What was your school lunch like when you were in elementary school or high school? Did you look forward to seeing what was being served up or did you beg your parents to let you pack a lunch for school? For most of us adults, there are few fond memories of the school lunches of the past, unless it was pizza or maybe, taco day in the cafeteria.
Remember the names we used to have for some of the entrees we were served? My favorite when I attended New York City schools in the 1970s, was mystery meat. I loved the marconi and cheese but could never tell what the meat was in a cafeteria style hamburger helper meals they used to serve us. It sure didn't look like they were using a real tomato sauce.
Fortunately, our children today now have more in-school choices for lunch than we could ever dream of. Salads! Fruits! Fruit juices instead of full calorie sodas. Even multiple vegetable choices. Vegetarian. The cafeteria workers and administrators would have thought I was talking a foreign language if I asked for a vegetarian meal, even in New York City.
Back in the "olden times", the only options many school cafeterias had was what was on the government surplus food list and could they get it as cheaply as possible. If they could save pennies off a meal that cost less than $1 a meal, the better. That used to be the only guidelines that school cafeteria managers used to worry about. Not any more.
Now, they are actually counting the calories, fat and salt in the meals they serve. That's started a slow but unstoppable revolution in the school cafeteria line that our children will never fully appreciate.
What's changed over the years is a more complete appreciation of the importance of what we eat to learning, and to how early eating habits greatly influence how well we live as teen-agers and adults, and how long we'll live healthy lives. New studies show more children than ever suffering from diseases we thought only middle-aged and senior adults suffered from, like high blood pressure, obesity and heart disease.
In Cincinnati Public Schools, the lunch and breakfast menus have undergone a sea change over the past year, with high schools getting new options first, followed by the district's elementary schools. High school cafeterias now offer 6 main entree choices, double what they used to offer. More recently, elementary schools had their meal options upgraded from three menu choices from just two.
According to their web site, Cincinnati Schools now offer daily meal choices of a two hot entrees or sandwiches, a deli cold sandwich or a chef salad for high school students. Elementary school students get a choice of a daily hot menu entree, generally, a chef salad and non-meat high protein entree.
The district also offers fresh fruit, fresh vegetable choices and low fat or skim milk in addition to whole grain low fat pizza, wheat or enriched white bread with whole grains.
Deep fryers have been removed from most schools with many Cincinnati schools now offering baked, instead of fried, french fries.
The Cincinnati Public Schools Food Services Supervisor, Jessica Shelly, told a reporter, "Our main goal was to create a restaurant style food (menu) that meets nutritional guidelines set forth by the national school lunch program."
Having been one of the first large school districts to offer school lunches back in 1898, the Cincinnati School district now offers 3,300,00 school lunches a year and 2,100,000 breakfasts during the school year and the summer.
If you wonder why schools throughout the country are focusing so much on feeding students at lunch and breakfast, it's because efforts there really do seem to pay off in better students, more learning and higher test scores. Cincinnati Food Services Director Renie Kelly is quoted as saying, "Good nutrition is important to learning. We know that children behave better, have longer attention spans and are more eager to learn, when they eat healthy breakfasts. We make to make sure that all of our students are ready, every day, to focus on their lessons."
Although school lunches around the nation are getting healthier, many nutritional experts and parents say what gets put in front of children, these days, still has a long way to go to get a true "healthy eating" grade.
A February 2010 survey by the New York Daily News found school cafeterias in New York City schools were still serving highly processed foods that are loaded with preservatives and other less than healthy ingredients.
Nutritionist Susan Rubin founded the advocacy group, Better School Food. She criticizes recent school menu changes. Rubin says, „"t's more window dressing than real change. Just cutting calories and fat doesn't make processed food healthy."
Ingredient lists from the Daily News school lunch survey found a simple, frozen and reheatable toasted cheese sandwich contained more than 30 ingredients including high fructose corn syrup. The newspaper quotes a 16-year-old high school student as saying of the cheese sandwiches in her lunchroom, "It just looks so greasy, you can tell it's unhealthy."
