With long lines of students sprinting toward the cafeteria at the sound of the lunch bell, American fast food industry giants such as Domino’s and Pizza Hut reap billions of profit on school lunches through programs such as Smart Slice and A+ Lunch — but at what cost?
School food has a forgettable taste. It usually leaves you feeling like you ate solely for the purpose of getting full. I know people who eat school lunch every day and they never voiced any satisfaction with the food. Anytime I hear anything about the food it involves misshapen vegetables and poor taste.
The main problem with school food lies in its bland flavors and deteriorating nutritional value.
School food has a forgettable taste. It usually leaves you feeling like you ate solely for the purpose of getting full. I know people who eat school lunch every day and they never voiced any satisfaction with the food. Anytime I hear anything about the food it involves misshapen vegetables and poor taste.
In response to the declining nutritional quality of school lunches, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) published an article announcing the new guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calling for the cutback of sugar and salt in school lunch recipes. The new guidelines aim to lower sugar and salt levels in school lunches by 10 percent by the year 2025.
This means that food available to students will slowly become less enjoyable for students.
We can already see some of this effect here at in our own school. Some of the food available at Wilson does not have the most zing. It is healthy, but it needs to work on the taste. The main example of this has good taste but the choice of nuts ruins it.
The best option that comes to mind is to hold a cooking competition to make some new meals for students, by students. What better way to find what students want to eat for lunch than by letting them make, try, and vote for it themselves?
This has been done in the past, however. The problem with these sorts of competitions is that once they have been completed, it is up to the school and the district to follow through with the new meal plan. The solution to this would be to make an active effort among the students if we do not feel that the food is good enough.
Schools and Government officials say that the reason we need healthier school lunches is because unhealthy lunches contribute to childhood obesity. A study was conducted at California State University (CSU) San Bernadino by one Luis Chavez. The study seeks to verify the correlation between children who participate in the Nation School Lunch Program (NSLP) and childhood obesity. The results were as follows: “A total of 15,136 responses were analyzed. Results revealed participation in the NSLP had a small, positive effect on students’ BMI. Race and a family’s economic stability also had small, positive effects on NSLP participants’ BMI. Interestingly, those families reporting struggling very often economically did not appear to be associated with BMI.”
School lunch doesn’t need to get healthier. Students who have less regular access to food should be able to eat something that they enjoy. The issue of school food will always have people on both ends, however, people care about what is being fed to their children.
In conclusion, school food at Wilson and on a national level has a lot of room to grow and there’s no reason that it has to be either healthy or flavorful. In addition to this, school food does not contribute to the child obesity epidemic as much as people think.
