legislation). Many progressives were not on board 2007-2008 with NFFC's Food from Family Farms Act, which would end cheap corn, soybeans etc. prices (below cost inputs for high fructose corn syrup, transfats, animal factories). They didn't support supply management (combined with commodity reserves to address price spikes), with adequate price floors (and ceilings).
Iowa's Tom Harkin, Senate Ag chair, is the key on this, the key to Vilsack and Obama as well as to congress. His Harkin-Gephardt farm bill would correct huge issues like those mentioned above, and also export dumping causing LDC poverty (LDCs 73% rural). He and others (Wellstone, Gephardt, Daschle) quit advocating it when he became ag chair (thinking it wasn't winnable under Republican domination?). But now we have Obama's big win. Food reform folks were miseducated on this, and on the wrong side, believing falsely that subsidies set prices and influence supply. They don't. They just compensate farmers for losing massive amounts on the markets. (See nffc.net) Before we can get together to influence congress we need to reeducate the food reform movement.
Ok, 1 more point. Meat and dairy are nutritionally dense and should not be discouraged! The food processing complex bashed saturated fats (from meat and dairy) in their falsely based advocacy for transfats. See Mary Enig on McGovern Committee and transfats (http://www dot westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.html#congress), and the Weston Price Foundation (on benefits of saturated fats: http://www dot westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny.html#benefits". A nutritionist told me recently that finally, after 30 years, the hospital is no longer recommending margarine to heart patients!
We need to get organic grassfed meats and dairy into our schools, along with organic fruits and vegetables.
Hey folks, at the least let's discuss these matters. Post your responses and let's get to the bottom of it.
Yet again, Brad....
Yes, I agree. The corporate machinification of everything is something we need to change. As Emerson said (Divinity School Address), Man [and Woman] Farming rather than The Farmer. Generalization, not specialization. The highest possible level of expertise in every person rather than splitting us into a tiny ruling class and vast robotic class.
And yeah, we need to change the production of meat and milk from a feedlot-based agribusiness to locally-produced, small mixed-farm grass-fed beef and diversification into other meats as our farms and homesteads diversify. But only if at the same time we reduce the amounts of meat and milk in our bizarrely-corrupted diets. Diets must become more locally-based, which means more locally unique. People on the coast of Maine shouldn't be eating much beef, and people in Kansas shouldn't be eating much ocean fish (as Michael Pollan says, special occasion foods are OK--as long as we move toward a more equal world with no one living in poverty because some have too much.)Well, actually no one should be eating much fish because it's mostly poisonous and mostly overfished. But that's another subject.
We do eat too much fat. Too much for us--and too much for the world, because in most areas of the country (and those places we export our meat production to, like the Amazon)...in most areas of the country, production of meat, eggs and dairy products takes far more land, water and other resources than a similar caloric amount of fruits and vegetables. That is becoming less and less tenable economically, ecologically, psychologically, politically and socially, and must change in the face of onrushing global climate catastrophe.
How much too much is somewhat open to debate, as some of the effects of our diet are clearly from the methods of production rather than the products themselves. Pesticides, fertilizers, plastics, antibiotics, etc. need to be rethought, and it is lucky for us that organic methods often drastically reduce, even eliminate the need for them. (See the last chapter of Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall, eg.)But we do eat too much , and too much fat and need to reduce it to be healthy and live in harmony with the planet--which we need, by the way.
Many fine points. Here's where I disagree.
First, meat and milk, raised properly, are dense in nutrition and good for our U.S. diets. This is hardly known by anyone, progressive or not. That's why I'm emphasizing it. Most of what we know against fats arises from the corporate complex and their influence on government in favor of unhealthy vegetable fats. FOR PROGRESSIVES on this I recently found Barbara Ehrenrech's article, "Lowfat Capitalism," from "the Progressive" and reprinted in the Weston Price Foundation Journal Winter 2002 and http://www dot westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/lowfatcapitalism.html. (Weston Price folks love to document, as I do.)
On clearing the Amazon. It's being cleared for vegetable transfats (soybeans) as well as animal fats. At the same time, raising livestock is important for sustainability, as it puts (in these kinds of systems) land back in permanent pastures and hay, especially on highly erodible land. Without livestock dispersed, these lands are plowed up and/or saturated with chemicals for no till. Livestock help resource conserving crop rotations (ie. small grains, hay, pasture). Livestock can harvest their own feed and spread their own fertilizer without fossil fuels (draft power). Many farmers are getting by with very little machinery, unlike crop production. So there's no pure, utopian answer on the Amazon, as on other issues. Wisdom, reconciling dilemmas, reconciling many values, is needed.
