It took a few decades, but I finally got to sit with the cool kids at lunch the other day.
I knew I scored because the fourth-graders at my table were stone-cold rebels, defiant in the face of authority — the lawmakers, lobbyists and regulators wrestling over what these kids should have on their lunch trays. The distance between Capitol Hill and the cafeteria at Flower Valley Elementary in Rockville is a lot more than 17 miles.
( Katherine Frey / THE WASHINGTON POST ) - The chicken sandwiches served in the cafeteria at Flower Valley Elementary School in Rockville are a hit with third-grader Jalen Blackwell. Montgomery County’s experiments with garden burgers, though, weren’t so successful.
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“I don’t want the salad. Yuck,” declared Joseph Vu, 9, clearly the leader of the pack. He’d already stared down that federally authorized dark-green salad in the lunch line, along with apples, peaches and oranges.
“I don’t want those. I like the pizza. PIZZA!!” he told me, inspiring a fist-pumping chant among his minions: “Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!”
So much for that whole eat-your-vegetables campaign.
Feeding kids at school is a multibillion-dollar industry, and this winter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will attempt to pass the first new federal guidelines in 15 years. The goal: to reduce the additives, fat, salt and sugar that are fueling the childhood obesity crisis and add the whole grains, dark vegetables and fruit that will make our kids healthier. Despite what the fourth-grade bad boys say.
It won’t be easy. The school lunches we remember from our own childhoods — the mystery-meat tetrazzini, the burgers the color of elephant skin, the gelatin “salad” — are long gone.
That kind of cooking gave way to corporate and school profit-making a couple of decades ago, when outsourcing ruled and vending machines invaded, giving schools a share of the junk-food profits to help fund schools’ sports, arts and music programs.
Fries, corn dogs and mozzarella sticks! It was county-fair-meets-happy-hour-apps in our school cafeterias for many years. The lunch ladies went from cooks to mere cogs, as making food from scratch became obsolete and they became the reheaters of processed food.
The way kids ate affected even the architecture of schools. At some point, school kitchens went the way of eight-track tapes. And going back to making food from scratch is impossible for some because they don’t have the plumbing or electrical capabilities to actually create meals on site, explained Marla Caplon, Montgomery County Public Schools’ director of food and nutrition services.
And how did our kids do amid this food fun? A third of American children are overweight or obese.
School lunches are just one piece of what’s gone wrong, but even tackling that problem won’t be easy. Too many players with too many agendas. You’ve got folks like the potato lobby trying to persuade everyone to include potatoes — which invariably get turned into Tater Tots and fries — as vegetables. And the beverage industry angling for its piece of the school-lunch action. And you’ve got the school folks, who aren’t always on the same page as the healthful-food advocates.
“And when it comes to nutrition, it’s one of those things that everybody thinks they’re an expert. . . . Everybody thinks they have a stake in the game, because everybody eats,” said Jessica Donze Black, project director for the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project at the Pew Health Group.
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