Growing Food and Kids

Square pizza may be one of the universal experiences of American childhood. In the 1980s, when I was in elementary school, square pizza was very much a fixture in school lunchrooms across the country. Apparently, it’s still around — a friend whose son just started kindergarten told me last week that he was excited about pizza at school until he saw that the pizza was square, which seemed unnatural to him. 

But when I was in elementary school, pizza wasn’t an everyday thing. In addition to serving pizza, our lunchroom ladies also cooked and served a hot meal everyday that included homemade breads, green beans, corn, mashed potatoes and other vegetables.

Today, those healthier choices are difficult to find — and unlikely to be chosen when kids have so many unhealthy options. French fries and pizza are available as a la carte items every day in many lunchrooms, and kids can buy all manner of junk food in lunchroom vending machines. (A few states and localities have made it tougher to eat junk at school; the Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, banned soft drinks and most junk foods, but such rules are rare.) Even the kids who eat the standard prepared meal are rarely getting anything fresh; school officials say that in order to keep prices down, they must use the cheapest ingredients they can find, such as government cheese and ground beef.

For kids who spend their summers eating fresh veggies from a garden or farmers’ market, highly processed, fatty school lunches could be a shock to the system. But in a different world, for kids who don’t normally have access to fresh, real foods, school lunch could be a delicious introduction to whole foods and healthy eating.

This fall, the Child Nutrition Act, which provides $12 billion to pay for school lunch and breakfast for more than 30 million schoolchildren, is up for reauthorization. Congress is considering several changes, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking at reforms including farm-to-school programs and school gardens. “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told the New York TImes last week.

Reforming school lunch could have a major impact on the way kids eat and help reduce childhood obesity and improve kids’ long-term health. If you care about good, fresh food, you should care about the lunchroom discussions going on this fall. Keep watching this blog for more about the topic.

What do you think should change in school lunchrooms? Do you think your own school lunch experiences had an impact on your long-term food choices and health?

Photo Credit: CanStockPhoto.com