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essay on unhealthy school lunch
childhood obesity united states
childhood obesity assignment
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According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years,” meaning that America’s children need to start eating healthier, including healthier school lunches. The National School Lunch Act is a fairly recent addition to American society. For, as the world waged war a second time, the United States began to worry about the strength and health of the country’s soldiers. However, in the beginning, selling excess agricultural goods was more important than building a healthy, well-balanced meal for students. Unfortunately, many children coming from poorer families could not afford well-balanced school lunches, so in order to compensate, the School Lunch Program changed its focus to help these students. This program, however, decreased schools’ lunch budgets, and schools had a hard time keeping up with the amount of free meals they had to provide, so they came up with some extra ways to increase revenue. However, in a small town in Massachusetts, one chef makes a difference in the health of the school lunch students eat each day, and proves that hiring a trained chef to cook real, healthy meals can increase profit. Unfortunately, that is not the case in most schools across the nation. The quality of health of the food being served in school lunches is extremely poor and was allowed to decline even more with a new set of rule changes. However, there are some improvements currently being made to increase the quality of health of the food being served to students, including teaching them all about food and its nutritional information, both good and bad. In order for students to eat healthier lunches at school, the USDA needs to implement healthier ... ... middle of paper ... ...ut food and its nutritional information, both good and bad. Works Cited Christie, Kathy. “Stateline: Even Students Are What They Eat.” The Phi Delta Kappan 84.5 (2003): 341-342. PDF file. Kalafa, Amy. Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children's Health. New York: Jeremy P. Tacher/Penguin, 2011. EBook Reader. Levine, Susan. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. "National School Lunch Act." Poverty and the Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Credo Reference. Web. 21 January 2014. "School Meals." fns.usda.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Feb. 2014. Wu, Sarah. Fed up with Lunch: How One Anonymous Teacher Revealed the Truth about School Lunches--and How to Change Them! San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 2011. E
This documentary takes a look at how our school’s lunch programs and government play a role in the spread of obesity across the nation. The film really attempts to drive home the idea that our children are being immorally brainwashed into wanting unhealthy foods. At some points of the film, it appears that the director uses big companies and school lunches as a scapegoat for our nations crisis. It is a valid point that our nation’s children are being
Janet Poppendieck is a professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York, and additionally she is the author of several books including her most recent Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. This book centers on America’s recent interest in whether or not our school lunches are healthy. This issue has been put into the spotlight recently through shows such as Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution and in the news because recent changes in the Nation School Lunch Program’s dietary guidelines. Poppendieck’s book looks at the in depth reasons into why school lunches have turned into what they are today, what challenges need to be faced in order to fix school lunches, and ultimately how our the system should be fixed. She accomplishes this by interviewing her current college students about their previous school lunch experiences, working in a school cafeteria, interviewing current school employees, and looking at the history and policies of the National School Lunch Program.
As discussed throughout this paper there has been controversy about Michelle Obama’s school lunch guidelines. The reader has heard multiple arguments developed from this topic from each viewpoint expressed in this dispute. Now it is up to them to take a side.This paper is about Michelle Obama’s school lunch guidelines and how they are affecting schools and students across the nation. To help reduce the number of overweight children in America, Michelle Obama made lunch regulations schools had to follow and sparked a widespread conflict.
Since the beginning of time, schools were always a place we could trust. A place where we could send our kid(s) off to without worry of what they may be learning, doing, or eating, but perhaps we should be. As the craving of fast food is growing, so is the demand for it. Some schools have taken advantage of this and brought fast food into their schools, providing it for lunch. A high school in California serves McDonald’s, Subway, and even Quiznos to their students for lunch (Lehmann). The school claims the kids are more likely to buy school food when they see brand foods (n.p.). Schools get money from the National School Lunch Program for every meal they serve, but that money from the government only covers so much (n.p.). To pay the rest of the lunch staff, facilities costs, and food, schools turn to the money they make by selling lunches and breakfast to their students (n.p.). Another school in California has even tried to mimic Round Table, a brand name pizza in their area, with healthier ingredients, but was only able to sell 250-300; when they sold Round T...
Zhao, Emmeline. "School Lunch Rules For Healthier Meals Get Mixed Reviews From Students." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Sept. 2012. Web. 26 Apr. 2014.
"School Meals Need to Get Healthier: Report." Healthday. 29 OCT 2009: n. page. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.
Thirty one million kids nationwide eat school sponsored meals twice a day for a hundred eighty days and on average for twelve years. In this sense school lunches are an important and critical component of childhood nutrition and development. Yet these meals are highly processed and filled with chemicals and preservatives. School lunch rooms are essentially fast food restaurants; they unload shipments of frozen food then heat it up in glorified microwaves and serve it hot and ready. This is the same basic principle of fast food restaurants and people all know how terribly unhealthy fast food is for them. Still America feeds this toxic material to kids every day. This has been a tremendous issue for years but it is more devastating now than ever before.
President Harry Truman initiated The School Lunch Program (NSLP) in 1946, it was established under the National School Lunch Act. The program provides nutritionally balanced, low‐cost lunches to more than 32 million boys and girls each school day.The NSLP ensures the nutrition,portion, and safety of our children food, over the years do to the rise of childhood obesity the The USDA School Lunch Program is constantly evolving to meet the needs of our youth. Many concerned citizens, such as Eric schlosser author of Fast Food Nation believes that the USDA is not providing our children with the right nourishment. Many parents are taking it into their own hand and creating and joining advocacy groups. It is crucial that our youth receive nutrient
Press, The Associated. “Some Schools Drop Out of New Healthy Federal Lunch Program, Citing Small Portions and Foods Kids Won’t Eat.” New York Daily News, August 28, 2013. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/schools-drop-new-healthy-federal-lunch-program-article-1.1439576
The founding of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, otherwise known as NSLP, was inspired by investigations placed on men who were rejected from draft during World War II, where a connection was found between their physical impairments as a result of poor nutritional diets in early childhood (National School Lunch Program). Their mission statement being, “ A measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children.” Later on effecting after school initiatives in which after school activities on school grounds, were required to provide snacks for the students, in 1998 (National School Lunch Program). Throughout the history of government involvement in school lunches, there have been changes made due to new findings. First the purpose of school lunches were to give students food in case they were not receiving any at now, slowly it began to evolve to a nutritional meal that covers the main food groups.
In relation to the modern world of food, in terms of ways in which people or families have grown accustomed to this in turn affects the ways in which students and teenagers eat. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s article, “The American Table and The Global Table,” he expresses that people consume so mindlessly and ignorantly that as a nation, we are giving the government opportunities to manipulate the ways in which food is perceived. Foer argues that “today, to eat like everyone else is to add another straw to the camel’s back” (Foer 971). This is significant in that it highlights the role that consumers play in the food industry. Put bluntly, the more mindless demands that are made, the worse the situation becomes. Students and adolescents, ambitious and goal-driven, often claim that it is important to stop such unawareness, but the irony lies in the fact that we might be just as unaware. The more we demand, the more the government complies and essentially, people are “sending checks to the absolute worst abusers” (Foer 968). As administrators in the cafeteria, where finances are limited, and time is constrained on a daily basis, I believe it is so important that your team continues to implement quick, but sustainable food choices. In a sense, it is purely the matter of the ways of how easily students can be conditioned into choosing the right foods and by continuing to maintain these healthy options students will be able to avoid the growing epidemic, obesity. Michael Pollan claims that “daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds,” and what can be drawn from this is that people are affected by habits and if students are habitually surrounded by these healthier food choices, the result will be most significant and beneficial in the end (Pollan 10). While I am not saying that by implementing a
Do you remember your favorite “School Lunch”? I do, I essentially had two favorites; pizza and hamburgers with fries. Think back, wasn’t there at least one school lunch that the lunch ladies made that everyone was so excited to eat. Kids that habitually brought their super hero lunch box with thermos would leave it at home and be in line for pizza or burgers and fries. We could also go back for “seconds”, it was the best meal of the week including what was served at home. The federal government has been involved in the NSLP (National School Lunch Program) since 1946 with the implementation of the National School Lunch Act. These initial programs developed the commodity distribution program for schools, institutions, needy households, summer
The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act was passed in 2010 by Barack Obama, with support from Michelle Obama. This bill changed the way many cafeterias are running on a daily basis, both in budget and what (as well as how much) they are serving. To understand why some schools are struggling to fully thrive under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, it is important to know some basic statistics of this act and what they mean for schools. Amanda Paulson informs us about funding statistics of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, stating that the Federal Government endorsed “[a]n additional $4.5 billion over 10 years to child nutrition programs–the first time the federal government has increased funding for them in 30 years.” Paulson continues on by stating that schools receive a higher reimbursement rate than prior to this act being passed; in particular, schools now receive “[a] 6-cent increase to the $2.68 reimbursement rate that schools get from the federal government for free school meals.” Furthermore, Julie Kelly and Jeff Stier inform us that “[t]he Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act funds a number of child-nutrition programs including the National Schoo...
Have you ever tasted school cafeteria food? I don’t think you would want to. In school story books, do you have characters saying that the food tasted good at school cafeterias? Nope. Why is this? Cafeteria food is often cheap, bought in bulk, high in calories, malnutritious, and microwaved. Student polls and opinions prove this. Therefore, this leads to a suggestion: Healthier, tastier foods and a better, advanced lunch system should be implemented.
Imagine entering into a school cafeteria and being seated at any one of the lunch tables. The first thing one may take notice of is the obese or heavier students also seated at the tables. This probably wouldn’t have been nearly as noticeable thirty years ago. Yet, child obesity rates have nearly doubled in thirty years according to the Centers for Disease and prevention Control. Students are making unhealthy meal choices or eating unhealthy foods such as soda pop, candy bars, foods loaded with preservatives, and unhealthy fats. Now, imagine sitting down in the same cafeteria where the students have been educated about healthy food choices. Vending machines had been removed, and parents had made an effort to help their children eat healthy. Due to increasing rates of U.S childhood obesity in the past thirty years, investing in serving healthy meals to school children never sounded so reasonable. The only way we can accomplish our goal is through healthier meals, wiser spending, and getting students to participate.