Children: Not Actually Garbage Disposals

Apparently, it costs too much to give kids healthy food in school.

School lunches are full of excess fat and school nutrition budgets used as a slush fund for commodities producers, especially the beef and dairy industries, which are overrepresented in children's diets by even this unrepentant omnivore's estimate. Emphasis mine:

... But all that cheese adds up. Public schools serve more than 4 billion meals every year -- a number that would make many fast-food chains envious -- and officials say all those lunches are contributing to the growing health crisis among kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in adolescents since 1980, spurring an epidemic of type II diabetes, once considered an adult-onset condition. Obesity has also been associated with heart disease, arthritis, and certain cancers, and researchers have found fatty streaks in the blood vessels of children as young as 10.

"USDA needs to relate the current crisis in kids' health to the meals that are being served, especially to poor kids, because that's the population that's most vulnerable," says Antonia Demas, director of the Food Studies Institute, a child-nutrition group based in upstate New York. Because low-income children often eat both breakfast and lunch at school, "they get at least two-thirds of their calories from school each day, and they're the population really showing an increase in the diet-related diseases."

... Given the industry's clout, USDA officials are careful to include agribusiness representatives in almost every discussion about the school lunch program. In the mid-1990s, a group of health advocates met with the USDA a to ask that schools be allowed to serve soy products like veggie burgers. According to one participant, a department official asked them, "Have you spoken with the Cattlemen about this? Until the Cattlemen go for this, we aren't going to be able to move on it." Soy alternatives were eventually allowed, but only after the beef industry group was consulted. ...

And as we discovered last year when video footage of slaughterhouse practices was revealed, downer cows have been making it into the school lunch meat supply. Children aren't only eating too much meat, it isn't the good stuff.

Jill Richardson, writing at LaVidaLocavore, suggests an alternative: make school lunches wholesome and appetizing, like they do in Italy, France and Japan,countries where they don't treat kids like garbage disposals for food only the starving would volunteer to eat.

(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr. That picture might look appetizing, unless it was a good composite of your every single breakfast and lunch, as opposed to the occasional 'I'm going to hell for this' treat.)