Two months down…
February Stats:
16 school lunches eaten:
(3 – burger-like lunches)
(3 – chicken lunches)
(2 – pizza lunches)
(2 – chili lunches)
(2 – hot dog lunches)
(2 – pasta lunches)
(1 – cheese croissant)
(1 – meatball sub)
…
(6 – fruit cups)
(3 – oranges)
(3 – green beans)
(3 – tater tots)
(2 – baby carrots)
(2 – apples)
(2 – pears)
(2 – beans)
(2 – corn)
(1 – fruit icee)
(1 – fruit jello)
(1 – broccoli)
(1 – fries)
…
BUT I didn’t barf this month!
What I learned about school lunch:
- Milk’s nutritional values by the pint
- HFCS is served up (some great comments on that post)
- Readers’ book recommendations
- Launching of the flickr photo group: Your school lunches (Fed Up: School Lunch Project)
- Health update
- Anonymity explained
- School lunch wishlist
- Time or lack of it
- Recess not on the menu
- Summer ideas
What I learned about myself:
- I am getting addicted to getting comments — keep ’em coming!
- I’m spending more time online than I did before, which squeezes out household duties (like dishes and laundry). My house is a pit until the weekend, but so what!
- The biggest lesson thus far is that the project absolutely has an effect on my husband and my family. I have to post every day; it’s a commitment. My husband, who wasn’t crazy about my project idea when I came up with it in December, now is enjoying it. He is helping me with some of the more mindless work too and I enjoy involving him. But if I have a freakout about losing my job, it’s him who bears the brunt of my anxieties.
Coming in March:
- More school lunches yet unknown!
- Results of impending visit to a gastroenterologist.
- Guest blogger(s) – email me if you want to do a post
- Who knows what drama awaits!
Congratulations on not barfing!
I've been reading this with much interest as I am a teacher, now at home with two children. My older child is in kindergarten at a school where most children bring their own lunches. There is food service that consists of mainly fried food, hot dogs, and such. Because it is not a mandatory program, there is no requirement for the children to eat any veggies, and should parents send money with their kids, there is nothing in place to prevent the kids from having a lunch of cookies and sports drink.
Ahem. Sorry for the rant.
The fact that you'd take this on even when you worry about the security of your job, not to mention your health, is very impressive. Well done.
Keep it going! Cheers from Australia!
I love following your blog and think you're doing a real service to the school community. Thanks!
Not that you have the time, but I wonder if you'd be interested in creating an info-graphic/word cloud of your monthly stats. In other words, create a visual of your data. You could use Wordle for instance (http://www.wordle.net/) for each month's list of items, and even for the entire year.
I'd love to do a post. I don't regularly eat school lunch but there have been 2 interesting trips to the cafeteria this year.
I'm so glad you didn't barf this month! 🙂
Just a quick note to say thanks. I agree with Paul that you are doing all of us a great service.
I too am glad for your idea and your commitment to this project, your blog, and us readers!
I think my daughter, an 8th grader at a secondary school (7-12th grades) would LOVE to guest-blog!
She has been reading (voluntarily) books about healthier eating-and how bad processed food is-and whether she is involved on your blog or not, I think she would enjoy this project. She usually gets really excited about projects that aren't school assignments 😀
Also, I want to mention that I went to the same school and I used to eat Tastycake chocolate donuts and a Pepsi for lunch.
Anyway, great job!!
Please email me if you would like to guest blog. Thanks! fedupwithlunchATgmailDOTcom
Aloha! I'm very impressed with the whole concept of this blog – good on you for doing it! I'm also concerned that the photos you post look like the food is covered in plastic and then heated up? So, the food is not prepared in your facility but perhaps delivered to yours from a main facility? I think that when you heat up plastic wrap it can drip carcinogens into the food…. (really – google it!) just sayin…
Love your blog and hope you survive!
Hi, you said you HAVE to blog everyday so it is taking up some of your family time, have you considered doing a couple posts ahead of time and just setting the time for them to post so you have a daily post? This would also help with the anonymity as you wouldn't be posting about what you eat the day you eat it (especially on days when you get ckn teriyaki which I imagine is more rare of an item).
Just found your blog, through the Yahoo News feature, and am glad I did–what an eye opener, I hope things improve by the time my little ones are in school.
I was wondering. Do they not offer a salad bar instead of the regular lunch or at least a chef salad instead of the regular entree. I totally agree, these lunches are not eye appealing or healthy. Where is the fresh fruit and more vegetable choices?? I work in child nutrition in a different state from you and our food is a lot better than this. We offer chef salads everyday besides the regular entree. Do you ever have lasagna, spaghetti,oven baked chicken, Deli turkey subs or just garden salads as part of the meal. We also bake all items in the elementary level now. I am sorry your cafeteria food is not good and it doesn't look like they take any pride in presentation either.
I realize I'm responding to this insanely late, but I have to say that I would give just about anything to get the kind of lunches you're showing on here. Throughout high school and elementary school (my county didn't get middle schools until this year, I'm a Sophomore in college) we didn't get things nearly this good.
We would get pizza once a week with corn. Period. Every other day of the week we would get one "entree" (such delicious things as nachos, burgers that looked like they were made out of soy beans, and hot dogs that once caused a classmate to lose a loose tooth) with one side. If we were lucky, we'd have two side options.
We did have a salad bar, but it wasn't watched and, therefore, had people's spit in it from the earlier lunches. If we wanted chips or cookies or fruit cups, we had to pay an extra 50 cents for them. Many times, especially in my high school, I went with simply the wimpy little entree that wouldn't fill up a two year old and, when we were lucky, bread. Though…most of the time you could knock someone out with that bread, it was so hard.