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player ready...In my day, my school lunch came out of what my family called a lunch bucket, an antiquated term from my grandfather’s time. Most people called them lunch boxes, and still apparently do. And you can still buy them, plain or decorated, hard or soft, insulated or not, simple or as a kit with many compartments. However, it’s been years since I’ve seen a kid carry one.
Mine was plain dark blue, no Hopalong Cassidy or Ace Drummond decorations, with a rounded top that held a thermos containing milk in the summer and soup in the winter. In the bottom there was a sandwich, a pickle and, if our finances were good, a piece of fruit. I wasn’t allowed to make my own lunch which, if you know little boys, was probably a wise thing. Without close inspection, it’s difficult to tell if a sandwich contains jelly beans.
Nobody ever asked you if you liked your lunch. You just ate it, a strange sandwich made from the lady across the alley’s leftovers on pickle soaked bread, or whatever. If you said you didn’t like it, the answer was “Just eat it. It’s good for you.” It was in fact depressingly healthy food. You were also reminded that there were plenty of unfortunate Third World children who would be grateful to have it, which of course was true.
That answer apparently won’t cut it today. When I was little, the reason adults didn’t give a child expensive food was because “he’s just a kid.” The adults had pork chops, the kids had hot dogs. You didn’t waste delicacies on little boys whose culinary tastes were almost, but not quite, as refined as those of a hungry goat.
But times change, and before long modern school lunches consisted of things like pizza, stir fry, cheese fries, penne Alfredo, barbecue chicken, mozzarella sticks, and doughnuts, all loaded with high levels of sugar, salt, and fat. The days of the cold bologna and lettuce sandwich were over.
Three years ago, however, someone pondered the fact that a lot of little kids are now too fat to participate in sports, and the fact that we’re now seeing Type 2 diabetes in pre-teen children, and wondered if, just maybe, we were feeding our children the same way you feed a goose to make foie gras, with pretty much the same result.
As a result, new food standards, not laws, were formulated that suggested minimum fruit, vegetable, and whole grain servings while limiting fat, sugar, and salt. Many school districts, including Naperville School District 203 and Indian Prairie School District 204 have voluntarily adopted those standards, much to the students dismay.
Kids today are used to getting their way. They’re used to certain flavors and they’re used to eating a lot, so many of them don’t appreciate the caloric restrictions of the new food standards. To them, deep fried stuff tastes healthy, a whole wheat vegetable wrap does not.
Because first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program has been associated with the healthy food movement, many kids have taken to tweeting pictures of the “healthy” school lunch they don’t like using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama. A national study recently found that 60 percent of school lunch vegetables and 40 percent of the fresh fruit were thrown away, and weren’t even sent to those starving third world kids.
And apparently most parents are OK with that. Instead of saying “Just eat it. It’s good for you,” they’re letting their kids take lunches of processed foods. Well, it’s a free country, and kids are their parents’, not the community’s responsibility. But it would be nice if the parents would understand that what they’re actually doing is killing their kids… delectably, flavorfully, deliciously and with plenty of umami, but killing them nevertheless.
Bill Mego is a freelance writer.