School Lunches that Nourish Body and Soul

By Ellen C. Bicheler 

Issue 120 September/October 2003

Green and white fettuccine with tomato basil sauce?

It may not sound like standard school-lunch fare, but in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it is-thanks to Lynn Walters and her organization, Cooking with Kids, Santa Fe schoolchildren are eating healthier, uncommonly delicious hot lunches. Walters has managed to integrate 91 meals a year into the city's school-lunch program. Walters calls Cooking with Kids "a multicultural food education program that works to improve children's nutrition by involving public school students in hands-on learning about culturally diverse foods." Students concoct such dishes as East Asian Noodles with Coconut Rice Balls. They've been treated to tastings of grapes and salad greens, then encouraged to describe what they've tasted. Did they like the spicy salad greens, or do they prefer romaine? Walters and her nine-member staff work with teachers to satisfy academic requirements of geography, math, science, social studies, language arts, music, and art right alongside the cooking.

There's good reason. With the ever-growing corporate influences in our schools of such firms as McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, and the "pouring-right" contracts of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, we need more than ever to provide strong nutritious models for our children to follow. Our children are bombarded with television and radio advertisements, free book covers from food vendors, educational posters in the hallways with corporate advertisings of potato chips and soda, athletic billboards with their sponsor's name and logo, and Channel One: required television in the classroom, complete with two minutes of commercials each day.

With the Surgeon General's 2001 report on obesity, we should be wiser. The report details the 300,000 annual deaths from obesity {check with author} and its complications of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, asthma, skeletal problems, and psychological disorders. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals in its 2000 statistics that 15.3 percent of our children are considered overweight, a figure that has doubled for children since the 1980s, and tripled for adolescents. The CDC predicts that one in three US children born after 2000 are at risk for developing diabetes, and relates this to overeating and lack of exercise. According to a California report, "Why Kids Are Getting Heavier," our 1995 total annual cost associated with obesity was $99.2 billion.1

The May 2003 General Accounting Report (GAO) on the school lunch program concludes that "efforts are needed to improve nutrition and encourage healthy eating." Findings exposed that, although most schools met the nutritional requirements, more than 75 percent of them failed to reduce calories from fat to below 30 percent, and exceeded the limits for saturated fat. "Barriers to providing nutritious meals," said the report, "included budget pressures and competing time demands." The report emphasizes that teachers had very little time and no budgetary resources to teach nutrition because of "the focus on meeting state academic standards."2

Dr. Ben F. Feingold's research names food additives and dyes as possible sources of such behavioral problems as Attention Deficit Disorder. And Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, believes "Getting commercialism out of schools is the first line of defense against the epidemic of childhood obesity. If the food is good, kids will gobble it up and tell their parents to keep junk food out of the house. They will ask for cooking classes. They will want to know where food comes from and how it is produced. I tell everyone who asks me that the first thing they should do is visit their local school to see what's going on with school food and do something about it to make it better."

At this writing, Congress is reviewing a more than $6 billion National School Lunch Program. They've already allowed irradiated meat into the school lunch program. The argument of the sanitization of the meat won out, despite critics' claims of possible links to cancer.

Senators Patrick Leahy and Dick Lugar are promoting a "Better Nutrition for School Children Act" (S.1007), which would further limit vendor sales of "foods of minimal nutritional value," although the bill takes into account schools dependent on the income from the sales.

Senator Leahy's Child Initiatives Act (S.995) advocates increasing milk, fruits, and vegetables in school menus by giving an extra two to ten cents per meal to schools that opt for the healthier choices. It also provides a grant program for "farm-to-cafeteria" projects, which allows schools to purchase local foods from farms of small to medium size.