Students at Belfry High School in South Williamson, Kentucky found maggots in their baked potatoes, and were even served green, moldy meat last year. Now in a new level of school lunch madness, worms were found in a Sheehan High school lunch fruit cup. Junk-food manufacturers also feed school children every day, not a professional nutritionist. Is it time to fire administrators in charge of mandated school lunch programs?
There’s also the Coca-Cola company who adds to the school lunch fiasco, serving up nutrition-less, sugar-laden drinks. Eighty percent of public schools have contracts with Pepsi or Coke to sell your kids health-hazardous drinks every day. Do you think we should be serving kids high fructose corn syrup with those maggot-laden meals? A UCLA study found that sugar damages the memory and makes learning more difficult. Add in a little maggot protein and the food gets a bit more disgusting.
The USDA’s guidelines for school lunch programs are replete with questionable items. How about some GMO food to go with all that aforementioned? Or how about a ‘free’ school lunch that includes food from a vending machine that sells candy bars and potato chips?
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act funds a number of child-nutrition programs including the National School Lunch Program, which costs $12 billion a year—plus $3 billion for breakfast programs—and serves nearly 32 million children, about 45% of the total U.S. youth population.
How about this appalling example? Minneapolis public schools dispatch food trucks to stalk kids at area parks to deliver carrots, but most of these kids won’t touch ‘healthy’ food that is offered to them in school lunches because it is so unappetizing. Bertrand Weber, the school- district’s nutrition director, is seeking more than $6 million to bring the program to the entire district.
From worms, to GMOs, to utter junk, we can’t actually expect our kids to thrive on this kind of food.
Conversely, states like Illinois are adopting organic school lunch programs that focus on educating kids and serving appealing food. And there are ten extremely successful farm-to-school programs that even teach kids to grow their own organic food. It’s clearly time for a change.