mardi 27 août 2013

Enforced "healthy" school lunches - some kids aren't buying it

It might make Jamie Oliver cry; but nevertheless, some schools are opting out of recent enforced-healthy school lunch programs because kids are either smuggling in junk food or literally starving rather than eating what's being offered.




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"Some of the stuff we had to offer, they wouldn't eat," said Catlin, Ill., Superintendent Gary Lewis, whose district saw a 10 to 12 percent drop in lunch sales, translating to $30,000 lost under the program last year.



"So you sit there and watch the kids, and you know they're hungry at the end of the day, and that led to some behavior and some lack of attentiveness."



In upstate New York, a few districts have quit the program, including the Schenectady-area Burnt Hills Ballston Lake system, whose five lunchrooms ended the year $100,000 in the red.



Near Albany, Voorheesville Superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder said her district lost $30,000 in the first three months. The program didn't even make it through the school year after students repeatedly complained about the small portions and apples and pears went from the tray to the trash untouched.



...



In December, the Agriculture Department, responding to complaints that kids weren't getting enough to eat, relaxed the 2-ounce-per-day limit on grains and meats while keeping the calorie limits.



At Wallace County High in Sharon Springs, Kan., football player Callahan Grund said the revision helped, but he and his friends still weren't thrilled by the calorie limits (750-850 for high school) when they had hours of calorie-burning practice after school. The idea of dropping the program has come up at board meetings, but the district is sticking with it for now.



"A lot of kids were resorting to going over to the convenience store across the block from school and kids were buying junk food," the 17-year-old said. "It was kind of ironic that we're downsizing the amount of food to cut down on obesity but kids are going and getting junk food to fill that hunger."



To make the point, Grund and his schoolmates starred last year in a music video parody of the pop hit "We Are Young." Instead, they sang, "We Are Hungry."



It was funny, but Grund's mother, Chrysanne Grund, said her anxiety was not.



"I was quite literally panicked about how we would get enough food in these kids during the day," she said, "so we resorted to packing lunches most days."



It was initially said in some arguments that forcing the kids to eat better by giving them no alternative outside the rigid, measured nutrition offered by the school would lead to them "learning to like healthier food"; but it seems somebody forgot to tell the kids that's what they were supposed to be doing.





via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=264396&goto=newpost

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