"Psychologically"? A diversified farm with livestock is a better job, more enriched, diverse. As to fats and well being, (and many other related topics) start with Weston Price Foundation's "Myths & Truths About Nutrition." :Low-fat diets are associated with increased rates of depression, psychological problems, fatigue, violence and suicide. (Lancet 3/21/92 v339)" http://westonaprice dot org/mythstruths/mtnutrition.html Cited research here finds various cases of more fats being good.
Ok, "economically": there has not been an economic problem of too little food production or too little land in recent times. We've had surpluses depressing prices and causing massive world poverty, hunger and starvation. Livestock help moderate oversupply. 73% of Least Developed Countries' populations are rural. Farming is the key to these economies. Livestock provide value added, especially if prices are decent. Economic multipliers for diversity (crops and livestock) are high. Again, it's neither the utopianism of industrialism nor anti livestock solutions that are needed.
The "Know Your Fats" column of the Weston Price Foundation Journal, Wise Traditions, Fall 2008, had a response to criticism from the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers. There's a nice chart, page 61, on how saturated fats are good, but trans fats are bad, for cell membranes, hormones, inflammation, heart disease, Omega 3s, Diabetes, immune systems, and prostaglandins, sourced to M. Enig, Trnas Fatty Acids in the Food Supply: A Comprehensive Report Covering 60 Years of Research, 2nd ed. 1995.
Do "we" eat too much bad (vegetable) fats. Yes! Too many food miles? Yes!
I don't suppose anyone remembers the Trilateralist Paper "The Crisis of Democracy" by the late Samuel P. Huntington which found that the cause of unrest durings the 60s and 70s was "excess democracy." To curb this problem, it was proposed among other things to lower expectations by limiting education. If this National School Lunch Program is under the grip of agribusiness, it is no accident. To confront the program endorses the anti-federal mantra of conservatism, but to leave the program as is creates the lowered expectations that the elite mandated 30 years ago.
It's a win-win situation for the business elite.
The author forgot to mention that we can replace high fructose corn syrup with real sugar or even stevia along with switching from corn-fed based meat and diary to its grass fed counterparts and reduce our corn-fed population a great deal.
And the big way to do that is with the big billions related to the farm bill, the influence of the commodity title on commodity prices. We need to restore adequate price floors and supply management (nffc.net, Food from Family Farms Act or Harkin-Gephardt farm bill of 1990s. (Subsidies don't affect price.) This will make both sugar and grassfed more competitive. They've both been competing with corn that has no price floors and is usually way below cost.
Compared to the cost of buying a congressional representative or senator from the east or west coasts, the cost of corn belt politicians is low. Agribusinees needs to spend very little to keep laws on the books that are favaorable to their business.
Isn't agribusiness the second biggest lobby? As Bill Moyers and the Wall Street Journal reported, the Center for Responsive Politics $80,000 in agribusiness lobbying. Moyers blamed "commodity growers" for this, as did David Beckman of Bread for the World, but that's plain false, as CRPs own data clearly show. It's the output complex (for low, below cost farm prices for their cheap raw materials) and input complex (for no supply management to sell more inputs) and CAFOs (for below cost feed ingredients).
It's hard to beat them when the are effective at a divide and conquer strategy, reducing our (progressives) power to less than half of what it should be, and getting farmers divided in opposition to them. That ignorance makes it cheap! Such a deal.
On that matter, I hope you aren't thinking that it's about farm subsidies, which is what I'm talking about in the previous paragraph. It's about the lack of price floors and supply management (and lack of price ceilings and reserves, see nffc.net). Most urban progressives sided with agribusiness in a Republican "Freedom to Farm" type farm bill, with none of the NFFC (New Deal, Harkin-Gephardt 1990s) policies. They helped raise the smokescreen of subsidies while doing nothing about price issues (not joining NFFC), since subsidies have only an indirect, small-single-digit + or - impact on prices (see summary, Tufts Univ. "Paradox of Agricultural Subsidies," p. 21, online). Price issues: fructose, CAFOs, transfats, ethanol. Meanwhile, subsides (needed only when there are low or no price floors) prevent a massive depression for U.S. farmers, so progressives tried to lower farmers income while doing nothing about the price question (while not signing on with NFFC). So this divided farmers out as well. It's a broken movement, based upon ignorance. So yes, that's cheap for agribusiness, laughing all the way to the bank.
