Students in America’s public schools eat garbage for lunch.
This is nothing new. We’ve known for a long time that the meat served in public school lunches is a few steps below what is served in fast-food joints, and that the government money given to schools for lunch programs hasn’t increased since the ‘70s.
America’s pathetic school lunches have even attracted the attention of England’s Naked Chef who has been spending a lot of time in Huntington, West Virginia (the obesity capital of the world). Jamie Oliver’s newest TV show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, aims to transform school lunches from the artery clogging to the leafy green and nutritious, one school at a time. Most critics agree the show and the program have been successful given the challenges.
As Marion Nestle on the Huffington Post puts it “let’s cut him some slack for what he is up against: USDA rules that make cooking too expensive for school budgets, entrenched negative attitudes, widespread cluelessness about dietary principles . . .”
Even the Obama Administration has set out to do something about the lack of safe, nutritious food in school lunches.
Senators cleared the path Wednesday for a final vote on legislation to bolster food safety (i.e.: eliminate salmonella and ecoli) and up the nutritional value of school lunches, including provisions to improve training for cafeteria workers and to alert schools more quickly about recalls of contaminated food.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 would commit an additional $4.5 billion to child-nutrition programs over the next 10 years and implement the most sweeping changes to those programs in decades.
Schools would get a financial incentive to adopt the new nutrition standards that the bill requires. Schools that implement the new rules would get an additional 6 cents per meal added to their federal reimbursement rate. Current reimbursement rates, which give schools $2.68 for each lunch they serve, have not changed since 1973, except for inflation adjustment, and schools have long complained that they are insufficient.
In addition, Congress is considering legislation to improve the Childhood Nutrition Act and Michelle Obama has just announced her Lets Move! Campaign aimed at fighting childhood obesity. There are also projects in the works to create farm-to-school programs and to fund school gardens.
All of these ideas seem poised to make a huge difference in what our kids eat. But I urge the Obama administration to pay attention to one key component they seem to have forgotten: accessibility. Parents are still responsible for half of what their kids eat and all the food preparation skills they learn. Most urban, low-income neighborhoods exist in a chronic supermarket shortage, meaning there is no place nearby to buy groceries.
Until all Americans have access to healthy, affordable food and the resources to know what to do with it, healthy school lunch programs will only make a dent in the problem.