She's not alone. Danielle Mirsky, a Summit, NJ, mom of two, says the offerings in her second-grader's cafeteria revolve around Domino's pizza, French-bread pizza, chicken patties, and hot dogs. "I hate the menu," she says. "I wish there were more choices and less processed food." Her son, David, 7, has a slightly different take: "My favorite meal is little mini chicken nuggets," he says. "They're good. You get like twenty of them. You also get french fries." He says he also likes the nachos, but then adds, "They hurt my stomach, so I can't have them." With childhood obesity so much in the news, why are kids eating nachos and nuggets (and other foods heavy on fat, salt, and starch) for lunch in school? Moms like Juon and Mirsky aren't the only people irritated. Doctors and dietitians are joining the call to change the food that more than 30 million kids eat at school each day. "Children shouldn't go to school to learn bad eating habits or even uphold bad eating habits. Schools should be exemplary," says David Satcher, M.D., U.S. Surgeon General from 1998 to 2002. He's the founder of Action for Healthy Kids, a national nonprofit organization aiming to improve nutrition and increase physical activity for our children.
The health risks associated with the kinds of foods served at schools are many, from obesity, of course, to cardiovascular problems and cancer later in life. And while, ironically, some cities, including New York, have banned the serving of foods containing trans fat in restaurants, you can still find trans fat in lunches being served in our schools. According to 2006 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 percent of children ages 6 to 11 are obese. In a sample of 5- to 17-year-olds, almost 60 percent of overweight children had at least one cardiovascular-disease risk factor and 25 percent had two or more.
Obesity isn't the only issue: The connection between good nutrition and learning is firmly established. Eating well and being physically active contribute to better academic performance, attendance, and behavior, research shows.
Heather Brandon, a mother of three in Hartford, CT, has seen plenty she doesn't like in her daughter, Council's, lunchroom. "They serve a ton of meat and a lot of fried stuff," she says. "The thing that grosses me out the most is the beef tips. I don't know what the 'tips' are. The sauce is full of corn syrup. And then a roll -- a starchy white roll!" Because Brandon tries to limit the amount of meat and fried food her family eats, often her daughter's only cafeteria option is a bagel and a cheese stick.
So why can't kids find more meals with vegetables and fresh ingredients? Turns out the answer's not so simple.
BALANCED BUDGETS OR BALANCED MEALS?
School cafeterias are essentially small businesses. For the most part, they exist independently from a district's budget and are expected to break even. Food is the only aspect of your kid's school day that has this burden; everything else -- from textbooks to sports teams to computer labs -- is paid for by school-district funds (your taxes plus money from the federal and state governments).
The average price parents will pay for an elementary school lunch this academic year is $1.86, according to the School Nutrition Association, a group based in Alexandria, VA, that represents 55,000 school food program directors nationwide. Yet the cost to produce that meal is $2.92, a 25-cent increase from last year.
So why not charge parents more to close that gap? School food directors say privately that the school-board members who control the prices resist raising them over worry about larger families: Even $3 a day times three kids adds up. So schools keep prices low. "This is a penny business where every penny counts," says Erik Peterson, spokesman for the School Nutrition Association.
And serving processed foods saves some of those pennies because they can be reheated easily by anyone on staff. "We do very little scratch cooking," says JoAnne Robinett, student-nutrition supervisor of Beavercreek City Schools, outside of Dayton, OH. "It's just not economically feasible, and since raw items in the kitchen up the contamination risk, we'd need more workers certified in food safety." Employees trained in safety, nutrition, and the necessary skills for cooking from scratch are both hard to come by and expensive when factoring in hourly wages and, often, union contracts.
To get a nutritionally sound lunch, parents would need to pay about $4, says Ann Cooper, a leading advocate for healthier food who is in charge of school food service in the Berkeley Unified School District in California. She also reports that the government moves surplus agricultural commodities into the school-lunch system, much of it canned goods and processed chicken products -- and very little that's fresh.
