Monthly Archives: May 2010

Homework: Your school district’s menu(s)

You have homework. I want to know what your school district is serving to students. Please post a link to your school district’s menu(s) in the comments as well as a brief review and commentary: good, bad, or ugly. Menu is plural because there might be differences within a school district (for example, the menus could be different in elementary school versus high school)

If you can’t find the menu(s), what can you find out about your school district’s nutritional guidelines on their website? Do they have a Local Wellness Policy (as mandated by the Child Nutrition Act)? Are they adhering to their own policy?

Readers email me links and menus as attachments all the time. In fact, a reader suggested this post. Let’s compare and contrast!

Day 79: chicken patty

Today’s menu: chicken patty, whole wheat buns, baked beans, fruit juice, oatmeal cookie

Everything was brown! Wow. The patty was ok although I ate it open face slathered with bbq sauce. I don’t mind the baked beans. The juice tasted very sweet even though it is 100% juice. Believe it or not the cookie tasted great…hmm.

***

I enjoyed this morning’s guest blog post a lot. I’d like to say that the Presidential Fitness test really sucked for kids of all sizes. I wanted to win it badly, but I was not a runner and my time running the mile was often around 10 minutes. Also the “sit and reach” was terrible for me! I have no flexibility. The kids who always won were the athletes; the rest of us were just tortured and reminded of our physical weaknesses.

I’d also like to comment that I wanted to “letter” in a sport in high school, but even though I participated in sports, I never lettered. I was chronically disappointed. My high school developed an academic letter program around the time that I graduated. I thought that was a great idea. Is an academic letter program a common practice these days?

Guest blogger: Being an overweight kid

Anonymous mom is a mother of two daughters, ages 9 and 7.   Although she has her own blog, she’s written this post anonymously to protect the identity of her daughter.  She does not need diet or exercise advice.  
“Childhood Obesity” – even on this blog it tends to be discussed like it’s something esoteric and impersonal, like a bad weather system or a toenail fungus.  As in, “how can I get rid of this awful childhood obesity, it’s so embarrassing when I go to the gym.”  It’s a topic a lot of people like to grandstand about, like immigration reform or the importance of spaying or neutering your cats.  Everyone, whether they have no children, or one skinny child, or maybe one or two slightly chubby cats seems to consider themselves qualified to dispense advice on the best way to fight flab amongst those under 18.  Very few of those people will admit to any actual personal connection to the topic.

I was an overweight kid, and I have an overweight kid.  My daughter and I inherited a strong build and the tendency to pack on the pounds from my Dad, who yo-yo’d between 200 and 300 pounds for most of his adult life.  While my brother would come home from school, drain a milk carton, inhale a half a dozen bagels and never wear anything larger than a “medium,” I spent my childhood shopping in the “pretty plus” section and trying to develop the ability to appear invisible to classroom bullies.  The adults in my life, though well-meaning, offered only one strategy for coping with the constant barrage of name calling:  ignore it. They might as well have just told me flat out to envision the cheese crackers as all of my pent up anger and stuff them down my throat.  Even teachers and others in a position of trust would see no conflict between telling me to exercise more and smirking while the other kids laughed at me in gym class.  When I went to school in the 1980s, overweight kids were subjected to an annual abuse ritual known as the President’s test of physical fitness.  Once a year, we’d prove to our peers what they already knew:  most overweight children cannot run a half mile without stopping, or do chin ups.  (Many thin children couldn’t either, but apparently out of shape thin people aren’t as funny.)  In case you think marginalizing fat people is an effective motivational tool:  it isn’t.  I stayed inside most of the time where everyone would leave me alone.   Even when I eventually lost the weight for the first time, I did it in a pretty self-hating fashion.

Fortunately, the world is a slightly kinder place to my overweight 9 year old.  Although she’s a ball of fire and more interested in vegetables and sports than her naturally thin little sister, her weight is not even on the CDC growth charts.  She looks a lot like I did at her age, but her school experiences have been very different.  Since the 80s, our thinking on how to handle bullying has changed. Schools are adopting anti-bullying policies and parents are taking a more hands on approach to interactions between kids.  While it’s true there’s a little bit of “helicopter parenting” going on, I’m glad my kid is growing up at a time when I can expect that if I contact her school with a concern about schoolyard bullying, they will take it very seriously and intervene.  I know things will get much tougher as she approaches middle school, but I’m already strapping on my mama bear suit and getting ready.  She has had some run ins with kids (mostly boys) who think it’s ok to call her names, but for the most part they are the exception.  I’ve seen other kids stand up for her in a way that was pretty much unheard of when I was growing up.  I feel cautiously optimistic that she won’t waste her adolescent years feeling ashamed of her shape, and I’ll be her advocate for as long as she lets me.