What really upsets some nutritionists is continuing to have processed foods on school menus too often removes nutrients while adding unhealthy preservatives and fillers. They contend that processed foods also add in more sugar, fat and salt to make up for flavors that get lost in processing of foods.
New York University nutrition expert Marion Nestle says, „It's better for kids to get nutrients from real food without all these additives.
One of the biggest problems with school lunches Nestle sees in New York City schools are the heavy reliance on pizza as an entree. In fact, at some Bronx schools in the city pizza ends up on the lunch menu as often as 9 times in a single month. One of the pizza options in the high schools there has 25 different ingredients including azodicarbonamide, which is used as a bleach in foods and a deforming agent in plastics. Other pizza ingredients there include datem and sodium stearoly lactylate, two food additives that help blend other ingredients together.
The federal Department of Education offers a parent brochure on school lunches and more lunch information on its web site. But some of the recommended foods have nutritionists raising their eyebrows. Beef chili contains 27 grams of fat, which is more than half the recommended daily allowance for most children. Popular mozzarella sticks have 21 grams of fat.
Some private and charter schools are making strides toward providing students with healthier meals, but their options come with a steep price. At the Promise Academy Charter School in New York's Harlem, the school chef and his staff often cook from scratch to come up with entrees like jambalaya with Swiss chard, and lemon pepper chicken with couscous and green beans.
The school also offers a colorful salad bar featuring fresh kale, carrots, broccoli, corn and other vegetables, some of them picked from the school's own rooftop garden. 8-year-old Jada Clarke loves the lemon pepper chicken with vegetables. She told the New York Daily News, "I love a lot of the vegetables here." Jada went on to tell reporters, "I eat string beans, broccoli, carrots and corn. I love the tomatoes, but that's a fruit."
But Promise Academy's lunches cost an average of $4.87 a meal. New York City and most other schools, even with federal help, only spend about $1 a meal per student.
What can parents do to help improve what their children eat and what choices they have in school lunches and breakfasts? Child psychologists, like Dr. Edward Abramson of California State University, say start by watching what you eat, especially what you eat in front of your own children. Abramson says research increasingly shows that parents are the biggest influencers of their children's overall behavior and, specifically, what their children eat. He says parents should skip special diets. Instead, his suggestion is that aim for better overall eating habits for themselves and their children. That should include eating reasonable portions of food and getting child to cook family meals along with their parents.
When it comes to what your children eat for lunch at school, start by getting the school lunch menu for your children's school. Cafeterias may have them posted, the food service director at your school may have menu schedules printed and ready to give out. These days, most school districts post menu schedules weeks and months ahead of time on their web sites.
You should talk to your child about what's on the menu, what they like and don't like to eat. If you see highly processed foods, like pizza, on the menu. You may want to suggest to your child that would be a good day to get a salad, instead. Or consider giving your child a pack lunch for that day, so they have another option.
Steering your child to put more value in raw fresh fruits and vegetables can help as well. Don't be afraid to talk to your child about what they're eating both at home and at school. As schools around the country try to make fresh, raw foods more attractive, you can re-enforce that important lesson at home, by making more fresh fruits available for snacking and as part of your family meals.
The good news for parents trying to get their children to eat healthier, is that they'll soon be getting extra help and encouragement from First Lady Michelle Obama. She's been meeting with lawmakers, Cabinet members, and nutrition experts to come up with a national campaign to combat childhood obesity.
Mrs. Obama says she wants to help parents and schools craft some specific solutions, including revising federal child nutrition programs, including school lunches. Almost one-third of U.S. Children are overweight and 17 percent, in some surveys, are considered obese.
Meanwhile, President Obama's budget proposal includes an additional $1 billion a year for a decade to improve school lunch programs and the WIC program for low-income pregnant women. Some child nutrition advocates say they will push for even more money for nutrition programs. The Farm to School and Roots for Change groups say they plan on rallying a million American parents to press Congress and the Agriculture Department to allocate at least $1 more per school lunch, so cafeterias can offer more fresh fruits and vegetables and do more cooking from scratch.
