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Recommended: Healthcare crisis
Over the last few decades, Americans have had an amassing amount of health problems. Not only are health issues becoming more of a concern regarding adults, but also the number of children with poor health is on the rise. It has become such an immense issue over the past few years that the First Lady, Michelle Obama, has taken it upon herself and made a movement to improve the health of adolescents. While there are many reasons for the growth of health problems, a major provider is schools and the substandard food that they serve to the children. Thus, the poor quality of lunches is deleterious and deplorable because it introduces cheap, deficient diet habits, contributes to obesity at a young age, and lacks essential nutritional aspects.
To begin, school meals do not set a solid foundation for children regarding the diet habits they will have for the rest of their lives. For example, they are teaching kids that greasy pizza and corn dogs are a part of a healthy, nutritious diet. One student says, “We think school lunches are healthy because they have all these posters in the cafeteria telling us to eat healthy food and be active; we think the school is doing their part by serving us healthy food too, but they are not” (Jimenez). Not only do children think that this cheap food is a good choice, but schools also think they are benefiting because of how much money they conserve.
Most school districts in America spend less than $150 on food to feed a child for the entire 180-day school year. Less than $1 per day to feed our children food that is supposed to nourish and care for them, and this [is] in the setting of "education." (Cooper 2010).
Consequently, schools are jamming students’ brains with fictitious information, and scho...
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...- School Edition. Web. 31 Mar. 2014.
Johnson, Cara M., et al. "Comparison Of Nutrient Content And Cost Of Home-Packed Lunches To Reimbursable School Lunch Nutrient Standards And Prices." Journal Of Child Nutrition & Management 33.2 (2009): ERIC. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
"Unhealthy Foods Bulk Of School Vending Machine Choices." Nation's Health 34.5 (2004): 7. MAS Ultra - School Edition. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Kluger, JeffreyCaplan, JeremyKauffman, ElisabethRessner, JeffreyRubiner, BetsyTumulty, Karen. "How Bill Put The Fizz In The Fight Against Fat." Time International (Canada Edition) 167.20 (2006): 16. MAS Ultra - School Edition. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Newman, Constance, et al. "Meeting Total Fat Requirements For School Lunches: Influence Of School Policies And Characteristics. Economic Research Report Number 87." US Department Of Agriculture (2009): ERIC. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
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.
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
Schools are meant to give our children a healthy and nurturing environment, and yet so much of the lunches in schools are fattening; does this stop schools from achieving the aforementioned goal? Childhood obesity in the United Sates continues to be a growing problem despite so any new programs to help combat it, and new research is showing how schools may be playing a large role in childhood obesity. School lunches are showing to be the problem, they encourage poor nutrition in our nation’s students, and simple reform is proving to not be enough to stop the rise in obesity rates.
has to spend more money on changing school lunch system from eliminating unnecessary spending portion of system and create farming class. As reported by Cooper, “ The National School Lunch Program needs 8 billion dollars to feed 30 million children a year to serve high quality foods.” However, this price of amount has to be double to serve healthy foods to students because our next generation has to grow up with high quality foods not with low quality foods. Moreover, according to Cooper, the U.S. spends more than 100 million dollars on fast foods portion which the U.S. suppose to spend less amount of money on fast foods to improve the entire food system of the country. If the U.S. government lower the expense of fast food system and raises the amount of money for school lunches, entire schools of the U.S. would get positive results. For example, students could brainstorm very fast as Albert Einstein, and gain more energy to work out on their gym classes. Furthermore, school have to create agriculture class for students to have strong knowledges in foods. Students can literally be ware of what they eat at their lunch times; they will know vegetables grow in the ground and how foods are really fresh. Therefore, schools must provide farming class as in Berkeley; students have rights to know how foods are important to them. As a result, students could get a lot of benefits for changing school
As an average American student walks down the lunch line they might see whole-grain bread or noodles being tossed on their plate. “Who would want to eat this?” A common question asked by the student when they encounter the reduced calorie meal. Believe it or not, the changes, no matter how unappetizing they may be, were made in interest of the health children across the nation. After her husband was elected President of the United States, Michelle Obama took initiative of her own and started a campaign called “Let’s Move!” The campaign was developed to put a stop to childhood obesity through exercise and nutrition. Besides endorsing exercise to the children of America through commercials and advertisements, this movement included new guidelines that schools across the nation had to follow. This caused controversy between the students and schools and the government that will be covered throughout the essay. This paper is about Michelle Obama’s school lunch guidelines and how they are affecting schools and students across the nation.
Food To Students." Points Of View: Junk Food In Schools (2013): 2. Points of View
In most cases, when we think of the term, “ hungry children”, we think of third-world countries; We don’t think about the millions of children suffering in the prosperous nation of America. Anna Quindlen identifies the problem, that in America, a small but significant minority of children are starving; and she’s questioning whether to have year-round school to help feed them. Anna provides sufficient and effective evidence to help support her claim: She announced that school helps low-income families get their child at least one quality meal.
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 ...
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.
How much did school lunch cost when you were growing up? I know that for us, school lunch was between two dollars and two dollars fifty cents in elementary. In junior high school, school lunch was two dollars thirty-five cents. Right now at the high school, the average student lunch is two dollars sixty-five cents. On average school lunch prices have risen fourteen cents since the new rules were passed. With the new rules, the food that the schools have to buy to provide lunch for their students is more expensive. Not only have the lunch prices been raised, but to account for the other part of the new expense, t...
of the amount that children should eat in a whole day (“Three Facts About School Lunches”).
With the implementation of the “Healthy Kids Hunger-Free Act” schools are not serving as many lunches and participation is decreasing. According to the Government Accountability Office (GOA), “Nationwide, student participation declined by 1.2 million students(or 3.7 percent) from school year 2010-2011 through school year 2012-2013, after having increased steadily for many years”(sec. 1). The school lunches became more distasteful and bland; the combinations of foods did not make sense, and the portion sizes decreased significantly. In order to support the cafeteria
To conclude, unhealthy foods in the cafeteria and the vending machines are the worst examples for the kids to maintain the healthy eating habits. Us Parents have to step in to make changes for our kids because in doing so would determine what kind of foods our kids are consuming. We do know for facts they are not getting the proper nutrients while in school, although they do spend in average of eight to 12 hours in schools. We, the parents, can start to make a difference, by attending the school meetings and being active in our kids functions in schools.
The food made now is different since programs were first developed, including the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed. Also, school programs keep getting new rules added to them, but none are eliminated. The price of school food is viewed as a cost to be minimized rather than an investment. With this, we realize that children’s well being has not been the central focus and it should be the primary goal of schools. Poppendieck explores different questions that arise regarding children
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.