As the flip side to the obsession I've developed for good food, I've also become very interested in how food can go wrong. I've watched a lot of documentaries lately about the obesity problem. I'm also growing more and more interested in the politics of food. How everybody from the food manufacturers to grocery stores and marketing firms are either making us fat or are trying to stop us from eating ourselves to death. This interest is a lot more useful to me now than it was in the beginning. It helps me to validate that at least for now, it's alright not to want to eat. Food is bad for everyone in some way.
My second book of the year fed right into my "bad food" interest. Fed up with Lunch is the story of a school speech pathologist who decided to eat lunch with her students every school day for a year and then blog about the experience. What she found was very surprising. The food served at her school was far from the healthy fare you'd expect to be fed to kids trying to learn. Most of the food was processed to within an inch of it's life and served in slimy plastic packaging. Most of her students didn't have enough time to eat the entire meals because lunch lasted just 20 minutes. She explained that frozen fruit packed in sweet syrup counts as a fruit under the USDA's school lunch nutrition standards. She also explored how theco lack of good food in schools is compounded by the slow disappearance of physical activity built into the school day. Many schools have either done away with completely or drastically reduced gym classes and recess to accommodate shrinking budgets and shortened school hours.
The moral of the story? Pack your kids a good healthy lunch if you can. Most school food is bad food.
My second book of the year fed right into my "bad food" interest. Fed up with Lunch is the story of a school speech pathologist who decided to eat lunch with her students every school day for a year and then blog about the experience. What she found was very surprising. The food served at her school was far from the healthy fare you'd expect to be fed to kids trying to learn. Most of the food was processed to within an inch of it's life and served in slimy plastic packaging. Most of her students didn't have enough time to eat the entire meals because lunch lasted just 20 minutes. She explained that frozen fruit packed in sweet syrup counts as a fruit under the USDA's school lunch nutrition standards. She also explored how theco lack of good food in schools is compounded by the slow disappearance of physical activity built into the school day. Many schools have either done away with completely or drastically reduced gym classes and recess to accommodate shrinking budgets and shortened school hours.
The moral of the story? Pack your kids a good healthy lunch if you can. Most school food is bad food.
No comments:
Post a Comment