American school officials’ attitudes about the relationship between kids and their school lunches have swung from shades of strict social Darwinism to reflections of the free-market mentality over the last century, as Michael O’Donnell explains in his Washington Monthly book review. Thus, the ideal of character-building deprivation gave way to the age of the tater tot. —KA
Washington Monthly via Arts & Letters Daily:
This spirit of tut-tut character building through patronizing if affectionate deprivation comes off as thoroughly British, but for a time the attitude spanned the Atlantic. In 1906, one American principal opposed the growing enthusiasm for a school lunch program by warning: “If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their character, and by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and, through them, against society.” Let them starve a little, went the thinking—it won’t kill them, and it’s better than getting fat on sweets.
Shameful, no? So now we have swung around a full 180 degrees to the opposite extreme, at least in American school lunchrooms. As Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in “a new age in which a business model … permeate[s] school food.” Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. Vending machines light up the hallways, usually through an exclusive contractual arrangement between school or school district and a company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Fast-food operations like Subway and KFC set up shop in the food court, tempting away all the students with enough money to afford a hoagie or fried chicken strips. Alongside the traditional cafeteria meal are a la carte lines where burgers and French fries (and their unholy cousins, tater tots) glisten with grease under the lamplights, exempted in all their fatty glory from USDA nutritional requirements. Even those children who buy the standard hot meal eat mostly junk: pizza with fries hits all of the major food groups, if you define the groups expansively enough. As Ronald Reagan’s USDA famously taught us, ketchup is, after all, a vegetable.
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By Mat, September 15, 2010 at 3:39 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
It’s a pretty simple equation: calories taken in vs. calories burned.
Report thisBy lichen, January 13, 2010 at 4:23 pm Link to this comment
liecatcher, I see that you assume there is something hard and ‘scientific’ behind corporate aims to promote cheap, processed, disease-causing food meanwhile morally blaming people for not “exercising enough” when the disease-ridden trash will get you unless you don’t eat it. Having been a vegetarian my whole life and a vegan for over a decade, I think I know what the definitions are; obviously you are the one uninformed.
Report thisBy liecatcher, January 11, 2010 at 1:14 am Link to this comment
TO lichen:
Hey lichen:
You’re not helping your credibility & doing yourself
a great disservice by faking it & making up
“statistics”. Also, look up the definitions of vegan
& vegetarian so you won’t embarrass yourself again.
Definitions of lichen:
noun: any thallophytic plant of the division
Lichenes; occur as crusty patches or bushy growths on
tree trunks or rocks or bare ground etc.
noun: any of several eruptive skin diseases
characterized by hard thick lesions grouped together
and resembling lichens growing on rocks
Main Entry: li·chen
Report thisPronunciation: \?l?-k?n\
Function: noun
1 : any of several skin diseases characterized by the
eruption of flat papules ; especially : lichen planus
2 : any of numerous complex plantlike organisms made
up of an alga and a fungus growing in symbiotic
association on a solid surface (as a rock)
By lichen, January 10, 2010 at 6:58 pm Link to this comment
Weight is 90% dependant on diet, not “exercise.” “Studies” that suggest otherwise were put out by the food industry, and people selling exercise machines and gym memberships. There most definitely is a problem with modern processed junk food, and it will make you just as unhealthy if you overconsume crap and tax your body with overexercise. School ‘phys ed’ programs can be pretty despotic—trying to take over control of a child’s entire body.
John Ellis has it right about what our diets should be. There should be good, whole-food, organic, fresh tasty vegan options at school cafeterias.
Report thisBy liecatcher, January 10, 2010 at 1:39 pm Link to this comment
TO:John Ellis, January 10 at 1:18 pm
Hey John Ellis:
Report thisYou nailed what we should be consuming with one
omission, clean water.
In Jillian Michaels latest book, “MASTERING YOUR
METABOLISM”, she explains that delicate homones
direct all
physiological processes in our bodies , & how they
are affected by
toxins entering our bodies from air, food,
water.,pharmaceuticals,
& other addictive chemicals. And, as a fitness guru,
she covers
exercise in detail as essential to achieve health.
She even deals
with correct food preparation & suggests best times
to eat.
A few bloggers derided me for saying that health
can’t be
purchased from a pharmacy or hospital, or attained
with
“health” insurance, but requires a lifestyle
conducive to
achieving health.
Obviously, the millions addicted to alcohol,
nicotine, caffeine,
sugar & recreational drugs are outside the health
box.
By liecatcher, January 10, 2010 at 12:03 am Link to this comment
“GIVE ME THE YOUTH & I’LL RULE THE WORLD”
Report thisBy rollzone, January 9, 2010 at 12:21 am Link to this comment
hello. oh,look- we have solved world hunger. air lift supplies of school lunches to everyone! growth of the human body has metabolism so accelerated at school age that you could feed a gluttonous slob non stop from the time he got to school to the time he went home, and he would still be hungry for dinner.
Report thisthe food, the sitting, the boredom- none of it has anything to do with making children obese. something is unnaturally different in their genes.
By FRTothus, January 8, 2010 at 1:20 pm Link to this comment
We feed the kids junk information, so I guess this just completes the circle.
“A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks. Its primary target are the “stupid and ignorant masses”. They must be kept that way; marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in, to engage in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. This hapless multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.”
“Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn’t survive very long if they did that.”
Report this(Noam Chomsky)
By Jim Yell, January 8, 2010 at 10:00 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Long ago when the started allowing fast food chains to provide meals in schools I observed then that it was an idea, but a bad idea. Part of education should be exposure to healthy eating.
When I was young we had tasty food and the cafeteria was full of cooking aromas, not frying grease and pretend burgers.
Two things need to be done, return balanced, healthy food to school lunches, getting rid of high frutose corn syrup and over sweetening food.
Second construct a general physical education program that gives exercise to all students and drop the aggressive move to promote spectator sports and spending a large part of school budget on pretend-professional sports, which only service a small percentage of the student body.
Oh I will add a third thing to do, construct physical activities not only for the building of the physical body, but also for the interest of the individual student. Not everyone wants to be a line backer.
Report thisBy kerryrose, January 8, 2010 at 8:45 am Link to this comment
As a single mother with a low salary as adjunct professor, both of my sons received reduced lunch prices in middle and high school.
They are allowed one meat selection, one bread selection, and 2 fruit or vegetable selections with milk.
It sounds healthy enough, but my children come home hungry most days.
Report thisBy dihey, January 8, 2010 at 5:52 am Link to this comment
It has been firmly proven that changing to a better diet without adequate exercise will not reduce or prevent obesity.
Report thisTwo industrial products are the main culprits for the current obesity: the car and TV. Our country is leading because we got cars and TV much earlier than the rest of the world.
Moreover, once children begin to go to school it is already almost too late to prevent obesity.
It is not the schools or the school lunches that are the problem. It is a society that forces both parents to be absent for most of the day and forces pre-school youngsters to be inactive for almost 24/7/256.
Laments about school lunches without addressing the more fundamental problem are a near-useless waste of energy.