If Jamie Oliver thought the school lunches in Huntington, West Virginia were bad, Oliver should come back to the States and visit the Chicago school lunch program.
-- Daily nacho service in the high school
-- Doughnuts and Pop-Tarts for breakfast
I did hint that Oliver didn't really know how bad the school lunches really are in the United States. But this story this week on how the Chicago public schools are making changes on these things makes you ask one obvious question.
Why were you serving this crap in the first place?
You can make nachos healthy, but chances are that they aren't. High sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup) products for breakfast are not conducive to learn.
The news isn't completely good, but change is coming.
According to the district's current food service operator, starting in June, nacho service will be reduced to once a week in high school and once a month in elementary school; sweet packaged desserts will also be reduced to weekly treats; and doughnuts and Pop-Tarts will be eliminated.
We complain that our education system doesn't help our children learn, and then we feed them crap. There is a quid pro quo. And you would think that attention spans, hyperactivity, ADHD, and acting out in class would be concern for our educational system.
Healthier diets increase the chances of having our kids learn what they need to know, and in a classroom setting that is more ideal to learn.
This is especially poignant given that this is the hometown of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. Perhaps Obama's push is having an impact in other areas of childhood obesity.
The Chicago changes do include some positive steps.
Improvements include serving a dark-green or orange vegetable three times a week, one whole-grain offering each day and fruit juice offered only twice a week as the fruit component of the meal.
This isn't to make light of the changes but this is 2010. This should have been done a long time ago.
And the changes don't seem to go far enough: fruit is healthier for you than juice. And if it is a high sugar juice (apple, grape), it's barely healthier.
Our children deserve better — much better.
Would love to have seen Jamie Oliver's reaction to the Chicago school lunch setup. Oliver complained about pizza for breakfast? Imagine his shock with seeing doughnuts and Pop-Tarts. Yikes!!
It's about time that they do that..
Posted by: ask a doctor | March 24, 2010 at 10:37 AM
Speaking as somebody who actually does live in Chicago:
Our children do, indeed, deserve better. But are they going to get it? Those lunches have long been known to be incredibly light in protein, and unless I've missed something, the CPS hasn't addressed that. If the kids are being asked to get by on salad and fruit, with maybe a granola bar on the side, they're going to be really weak and hungry, and that's going to be a problem for everybody.
Typical CPS lunch dish in the past: two slices of wonderbread, soaked in grease, with a light sprinkling of hamburger crumbs between the slices. Maybe an ounce of meat, probably less - it's really more garnish than entree. No sources of vegetable protein offered, because the lunch ladies don't even know what that is. The cheese on those nachos, when the nachos were being offered, might very well have been the vast bulk of the day's protein for the kids.
In the specific context of the Chicago Public school system, this cure might very well be worse than the disease.
Posted by: Monday Never Comes / Joseph Dunphy | January 23, 2011 at 09:48 AM