Lunch Money
By Sophie Slesinger at May 4, 2010 | 11:14 am | Print
The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry recently cleared the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, proposing a $4.5 billion increase in spending over the next 10 years for school nutrition programs. Legislators hope to be able to increase the number of students eligible for free or reduced-fare lunch. Additionally, the program plans to provide more farm-to school programs, train more food service workers, set higher nutritional standards, and provide a 6-cent per meal increase in reimbursements to schools.
This reauthorization is an admirable agenda. But without increased spending it could quickly turn into mere one-time lofty goals.
Non-profit organization Slow Food USA recommends a one billion dollar per year investment over the next ten years (as does President Obama) to truly implement these needed changes in our school food system. Slow Food USA also organized the Time for Lunch campaign to create a network of activists fighting for better nutrition in schools.
The Piedmont Park “Time for Lunch Eat-In,” on September 7, 2009, was one of the 306 eat-ins happening across the country on Labor Day 2009 as a part of the campaign to “provide America’s children with real food at school.” Hundreds of people gathered to share food and protest the state of the American school lunch. Josh Viertel, the president of Slow Food USA, visited Atlanta and spoke at the Piedmont Park pot-luck.
Viertel’s presence at this Atlanta eat-in reinforces the strength of the Atlanta Slow Food chapter, and Leslie Smith Grant, president and founder of Chickin Feed, LLC, says that the eat-in concept and the entire “Time for Lunch” campaign works because “It’s fun and simple, and the whole world is converging around this.”
Grant, who admits eating plenty of frozen food as a kid, created an interactive, nutrition tracking device so she could keep track of what she was feeding her children (her “chickins”) and simultaneously teach them about nutrition from a young age. Her Nutrition Tracking Board, is now sold in stores, online, and was featured on the Rachel Ray show.
Grant is enthusiastic about the prospect of a healthier school lunch, and remarks that of most of the food Americans eat, “convenience comes first, price second, and quality and health third.”
With so many diet-related health issues in this country, it seems economical to invest in an effective and controllable preventative health measure for our children through how we nourish them.
Grant talks about the need to invest more in children’s health through school lunch, and says that, “carelessness is shown in frozen food, we do care about [our children] to spend time on this.”
However, currently there is not a whole lot of investment. Schools are reimbursed $2.68 per lunch, and about $1.00 goes towards the actual ingredients. Here’s a little decimal pop-quiz for all of our elementary (and beyond) school readers:
Q: $2.68+.06= ?
No, there aren’t any misplaced decimal points here. Try buying, or simply remembering, a lunch costing $2.68. If it was something that wasn’t fried and included a vegetable, then go grab another in a to-go box and head to Washington, because you may have in fact found the solution to the proposed six-cent fix.
The buzz on school lunch picked up even more in the past few months with the hit television show Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution. School lunch is finally on network prime time, and that’s hard to ignore.
When considering all of the major players voicing opinions—non profits, Democrats, Republicans, picnic-sharing protesters, a celebrity chef, it’s amazing to consider the notion that everyone is in agreement that there needs to be more funding.
The issue then that remains is exactly how much.
While the Senate committee does agree on increasing funding, $4.5 billion is not enough to feed the more than 30 million children that depend on school meals every day with the nutrients they need. Even one billion per year, more than double the Senate committee proposed amount translates to just pocket change in increases per child.
With strong backing from diverse faces of the American public, the power in agreement can propel the argument for increased funding to the Senate floor. As previously stated, over 30 million children rely on these meals every day. That’s over 30 million opportunities each lunch break to teach a lesson in healthy habits, and 12 years of habits will undoubtedly translate into lifestyle. We see the consequences of procrastination of this work with the increase in diet-related disease in our society. It would be unfortunate to waste these daily lessons because of poor planning, especially when we already have the materials to ace the test.
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