School Lunch: Bad On Purpose

This Los Angeles Times article does a decent job laying out the hurdles schools face in providing healthy meals for students, but I've got a little quibble:

... The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.

States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards. ...

When I wrote about the garbage in school lunches last week, I linked to a Mother Jones article that tells the story of that mid-1990s standards process, and the railroading of Ellen Haas, nutritional reformer appointed by President Clinton, by food service industry lobbyists and commodity groups:

... Haas soon found herself frozen out by legislators and abandoned by the Clinton administration. Says a key USDA staffer, "We were told by the White House, ‘You have to live with this.'"

Although Congress did set fat limits for school lunches, it created no effective mechanism for reaching those standards -- and no penalty for failing. ...

The crappy food that kids are served at school is not an accident. The crappy food that's advertised to them (and everyone) on television and any other waking moment by people with psychology and marketing PhDs, that's not an accident, either. The proliferation of cheap burgers and nachos, the banishment of carrots and leafy greens to the upscale neighborhoods, this is not an accident either.

Our food system is the way that it is on purpose and it can only get better the same way: on purpose.

As fellow Change.org blogger, Clay Burell, noted on the Education blog, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a petition going to ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches.

They don't mean fries, cheese pizza and mushy, canned green beans, either. (Good grief, I hated the canned green beans when I was a kid.)

I'm not one to insist that people swear off meat and cheese, but the stuff they serve at most schools ... whatever people can eat, they need fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, food that very obviously came from a recently living plant. For kids, doubly so.

Please ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches, today.

(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr.