Hot or Cold

Choice 1 or Choice 2. Hot or Cold. Eat at school or go out. What are our students eating? Is it healthy? Do they have enough time? I wonder this as I helped serve lunch for All Star Lunch Week. The students thought it was great to have a new teacher serving them their meal for the day. But as I watched closely as each student went through the line and then began to eat, they barely had anything on their trays and the last student to go through the line only had 7 minutes to eat. How can we expect children to perform after having a snack when it should have been one of the more important and filling meals of their day?

According to CHOICE, Citizens for Healthy Options In Children’s Education, children who intake a healthy lunch are more peaceful in their studies and in social environments. The School Lunch Program was founded in 1946 to ensure all students were provided a health meal. Students can receive meals at cost, reduced cost, or free according to their family income. Students gain almost ½ or their nutritional intake from their school lunch and depend on the nutrients. School lunch maybe the only hot meal of the day, or even worse, could be the only meal the child is getting. So why is their not more focus put on school lunches?

The School Nutrition Association is coming up with a plan to make school lunches healthier and more appealing to students. They believe if students develop healthy habits at a young age it will carry over into upper grades and also into adult life, hoping to lead to a healthy, active lifestyle. They are bringing in Chef Ann Cooper, the “Renegade Lunch Lady”, to speak during their next conference about the “Lunch Box: Healthy Tools to Help all Students” initiative in hopes of bringing stakeholders together to provide healthier school lunches.

Kids Health online offers great ideas to encourage your child to make healthy choices while at school and offers some ideas of packing healthy lunches from home. They also provide comparisons of foods once or still served in school lunches and offer alternatives to replace these foods. For example, replacing bologna with turkey ham and mayonnaise with mustard has less fat, and fewer calories.

Time for Lunch is a national campaign designed to provide students with foods that are clean, good and fair. Congress will be meeting in 2010 to address school lunches and Time for Lunch has hopes of change. Their mission is to get more funding to raise it from $1 a child, protect children from junk food, and link schools to local farms. Time for Lunch also partners with Better School Food and offers several suggestions for healthier eating in schools and at home.

I think change needs to happen in schools to improve their lunches and allow students to make good choices and take the time to eat. I feel this will lead to healthier classrooms and healthier lifestyles.