Of course, none of this relates to the “problem of childhood obesity” as we are supposed to regard it: as a public health issue.  In reality, when we talk about combating childhood obesity we are confronting two separate but equally important issues:  1) Obesity and its effect on the health of individual children and 2) How we feel about obesity, how we feel about obese children and how they feel about themselves.  In an ideal world, number 2 wouldn’t be an issue, but unfortunately the world is full of immature and emotional wounded people, ready to tear down anyone who shows a perceived weakness.  It’s also filled with well-meaning but somewhat clueless people who are honestly under the impression that overweight people might not know they are overweight, or know that eating less and exercising might be a way to change that.  

I support the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign and the movement to bring healthier school lunches into America’s schools, because I think they place the emphasis where it belongs: on systemic healthy changes rather than on individual obese kids.  For people like me and my daughter who are genetically predisposed to being overweight, the sea of parking lots surrounding islands of sugar and fat that we have to navigate every day present endless opportunities to become morbidly obese.  If school lunches can be made healthier for all children, chubby and skinny kids alike will benefit.  If parents can get the support they need to feel safe letting their children play outside, all of America’s kids will have a  more active and rich childhood. I don’t see programs like “Let’s Move” as an attempt to single out kids like my daughter, and I’m with them all the way.  

I’m a little bit nervous, however, about the Let’s Move Campaign’s goal of monitoring each child’s Body Mass Index. It’s easy to imagine how this could become another annual humiliation ritual like the Test of Physical Fitness. I hope the founders of Let’s Move are putting a great deal of thought into how that would be implemented, and not just assuming that every school would administer such a program with great sensitivity to the emotional needs of its students.  The truth is, teachers and school administrators already know who the obese kids are in their schools, and the kids know this, too.  There’s no real need to call all the children in to be assigned numbers which they can then wield as verbal weapons on the playground.  Let’s concentrate our efforts on giving all kids the tools they need to be healthy, and leave personal humiliation out of it. 

You might also be interested in reading this Newsweek column, which inspired this post.

Day 78: pizza

Today’s menu: pizza, carrots, banana, ranch dressing, milk

I normally don’t grab the ranch dressing since I don’t need it to eat my carrots. But I did today. Definitely not necessary for me.

Doesn’t the pizza look good in the second picture? I think it does. The pizza wasn’t terrible today. And a banana? I saved that for later. Today I had only 15 minutes to eat so there wasn’t time.

***

I feel imaginary pressure to get these daily lunch posts out to you as quickly as I can. It’s like I’m filing the daily school lunch post with the bureau.
“Here’s what they ate today,” STOP
“It’s a jungle out there,” STOP
“Hope to file another lunch report tomorrow,” STOP
“If you don’t hear from me, I was found out,” STOP
“Over and….” Transmission interrupted
Sometimes life gets in the way and I can’t blog right away when I get home. So this week the lunch posts are after 8pm.

***

Today we were talking about countries we’d like to visit.
I told some students, “I want to go to Japan one day.”
One student pipes up, “I want to go to China.”
I ask, “Why do you want to go to China?”
“Because I like dumplings.”

Guest blogger: Croatian daycare lunches

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Galena, my blog is http://galena365.blogspot.com/ I was born and raised in Croatia until I met my husband, an American. We decided to live and raise our family in America (although that decision is getting reevaluated daily). In Croatia, the approach to school/ daycare lunches is very different from the U.S. and that’s why I offered to Mrs. Q to interview my mom, a daycare principal, in Croatia.

Tell us about how your daycare is financed? The founder and owner of the daycare is the local government and it’s financed from two sources: local government budget (70%) and parent payments (30%). Current price per child is 1700 kuna/ 340$ monthly which makes up the total yearly budget of cc 1.450,000kuna / 290 000$.

That budget has to cover pay + benefits for 14 employees, educational materials, food, utilities and everything else you might need in a daycare.
What is the current number of children in the daycare?
Our daycare has 3 classes: nursery (1 -2 year old), younger group (3- 4 year old) and the older group (5 – 7 year old). According to the bylaws the nursery should have 14, younger group 20 and the older group 25 children. However, the real situation is that we have 17 in the nursery, 28 in younger and 35 in the older mainly because of parent/ voter pressure and lack of space in the current building.
Tell us about the meal schedule:

We are obligated to provide 4 meals during a 10 hours stay. Those meals include: breakfast, lunch, snack 1 and snack 2. We are also obligated to provide fresh or dry fruit in the room throughout the whole day, available for the children to take when they feel like it.

