In the United States, the National School Lunch Program in 2012 underwent a major overhaul. With this program, more fruits and vegetables were offered and attempts were made to eliminate foods such as those containing Tran fats. These changes were obviously a step in the right direction, but first a couple of reasons we’ll point out later why we haven’t gone far enough yet to provide the nutrition our kids need.
Especially in low-income areas where children are not always going to have the best opportunities for a full diet, it is important that the food they receive for lunch is of the highest quality. And even in middle- and upper-income families, when meals are often eaten on the run, school-age children often don’t meet their nutritional needs.
An example is the milk provided in schools. Since there is such an aversion among authorities for fats in our diet, fat-free or low-fat milk was considered the only milk provided. The problem is that with skim milk there is not much, so in order for these children to consume milk, they added chocolate. Therefore, we have decided to replace fat in the school lunch program with sugar. Obviously too much fat is not good, but statistically it causes far fewer problems than sugar. Reducing saturated fat by 3 grams and increasing sugar by as much as 13 grams per cup is a problem, especially with children who eat too much sugar.
The issues listed above that make it difficult for school lunch programs to meet your nutritional needs are:
1. School lunch programs are used as a surplus food distribution program. The United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, oversees the school lunch program. It also participates in many different food distribution programs, one that deals with taking surplus food that can be bought cheaper and finding it a home. Since massive amounts of food go to schools under this program, the USDA can kill two birds with one stone by sending this surplus to schools. Obviously, it is questionable whether this cheap and inexpensive food is the most nutritious.
2. Members of the School Nutrition Association and likely to have a conflict of interest. Those big companies that act as consultants to America’s school nutrition program are supposed to provide low-cost, high-quality meals to students across the country. However, these food professionals are some of the largest manufacturers of processed and junk foods in the country. There is obviously a conflict of interest there, as their need to distribute what they produce would likely outweigh their desire to provide the nutritious food that is the stated goal.
It’s clear that there are a lot of issues at play here, and there are a lot of players who have multiple agendas going on. But as adults who are more interested than anyone in seeing that their children are exposed to the best possible food, educating our children about what they should eat is one of the most important tasks of parents. Also, it’s best not to rely on these school lunch programs to be much more than just something that lasts the day and not rely on them for a high level of nutrition.
