School Lunch Nutrition

[Trey of Diamonds]

Interesting. From the article.

Congress used legislation to head off two proposed rule changes, one concerning tomato paste and one concerning potatoes, in federal school lunch guidelines.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wanted to change the vegetable rating on tomato paste, the ingredient that qualifies pizza a vegetable. Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste counts as a half a cup of vegetables, which the government considers a full serving. As a result, a slice of pizza is deemed to be the equivalent of a whole serving of vegetables.

The USDA would have required half a cup of tomato paste to count as half a cup of vegetables. This would have effectively ended pizza's status as a vegetable and forced school cafeterias to serve regular vegetables along with a slice of pizza to meet the vegetable requirement.

• Congress also approved a so-called "French fry amendment" to keep the USDA from cutting servings of starchy vegetables, such as corn, peas and potatoes. The USDA proposed to limit starchy vegetables to one cup a week in an acceptable school menu. Cutting to one cup a week of starchy vegetables was supposed to get children to eat other kinds of vegetables, preferably the leafy green and orange kind, to meet overall vegetable standards. The French fry amendment struck down the one-cup limit and left schools able to regularly serve starchy vegetables, including French fries, to meet the national standard for vegetable servings.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

I'd say people should pack their kids lunch if they're worried about nutrition, but, after thinking about it, kids would probably end up eating worse if their parents are making lunch.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

Very possible.

School lunch has been a battle for years and years. I hear some are now going back to actually cooking lunchs instead of serving pre-packaged stuff.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

So, do you think that schools do a good job of providing nutritious food for our children? Do they take short cuts that endanger their health? Should the government be more involved? Is the government taking kickbacks from the food industry?

 

[Kilgore Trout]

So, do you think that schools do a good job of providing nutritious food for our children? Do they take short cuts that endanger their health? Should the government be more involved? Is the government taking kickbacks from the food industry?

I wouldn't allow any children under my care to eat what they serve.

 

[Vinayaka]

Depends a lot on individual schools, but its society's battle, not just the schools'. I gave up on nutrition after about 20 years teaching it. It seemed no matter how much you taught, habits remained habits. We took the pop out of the machine, and the company took the machine out of the school. The parents would hold a bake sale and all that came was junk.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

I wouldn't allow any children under my care to eat what they serve.

Why? Nutrition reasons or something else?

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Why? Nutrition reasons or something else?

What they pass off to children in public schools can barely be considered food.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

What they pass off to children in public schools can barely be considered food.

In general I agree but as someone else mentioned, it does depend on the school. If you inspected a schools lunch program and found it acceptable would you then allow your children to eat there?

 

[Kilgore Trout]

In general I agree but as someone else mentioned, it does depend on the school. If you inspected a schools lunch program and found it acceptable would you then allow your children to eat there?

I may allow them to if I were able to deem that the food, preparation methods, and facilities could be trusted to be consistently acceptable. On the other hand, it will always be more healthy to prepare lunches for kids. I consistently shop, prepare, and cook healthy food as a matter of course, so I suspect this will continue when I have children.

 

[Songbird]

Most schools around here seem to do a fantastic job of providing healthy food and giving options. There's been a big school lunch overhaul recently, though, so five years ago this wasn't the case.

 

[Levite]

I always thought it was a great blessing that I kept kosher, and was so spared eating the trash they served at our middle and high school cafeterias. Even late in high school, when I stopped observing for a while as I questioned, I still brought my lunch from home, just to avoid the grease-soaked crap they served at school.

 

[Amill]

You can thank the potato growers for pressuring Congress to let the kids eat more french fries. And I love how Congress is telling the department what to classify as a serving of vegetable. If they're gonna go ahead and tweak policies that our departments make anyways, why don't they just devise the friggin school lunch standards themselves.

 

[Drolefille]

I'd like nutritionists to be the ones setting the standards of school lunches, not politicians and the food industry. As much as one can complain about the USDA having backwards policies on nutrition because of agriculture - I'm not an expert, but some say it's so - they're better than a Congressman voting to keep kids eating french fries because he's from Idaho. That's just plain stupid.