As a student, I deal with the problem of getting food on pretty much a daily basis
You know, whenever I feel like eating.
But lately; and bear with my inner post-menopausal woman when I talk here, I've noticed a pretty steep and speedy decline in the food quality prepractically everywhere it's served to young people in america. And by where they serve to young people, I don't mean chic and indie restaraunts on the corner with live and local bands and their cute little vintage furniture. No. I'm mostly talking about cafeteria. Scratch that. I'm just talking about school cafeterias.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've met and worked with a couple of lunch ladies, and I don't want to upset them, because they were nice and more importantly, they made a great pizza. The cafeteria and the people who work there aren't the problem. It's the people who decide what we eat. I need to find those people and do them a favor by serving them a lunch of the food that they feed us every day.
I don't mean this in a malicious kind of way at all, either. Sure, I'm pretty peeved everytime I go there for fresh fruit and it's not included in my crappy pizza and chocolate milk lunch. Maybe they think they're doing us a favor. I'm sure some well meaning school official goes home to their three kids and looks at what they're favorite foods are. Pizza? You got it. Chocolate milk? Okay. And they even think about those poor students who can't get to the cafeteria in between classes. A small amount of vending machines full of soda and honeybuns and, guess what? More chocolate milk. Scatter a few machines around like chicken feed, and hey! You have a nourishment system for your future. Do we buy it? Of course. Do we like eating it? Heck yeah we do. But after putting on a few pounds I began to think about what I ate everyday, and a bag of chips came up in a degrading kind of frequency.
At the risk of sounding like I wear glasses, how about some fruit? Or even better, vegetables? Maybe instead of a bag of cookies they could put in a granola bar. How about instead of getting a hamburger they give us a turkey and tomato sandwich? Is it too much to ask for a bag of mixed nuts or something?
Me being me, I'm probably not going to do anything about it, like, writing a letter to the superintendent or something smart like that. I'm sure better worded people have sent better worded letters than what I could ever write, and nothing has changed. I'm just thinking about what everybody who's going to be taking care of you in your old age is eating, and you should be too.
That is so true! My mom was telling me that the school should have us(culinary kids) do something about the school lunches. I told her "mom,they would have to talk to the school board or someone and then go through a whole bunch of other processes and so on." I think it was a good idea to put the chocolate milk in our vending machines right.A little more variety I guess. I also think that they should have a little more healthy foods in our vending machines,don't you agree?
ReplyDeleteJessica,writing a compelling blog post (and yours is!) is sometimes enough to get the word out about how you feel about a particular topic, in this case school nutrition. Keep on posting.
ReplyDelete