What is the meal structure?
The menus are created by a 3 person body (cook, principal, a health counselor). Some of the more general guidelines are: white meat instead of red, fish at least once a week, dairy products daily, multi-grain or wheat bread (NOT white). There is insistance on seasonal fresh fruits and vegetables instead of frozen stuff.

These are the guidelines from the Ministry of Health that all daycare centers in the country have to follow. 
Because of these guidelines we buy basic products and “enhance” them. For example, we purchase plain yoghurt and use it as a base to make fresh fruit yoghurt using fresh fruits and honey. We also make our own cream cheese using fresh cottage cheese and butter as base and adding vegetables (shredded carrots, broccoli, radishes or onions) or adding meat products to make pate (fish, tuna or bacon). Galena: Pate on bread with tea is one of the more typical breakfasts in Croatia.
The only foods we don’t make from scratch are fish sticks because of the choking hazard i.e. bones. Everything else is prepared from scratch, including the soups.
We cannot bake cakes because of the kitchen size so we include dry cookies (Galena: like plain animal crackers) and milk. We try to use honey as much as possible. Whenever we have ground meat we prepare it with 50% meat and 50% soy. The soups are always filled with seasonal vegetables with the addition of barley, lentils, chick peas, beans or peas.
Who cooks all this?

The daycare has one cook responsible for preparing about 70 meals a day. The cook also brings the food to each room on a trolley; she is in charge of cleaning the tables before the meal and taking the dirty dishes away.
 Mrs Q: I blacked out the kids’ faces because their parents did not give permission for the photo. They look like robotic, identical quadruplets so I hope that protects their identities!

How is the food served?
The teachers are in charge of serving the food although self- serving is encouraged with kids as young as two (as much as possible). I forgot to mention earlier that kids drink tea and milk for breakfast, and water for the other meals. The only juices allowed are the non-carbonated ones and those only for birthday celebrations.

Anything else you would like to add?
We have a special program working with the parents, trying to educate about healthy nutrition and we’re quite disappointed with the parents’ attitudes. Most children eat different tasting (Galena: more processed) foods at home so we have to use a bit of trickery: we call our broccoli cream cheese the “Ninja turtles’ food”, our strawberry yoghurts are “Barbie drinks”, buying silly straws for the yoghurts… whatever we can do to get them to eat.
Out teachers are persistent and the children are slowly getting used to “new” foods. Some of the children’s’ favorites are lettuce, carrots, celery salad as well as green/ red cabbage combo salad.
Here’s a daily menu example:
BREAKFAST: Bread with honey and butter; milk
LUNCH: Barley stew with rooty vegetables (parsley, carrots…)
SNACK 1: Bread with bacon pate
SNACK 2: Fruit yoghurt

Day 77: chicken nuggets

Today’s menu: chicken “tenders,” carrots, fruit jello, bread, milk

Does anyone know if chicken “tenders” are the same as chicken “nuggets?” I lump them all together (pun intended). I would have inspected the contents of the tenders I purchased, but I ate so fast that I wouldn’t have had time. One of the “bonuses” of eating school lunch is that I can eat so quickly it gives me time to tackle a couple brief administrative tasks like emails, filing, etc.

I have taken to eating only the top layer of jello, which is where all the fruit is. It’s very sweet stuff. And the carrots were fine.

***

Here’s what I thought I heard a kid say to me today,
“I have a PhD in Wii.”
I exclaimed, “What?!”
And he repeated himself, “I have a PSP and a Wii.”
“Oh.”

Guest Blogger: Teacher with suggestions

Hello Everyone! My name is Heather and I blog at HangryPants.com about food, fitness and life. I am a teacher in an elementary school in a New Jersey town where people don’t pump their fists, they pump their credit cards. Everyone is fit and healthy. Well, not everyone, but you get my point. I tell you this to share that school lunch … challenges exist everywhere.

Before I watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution it did not occur to me that the school cafeterias had functioning kitchens. My mom packed my lunch everyday, so I never paid much attention and I assumed everything came frozen and was heated up.
I’ve been making my fair share of observations in the cafeteria. Most kids do not eat a whole lot during lunch. They can’t socialize during class, so lunch is a free time with their friends. This is one criticism I have of the show; for the sake of drama they made it seem like kids refused to eat Jamie’s food and were throwing it all away, but that happens regardless of what they are eating. Yes, I see kids throw away more bananas than half eaten cookies, but both often go in the garbage. Food is the incidental part of lunch for most kids.
I’ve observed a lot of positive qualities about the cafeteria:
  • There are always sandwiches on wheat bread available.
  • There is always fruit like apples, oranges and bananas
  • There is no soda.
  • There are usually salads  (and I even saw a child buy one once).
  • There are forks, knives and spoons (but no plates).

