Every wonder how the mystery fish sticks or tater tots ended up in your school’s lunch program: think politics, think lobbyists. $10 billion is spent each year on the National School Lunch Program, which is renewed every five years. According to the USDA:
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the Nation’s second largest food and nutrition assistance program. In 2007, it operated in over 95,000 public and nonprofit private schools (grades K-12) and provided low-cost or free lunches to over 30 million children daily.
What a great opportunity to feed children nutritious food; however, politics as usual interfere with truly helping children in need. I work in a school with a high percentage of children on free and reduced meals. For some of these children, breakfast and lunch at school are the only meals they receive all day. Don’t they deserve more than ketchup being counted as a serving of fruit?
YES! Our children totally deserve better food than what is served today. They deserve real food not processed stuff laden with ingredients that you can’t pronounce or spell. Ketchup is not a vegetable & Tang isn’t a fruit. More parents need to rally behind this issue or we will continue to see higher obesity rates, more ill children and increased consequences of chemicals, pesticides & food safety issues.
Yes, this is why I make lunches for my daughter to bring. I ate school lunches as a kid, and they were pretty gross. They do some better now with some fresh fruit and a small salad bar in a lot of schools in my area, but a lot of the food otherwise leaves much to be desired in terms of quality.