We can fix school lunches

It's the Ordinary thing to do.

Public domain image via Wikipedia

When I was a kid, the lunch ladies still made big pots of tasty homemade soup like this woman is dishing up. Yeasty, oven-baked rolls made our mouths water all morning. Our stomachs growled so loud during the last period before lunch we could have started a chorus.

You saw an example of the meals Mrs. Q and her Illinois students eat yesterday (Would you eat this?). Hungry tummies may still compete with the teach for attention, but I doubt those BPA-laden, processed food units smell as good heating in the industrial microwave as the scent of the soups, breads and homemade desserts that wafted through our hallways.

When did we abdicate responsibility for the welfare of our children to a bureaucracy so tied to Big-Food and Big-Agriculture that we feed our children unappetizing, unappealing substances their teacher can barely choke down?

To build Ordinary, we must take back responsibility for our food, our children's welfare, and our own welfare, for that matter. I'm not advocating throwing out the government programs. I'm advocating getting involved in making them work for us.

Want to be part of the change to healthier school lunch programs? Boy have I got a resource for you: The Lunch Box. You won't be alone. On Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let's Move Campaign to improve school lunches, get kids moving, and give them a chance to live as long as their parents expect to live. If things don't change soon, expectations are slim that they will, so let's all get moving. Join the school lunch revolution!

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Would you eat this?

School lunch: Yum or yuk?
Image courtesy Mrs. Q

It's very challenging to teach students when they are eating school lunches that don't give them the nutrition they need and deserve. Oftentimes what is served barely passes muster as something edible. And after a meal high in sugar and fat, they then must pay attention in a classroom.

Mrs. Q
Fed Up: School lunch project

Looks like this meal falls into the category of "food-like substances," as author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food)likes to say. Wouldn't you agree?

Mrs. Q, a teacher, got fed up with inattentive children who were hungry, hyper and ... hungry, especially after lunch. She decided to look into what they were eating. Then she took it a step further.

For the rest of 2010, Mrs. Q is eating the same school lunch her students, the majority of whom qualify for subsidized lunches, wolf down (or not) in the cafeteria every day. She's often hungry after lunch. Sometimes she's downright disgusted. She finds some of the food inedible. She says she would not feed this food to her toddler.

If we are going to build Ordinary, we need to pay attention to what we're feeding our children. The Fed Up: School lunch project is a good place to start.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.