Overall, I think it would be possible to eat a healthy and nutritious meal in this school cafeteria unless you are a vegetarian or have other dietary restrictions.

I’ve also observed negative qualities of the cafeteria, namely that there is a lot of fried and beige food.
A lunch consisting of a soft pretzel and a bagel (below)

Chicken fingers, potatoes and broccoli bits (below)

Chicken nuggets and fries (below)

The other negative qualities of the cafeteria are behavioral – the choices the children make each day. For example, I’ve never seen a student buy one of the apples that are for sale. Purchased snacks are usually cookies, soft pretzels, bagels and ice cream.  Super healthy, nutritious, unprocessed foods are available and that is great, but so is all the junk or “treats .” What do you think most 3rd – 6th graders choose to purchase?
Kids with packed lunches eat fruits and vegetables. I see them munching their carrots dipped in hummus or eating leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.
Home Lunch: Sushi, orange, pretzels and chocolate milk. 

In the back is part of a lunch from home – an apple and string cheese. In the front is a school lunch – chicken Parmesan sandwich, French fries and garlic bread. (not pictured)
The vegetables served by the school are a shade of gray. I am not surprised they go uneaten and tossed in the garbage. Would you eat it?

So what’s the solution? It’s easy to say that parents should give their children lunches from home. It would make everything easier and the stuff that kids eat would fall squarely on the shoulders of parents. But what about kids who receive free or subsidized lunch? Or kids whose parents simply cannot make lunches for whatever reason?
My suggestion is simple, really. Offer better quality healthy food and limit the treats/junk with a little bit of education on the side.
(1) Make the healthy stuff better: Healthy food is offered, but it is not the star of the show. Kids eat most of their packed lunches, which are usually more balanced than the school lunches. Kids will eat food they like, and presumably they like the  lunches they bring to school. It’s not enough just to have a slab of vegetables on a plate.  It must be good and that does require some work.
(2) Limit the junk: I am all for treats, but I don’t think kids need to eat 5 cookies, a bagel and a soft pretzel everyday at lunch, especially when that’s all they are eating.  When I was little we had ice cream at school once a week. I don’t think it should be taken out completely, but I also think kids could use a little help achieving moderation and balance. Instead of taunting them with the sugar laden tasty things every single day, just offer cookies once a week. I think it’s unfair to send kids to school with money for lunch and expect them to make ideal choices everyday when the other options are safer (or at least more familiar) and tastier.
(3) Teach good decision making: Look, I’m a teacher and I know the last thing teachers have time for is to teach kids about nutrition and food. It only takes a little bit of time (and leading by example) to help kids make better decisions. I am not saying teach about good and bad foods – no, no, no, but rather teach  about where food comes from, how it’s made, the benefits of good food, etc. This  just might sink into the brains of a few children! I have a “Lunch Bunch” where kids eat with me in the classroom on a rotating basis. Kids love having lunch with their teacher and talking about what’s in their teacher’s lunch. It’s informal and social, but also informative!

Heather asks: What do you think about school lunches or lunches in corporate cafeterias? Whose responsibility is it to teach children what to eat? Should schools cut out all junk food? What do you think?

Day 76: cheese sandwich

Today’s menu: cheese sandwich, tater tots, apple, pretzels, milk

Carbs overload was my first thought, but I learned last week that schools have to offer more than five grains per weeks so that is why the random pretzels and cookies get thrown in.

I’m not a big processed cheese fan, but I ate the sandwich. Actually I ate everything except for the pretzels, which I threw away. In their place I ate a clementine that I brought from home. So yeah for two fruits! I think the apple looks picture perfect.

I’m not even sure how I got into this discussion, but today I was talking about food with a couple students (I think they were discussing something from a book and favorite foods).
I asked the question, “Is pizza healthy?”
Both of the students immediate replied, “No.” They looked at me with wide, serious eyes.
Pause.
“So pizza is not healthy?”
One student, “Nope.”
The second student, “Well, it’s a little bit healthy.”
These poor kids are so confused! Thanks marketing!
I said, “Pizza is easy to make and can be very healthy.”
Homemade pizza is so delicious. Do you make pizza at home?