Along with what parents pay for lunches, schools get cash back from the government for every meal they serve to a student who, based on his or her family's income, qualifies for a free or reduced-price lunch. This school year, that reimbursement is $2.57 for every free meal and $2.17 for a reduced-priced meal.
At a conference in Washington, DC, last year, Southern California school-lunch directors lobbied for higher reimbursements. To drive home what they face, they gave politicians a bag of coins totaling $2.49 -- the reimbursement they got last school year for a free meal. "We asked them to give us back $1.39 for labor," says Geri Dee, director of food service for the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District. Then the directors asked for 28 cents for milk, 40 cents for fruit, and 11 cents for the utensils, tray, and napkin. "All of them looked shocked because all that was left in their hands was 31 cents for the entree," Dee recalls.
There's a paradox here, though: While government reimbursements don't seem like enough, they are still higher than the full price paid by parents. That means schools in poorer districts have more guaranteed income to work with. "We found that here in the DC area, the food was better in the schools with a lot of free and reduced-price lunches," says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which is based in Washington, DC.
When it comes to budgets, nutrition has a hard time competing with the pressure to teach students to score well on academic tests, mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, experts say. "Nutrition or school lunches are not mentioned in that Act once," says Reginald Washington, M.D., chief medical officer for the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children in Denver and vice chair of Action for Healthy Kids. As far as funding goes, cafeteria meals rank low -- really low -- in the age of standards-based testing, says Cooper. "Food isn't even thought of as an educational component," she adds.
RULES THAT DON'T WORK
Congress made schools that participate in federally funded school meal programs develop "Wellness Policies" by the 2006 -- 2007 school year to address nutrition and physical activity. And to be sure, there are more schools stepping up efforts to offer fresh fruit, vegetables, salads, and vegetarian entrees. But there hasn't been enough oversight or enforcement, experts say, and so improvements like that have been spotty across the country. Cafeteria standbys like cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and corn dogs still abound.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) hasn't updated standards for school meals since the mid-1990s, and those standards are too easy to meet. Lunches can have no more than 30 percent of their calories from fat and no more than 10 percent from saturated fat; they must provide a third of the recommended daily allowances of protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, calcium, and calories. With no regulations for reducing sodium and trans fats or increasing whole grains, school meal standards aren't even on par with current federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, says Wootan.
A tray of reheated chicken nuggets, canned fruit cocktail, fries, and a carton of chocolate milk easily meets the current low standard, says Cooper. "Some schools write their entire menus around these cheap, easily prepared, highly processed foods," she says. "This is a huge, huge problem."
The USDA has approached the Institute of Medicine, a private organization that provides advice on health issues to government policy makers, for suggestions on updating the standards, and the institute's recommendations are expected later this year. But it will still be a long time before change is seen in cafeterias. After the institute does its initial report, there will likely be many hearings before the standards can go into effect. "It literally could be a decade," says Cooper.
SNACK OVERLOAD
In order to stay afloat financially, food service directors say they are forced to sell snacks, ranging from chips to ice cream to sports drinks. Kids love them, but their moms...not so much. Isn't a snack something that you eat between meals, not with (or, often, instead of) one?
Michele McGraw, a South Riding, VA, mom of four, wishes her children couldn't buy cookies and ice cream at lunch. Kids will be, well, kids. "I know they're going to pick chips over apples," she says. "The school lunch goes against what they're teaching them in health class." McGraw's daughter, Sami, 9, says she sometimes buys snacks along with her lunch, but some of her classmates fill up on the junk food. "I have friends who buy snacks every day," she says. "They have cookies and then they have Jell-O with whipped cream on it."
Once more, ironically, kids in upper-middle-class districts are coming up short nutritionally, since they're eating more snacks than kids in the poorer districts. Schools in higher-income districts are under more pressure to sell such snacks to balance the books, since, again, they have fewer students who qualify for the higher government reimbursements.
