Big Business: the Elephant in the Room of Changing School Food:

The Military – Are They the Godzilla?

When the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) first came into being a little more than half a century ago, one of the pressing issues of the time was that too many recruits were too malnourished to fight in the military, it was a National security issue.  Today, it seems the military has the exact opposite problem – we are too fat to fight and they see part of the solution as healthy school lunches.

It seems everyone, well almost everyone today believes that we need to fix school lunch and feed our children healthier.  In fact you can’t read a paper, listen to the radio or watch TV without seeing something about kids, school food and health.  From Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and from experts like Michael Pollan, Kate Adamick and Marion Nestle to foundations like Kellogg, Robert Wood Johnson, Orfalea and Colorado Health and programs like National Farm to School, Slow Food and Healthy Schools Campaign; there seems to be universal agreement that most school food is unhealthy.   Not only unhealthy, but we’re making our children sick to the point that this generation may be the first in our nation’s history to die at a younger age than their parents.

So if we agree that we have a broken system then why isn’t it getting fixed?  The answer is politics as usual, money, profit and big business.  Currently schools are reimbursed $2.68 for children’s lunches who qualify as “free” under NSLP.  President Obama’s budget called for an increase of 12 to 15 cents for school food, a fact I called unconscionable given the grave need to add money for fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains, all of which are being recommended by the Institute of Medicine.  The President’s budget now looks good given the fact that Blanche Lincoln’s proposal is for half the increase or about 6 cents, which equals about a quarter of an apple.

But even that measly 6 cents isn’t the real issue of bad school food.  The real issue is that we feed our children highly processed food high in sugar (breakfast often top 15 – 17 teaspoons including chocolate milk), high in fat (often 30 – 50% of schools don’t even meet the current USDA guidelines on a regular basis) and high in sodium which most schools don’t even seem to take into account.

For the most part, what makes up what we’re feeding our kids in school, are items like chicken nuggets, french fries, canned fruit cocktail, cookies, poptarts, corn dogs, pizza pockets, chocolate milk, trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup.  Versus what we should be feeding our children: lean proteins, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, white milk, salad bars and whole grains.

So back to the question, why aren’t we?  The answer, because there’s so much money in highly processed foods and the USDA commodity food system plays right into it by “giving” schools commodity food the USDA purchases, often high fat items like cheese and ground beef, almost all of which the schools pay to have processed into – you got it – highly processed foods like pizza, burgers and nuggets.

And there’s so much money in the system that big companies and marketing boards spends hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars marketing unhealthy foods to both kids and school food administrators, while keeping the costs low (cheap food equals sick kids).

The prevalence of cheap processed food has led to schools eliminating professional development and training for food service workers as well as retiring (without replacing) old kitchen equipment, which has exacerbated the issue by leaving schools without trained staff to cook food from scratch as well as without the equipment that they’d need to cook it.

We need wholesale change.  We need more money to pay for healthier food, we need guidelines that assure that school food is healthy, we need training to education school food staff to cook, we need money to equip or build kitchens and we need marketing and hands-on experiential learning to help teach kids what real food is, where it comes from and why they should eat it.

On one hand it might seem like a lot, but on the other, what’s more important than the health of our children.

So the real question is, can the military take on big business and win the health of our children by declaring war on the profit over health mentality that looms so large in school food.  Will national security be the final straw that breaks the stranglehold of highly processed junk food in our schools?

I guess we’ll see if in the room of school food, the Godzilla of the military is mightier than the Elephant that is Corporate profit.