PROBLEMS IN THE LUNCH ROOM

            

Last week a woman at church stopped me to tell me she likes my column and she said I was developing into Crosslake’s answer to Andy Rooney. Not sure what that meant, but just to be compared to an icon like that was good but knowing full well he was often referred to as just a cantankerous old man, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I did trim my eyebrows this morning just to be safe.

There is an ongoing discussion about obesity and proper eating habits in our schools. Last week it was an argument about pizza and if it should be classified as a vegetable or not, because it has tomato paste in it.  Kind of like classifying liver as a vegetable if you put ketchup on it but be that as it may be. The schools are just running out of healthy choices for food that the kids will eat, because at home too many times the kids make the menu up themselves.

My wife worked for many years at a junior high school and part of her job was holding the food fights to a minimum in the lunchroom. Two years experience at that, in that school, qualifies you to work in the lunchroom at Stillwater prison.  She often told me about the huge gray garbage cans that ended up filled with the vegetables and fruit the kids wouldn’t eat but the schools were forced to serve. For many people the question was, why do you feed them things they don’t want? The explanation was always the guidelines make us serve it. My questions were two fold. Why make them take it if they tell you they are going to toss it and to go deeper in that thought process why wouldn’t the kids eat it? My answer to the last question, that I already knew, was they don’t have to eat it at home and they’re not going to eat it here. You can lead a kid to the lunchroom but you can’t make them eat what they don’t want to eat.

So in essence the schools end up trying to educate kids about healthy eating choices but the parents who always hold the trump card with the kids when it comes to who has the most influence and rightly so-- them or the schools-- don’t offer it at home or insist on it. For some parents they might as well tell their kids that Math is malarkey and science is all a bunch of monkey poop. Yet the government regulators seem to think that the problem lays in the schools and the schools alone and they need to fix it. Well my apology to the school cooks for having to be such bad people.

Now going into peoples home and telling them they have spoiled rotten kids is never going to fly so you can see where this whole thing starts and ends. Why do I care and how would I know what kids want to eat? There are sixteen million kids living in poverty in this country—one out of four—and most of them would welcome any food. They’re the ones in the lunch room that do eat their food, along with the ones who come from family’s that teach their kids good eating habits. Sadly the ones with obesity problems are all to often the ones that eat just what they want to eat. Blame Mom and dad and not the schools for that mentality. Let the kids have Pizza one day a week but Pizza as a vegetable? Humbug