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Over in Ballard, Archie McPhee sells a cheerful Lunch Lady action figure for $9.95. Tell the disgruntled lunch ladies in Chicago, who are demanding respect from a school system that pays them peanuts (well, $10.46 an hour) and expects them to serve slop to thousands of kids.
"We're looking at each other like, 'I wouldn't eat that.' We wouldn't give our kid that at home," one lunch lady told the Chicago Sun-Times. No wonder that kids revolt. Just outside Chicago, a vast, unsavory food fight made headlines around the world.
(Meantime, there's Vincent Jarousseau, an up-and-coming Paris politician, deputy mayor of the bohemian 14th arrondissement, in charge of schools. Among other things, school lunches, which he posts on his blog. Three-course lunches, mind you, with a classic appetizer like hard-boiled eggs, or a fresh vegetable salad; a main course of beef, turkey or pork; cheese or fruit for dessert. French schools teach kids how to eat right; or, rather, they serve decent food because it's what the kids, their families, the school administrators and the country's elected officials expect.
The most emailed story over at the New York Times last week lamented the crummy choices offered by restaurants on their so-called Kids' Menus: mostly chicken strips and fries. Deep-fried crap, in other words. No wonder we're raising a nation of gastronomic illiterates. If you don't learn to eat at school, at home, or in restaurants, you end up with a range of flavor preferences that runs the gamut from Coke to Pepsi, from Mickey D to Burger K.
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One person in Chicago does not speak for the nation's school lunches. Especially when the meals involved in that school are from a management company more interested in making money. The research out there is clear on the progress most schools have made in offering healthful and tasy school lunches. Last year a New York based global market research firm - NPD - found that "secondary students are increasingly consuming more healthful food options, such as fruit, salads, and milk and passing by traditional fast food staples at school." The study shows that milk, bottled water, salads, and fruit were among the most highly demanded food items in the 05-06 school year. Typical fast food items, such as soda, burgers, French fries, and pizza saw a decrease in demand. The study noted that students ate more school lunches as a result of the healthful options being offered. Yup - good food offered and kids purchased it. Nationwide. Schools are stepping up implementing wellness and nutrition policies that spark a number of healthy changes; offering greater choices for fruit, vegetables and whole grain foods; revamping menus and cutting fat, sugar and calories; reducing portion sizes; implementing a “marketing push” for greater consumption of healthier fare as well as lifestyle issues (i.e., exercise, nutrition education, etc.); providing interactive nutrition education in the classroom; and encouraging student participation in taste tests of new, low-fat food items. These are the trends in schools and if they haven't happened at a school near you then they are coming. Now... when are parents going to take some responsibility and do their part as well? And when are editorials going to address the parents that send their kids to school with a bag of chips and a soda for lunch everyday?
Just what Seattlest needs...a serious comment to a snarky post. Any more of this and we'll turn into DailyKos or something.