Editorial on Food in the Grand County School District

...Published in the Moab Times Independent (web access for a fee) last Wednesday.

Make Better Food In Schools A Top Priority
Part 1 in a series of articles exploring local food issues
By David Everitt

Like clean air to breathe, regular exercise, a safe home environment, and clean water to drink, nutritious food is a crucial component to living a healthy life. But it sure seems that as much as we may agree with the concept, we don't act on it.

Case in point: look at what we feed kids at school. For many kids, particularly in a community like Moab, public school lunches (and breakfasts) are the most consistent and substantial meals they eat during the week. The effects of this meal are both immediate and cumulative; that is to say, the meal impacts both the kids' behavior in the class immediately after it (who hasn't had a "sugar high" or "food coma?") as well as a long-term feeling of overall health. A number of studies have shown the link between good eating habits and students' ability to pay attention in class, avoid destructive behavior, and simply learn better.

Disturbingly, 2005 ushers in a full-blown epidemic of childhood obesity. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, for the first time in 200 years, children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. Why? Obesity, and the complications associated with it such as heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and a number of kinds of cancer, are shortening kids' lives. And kids are obese because they lack regular exercise and they have unhealthy eating habits.

Naturally, then, you'd expect that the school lunches and breakfasts would be models of healthy meals, based on the latest recommendations by health experts and dieticians. You'd expect that healthy meals were a real priority for the Grand County School District because so many kids depend on those meals for their well-being, (half of the district’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch) and it's clearly our responsibility as taxpayers, parents, and community members to make sure that kids get good food to eat, just like it's our responsibility to make sure that they have clean water to drink. You would think that the District would make sure that the lunchrooms served high-quality food and had staff to prepare it.

If how money is spent is any indication, then you'd be wrong.

Unlike the football program, the basketball program, the library, the bus system, the crossing guards, the pep rallies, and the countless other very necessary and good things that are part of a functioning school, the lunch program is supposed to pay for itself. That's right: between the federal commodities that are donated to the District and the money charged for meals, the breakfast and lunch programs are self-supporting, paying for all the associated food, staff, and staff benefits.

Think about that. Why, out of all the non-classroom stuff that happens in a school, is the most physically and mentally important part of the day expected to pay for itself? Beyond the fact that the amount of money spent on education in general is dismal, I cannot come up with a single decent reason.

This mentality - the school-cafeteria-as-a-business mentality - has become the accepted way of running the lunch program. Consequently, cutbacks in staff have drastically reduced the number of meals that are actually cooked, as opposed to reheated or dumped out of a bag. Even if extra money was spent on fresh heads of romaine lettuce instead of bags of pre-sliced (nutritionally empty) iceberg lettuce, the staff would not have time to prepare them. And there is the constant, if unspoken, threat of an outside, for-profit vendor like Aramark taking over the school lunch program, with all the potential job losses and outsourcing associated with it. It's no wonder that some of the District's employees are extraordinarily defensive about the program.

I am told over and over that one major reason that the lunchrooms don't serve more "home cooked" meals is because kids simply won't eat them. They are used to Pizza Hut pizza and processed "fish" sticks and government surplus cheese, goes this argument, and therefore they will refuse to eat a freshly prepared lasagna or pasta salad or, for that matter, a pizza made from scratch. And while there may be a period of adjustment between the over-processed meal and one created with care in the school's kitchen, there is every reason (including the experience of many other public schools that have made this transition) to believe that kids will eat healthier food if it is available to them.

The school lunch program is a lifeline, particularly for kids who have one-parent households, and for kids whose parents simply don't have the time or the money or the wherewithal to make sure that their kids are getting fresh, healthy food to eat. The current lunchroom staff obviously cares very much about the welfare of the students, but to a great extent their hands are tied by a lack of personnel and the cafeteria-as-business mentality. It is time to change that, and it is up to all of us who care about the kids in this community to make sure that our school district understands that high-quality breakfasts and lunches are a priority for all students.

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