My husband and I are both educators. I taught at the middle and high school levels for 13 years before moving on to the university level. He is at the high school level. We were trying to remember when the change happened. Both of us remembered growing up with nutritious school lunch programs. We did, however, have the luxury of growing up in relatively small suburban towns where there was money for these programs. I didn't ever eat school food because of severe food allergies, my dad packed my lunch, but I remember watching my friends eat well rounded meals on a daily basis. My husband remembers the same. In my teaching career, which began in the late 80s, I watched students being taken care of by the cafeteria ladies and never notice a trend toward fast food until 1999 when I moved to Alaska and was teaching high school. I was appalled at the selections the students had: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, burgers and fries, hot pretzels and cheese sauce, sodas and juice drinks that were sweetened with corn syrup. Of course there were a few veggie trays available, along with a stray apple or orange, but they weren't often purchased. There wasn't even a proper cafeteria at the school. That was a first for me. I remember that I couldn't buy juice there. (I have an allergy to corn and corn-based products). I didn't notice that our high school had a high obesity rate. Our kids were active in lots of sports and other groups. I was the music director. Now that I'm in higher ed, I'm wondering if all the schools I was in prior to my time in Alaska were just different than the norm.
As I'm in schools now with students working to become teachers, I notice that there are cutbacks everywhere possible: cafeteria staff, janitorial staff, office staff, etc. One of the things you don't hear about very much in relation to NCLB is that many schools have also cut back on recess time and on physical education time (as with music and art classes) in the elementary schools. These cutbacks, when combined with this lack of focus on healthy food choices for children, can do nothing but harm children at risk for childhood obesity.
Just a few thoughts...
Health concerns pushed me and my family of 7 to switch to a Weston Price diet.
TALK ABOUT FREAK OUT AND ADDICTIONS AND WITHDRAW.
We are at an extreme - no bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, honey, sugar, no FRUIT, and ONLY GREEN vegetables. In our family, we can no longer afford to eat sugars that apparantly leach the calcium from our bones!
Our diet is meat, dairy, eggs, fish, greens, seaweed, and kim chi.
My kids hate the diet because of what they miss out on. Also, they don't like milk or fish.
I hate special events and holidays and the endless stream of treats that people gift my kids.
The last graduation we attended served donuts.
If big people eat the obvious rot and call it a treat - the kids are sunk!
Our school has a "no candy, gum, sweetened drinks, or desserts" policy. The kids hate it of course.
I'm not sure how long it will take for me and my family to find peace with our new diet - but our journey feels like it would be easier if the mass of people would just STOP BUYING THE OBVIOUS JUNK, and admit to our kids that we're all recovering addicts - and apologize to them, we did our best, but looks like we did them a disservice - they're addicts now too.
ADULTS, lead by example...don't wait for a law, don't even try to pass them, just stop by soda and shut down the business - make it a moot point.
What to do about things like fruit juices - my guru says no to it, especially the pasturized stuff. We can work on the details later.
Get the cookbook "Nourishing Traditions" from the Weston Price Foundation. There are plenty of good things to eat.
Your kids will get over it. The desire for sugar will wane.
I had a rule for my children - one box of sugary cereal per year. That was based on the idea that our food dollar was very limited and had to be spent wisely. Sugar cereal became the forbidden fruit. Now they they are grown, they revel in buying Sugar Corn Pops and such at will (and then pointing it out to me while making a mocking face!).
Point is that extremism that is not delicious or fun will not last in a society inundated by junk. Better to focus on inclusions rather than exclusions. My kids developed taste for a variety of foods. They still relish whole grain pasta, kale and collard green, fish, yogurt and other delicious and healthy foods. I do not think the donut now and then will do much harm.
Very few kids will reject a tasty stew or soup accompanied by a roll and a decent piece of fruit. Or mac and cheese made with whole grain macaroni and real cheese. It just takes some effort to find what works.
Joe
I went to urban public schools from K-12, and you wouldn't believe the garbage we were served. You wouldn't have fed it to your pets. And they used to wonder why the kids would play with their food. It was so bad, I used to skip lunch and just eat when I got home. Then I couldn't concentrate because my stomach was growling. I mean, it was unhealthy AND unappetizing.
Yes, make it healthy, but make it edible too. If you treat kids like animals in school, they won't wanna be there.
And keep fast food OUT.
An example I've seen in a box at my kids' school: Grade D apples, each barely 2 inches in diameter, rock hard, with worm holes. Bitter and sour, according to my children. New York State is an apple growing state, so the farmers fob off their losses on the school children. Hey, I love farmers, but it is what it is.
Joe