Because snacks make up a large part of what children are eating at many schools, the CSPI put together a 2007 report card that ranked states based on snack policies. Kentucky and Oregon earned the highest grades, A-minus -- those states limit trans fat, salt, and sugar. "Both have strong nutrition standards that apply to the whole school day," says Wootan. Two thirds of states have no snack policies in place.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Some change also needs to occur outside the cafeteria, say experts. As food-service directors point out, healthy options will still compete with candy as rewards from teachers, birthday- and holiday-party goodies, bake-sale fund-raisers, and vending-machine choices.
There's an at-home element here, too, according to Dr. Washington from Action for Healthy Kids. "People have to realize that unless we do it in the home, unless we do it in places where kids spend their free time," he says, "you're not going to notice much of a difference." And the lunchroom needs to be seen as just as important as the classroom, says the School Nutrition Association's Peterson. There are issues beyond the food itself that stem from the emphasis placed on the all-important test prep -- such as the pitiful amount of time kids actually get for lunch. With students' hurried schedules, they have an average of 22 minutes to go through the lunch line, pick options, pay, socialize, and eat. Council Brandon says her class barely has 20 minutes. "I don't have enough time to really eat my food," she says. And lunchtime commonly comes before recess, which only adds to the rushing. Naturally, kids want to finish as fast as possible so they can go play. And fried finger foods are easy and quick to eat.
McGraw often hears her children say the food at school is "disgusting." (She found out just how disgusting on a day parents were invited to the cafeteria and sampled gloppy noodles in cheeselike sauce.) "I guess my answer has been to make their lunch instead of fighting it," she says. Lots of kids brown-bag it, but plenty want to buy lunch, and plenty of parents, particularly working ones with multiple kids, appreciate having less to do during the morning rush.
If throwing up your hands and making lunch every day doesn't work for you, here's an easy way to take action: Go to Actionforhealthykids.org/resources.php to search for ideas on how to get started. Share what you learn with other moms and make your voices heard. Banding together is the quickest way to make a change.
THREE STEPS TO BETTER FOOD FOR YOUR KID
1. Visit your child's cafeteria and keep an eye out for:
- Whole grains. At least half the grains offered should be whole ones, such as whole-wheat bread, whole-wheat pizza dough, barley, and brown rice
- Vegetables of rainbow colors. Potato should not be considered a vegetable (and shouldn't always be fried).
- Protein options like skinless chicken, low-fat dairy, eggs, fish, chili, or soup with beans or lentils
- Low-fat or fat-free milk
2. Are you not loving what you found? Seek out like-minded parents. If your school has one, consider joining the wellness committee, usually composed of teachers, administrators, students, and parents. And learn from advocacy groups. You can get started with these websites:
- Betterschoolfood.org
- Healthyschoolscampaign.org
- Lunchlessons.org
- Healthyschoolfood.org
- Eatwellandkeepmoving.org
3. Approach the school lunch director. Be ready with realistic suggestions, advises Jean Saunders, director of school wellness for the Healthy Schools Campaign: "If you need to buy canned fruit, can it be packed in its own juice?"; "Does your budget allow for more whole grains?"; "Would lower-sodium versions of what you're serving be possible?" If you can pay more, ask the school board to put lunch prices to a vote. A slight bump may free them from relying as heavily on snack sales.
You Ate What??
Here, the worst school lunches Ann Cooper, a leading advocate for healthier school lunch, has seen this year nationwide. Lilian Cheung, a registered dietitian and director of health promotion and communication for the Harvard School of Public Health's nutrition department, points to sugary drinks, canned food (high in sugar and salt), and zero whole grains. "To the human body, potatoes are closer to a jelly bean than a vegetable. And red and processed meats are linked to colon cancer down the road," she says.
1. Large soft pretzel, chocolate milk, fruit slushy
2. Chicken nuggets, hash browns, chocolate milk, canned fruit cocktail
3. Corn dog, french fries, "strawberry" milk, frozen juice bar
4. Two mini-cheeseburgers, french fries, canned corn, canned pineapple chunks, chocolate milk
5. Italian "Dunkers", "strawberry" milk, canned green beans
Jennifer Sinco Kelleher is an education reporter at Newsday in New York. She spent a year researching school food -- and tasting cafeteria lunches across Long Island.
