Hey! Food Police!! Leave Them Kids Alone! January 25, 2012
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
Those poor, frustrated, food Nazis:
The revamped school lunches at Los Angeles Unified School District have won awards, commending them for improving the menu at the second largest school district in the nation. Too bad the students don’t agree.Rejecting healthful alternatives like vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles, students are throwing them in the trash by the thousands, bringing junk food from home and buying instant noodles and other decidedly unhealthy fare from the “black markets” that have begun to thrive at campuses across the district, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Not only is the healthy food initiative failing, but it’s leading to wasted food and malnourished students:
Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students, who are ditching lunch and are suffering from hunger-related ailments.
Fortunately, wiser heads are now prevailing:
The complaints have been heard and LAUSD is planning changes to the menu, the Times reports. Burgers and (healthy) pizza are coming back, and dishes like quinoa salads and brown rice cutlets are out.
Actual LAUSD lunch shown below (photo from here).
Yeah, I'd probably toss that, too.
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Just wanted to point out that we have only 3 posts to go before we hit 5000. I’m also very close to 1000 posts at Uncommon Misconceptions. Seems like we could time it so both blogs hit their milestones on the same day.
Paaarrrtttaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!!
My blog is actually at 999 right now, so it’s just a matter of waiting for IB.
Timely news about Michelle Obama:
I do think that school lunches are atrocious, which amazes me because they’ve been atrocious since I was a tyke. But I think Michelle Obama’s arm-twisting is the wrong way to improve them.
Yes, school lunches were usually not good. The rectangle of cheese pizza we got from time to time were the most popular. The sloppy joe sandwich was probably second. But, then when I got to high school in California we could get cheeseburgers. Oh the patties were those terrible grey things fished out of a pan of hot water and slapped on a cold bun with a slice of processed cheese food. Maybe a pickle? And you could slather on ketchup & mustard from the little packets yourself if you wanted to. Absolutely horrible as a cheeseburger…but actually really quite amazing as…something else. I LOVED them. You had to not think of them as burgers and not compare them to real burgers. It’s like they went beyond the boundaries of horrible and came out the other side as another food thing utterly unlike anything else. Unburgers perhaps. We moved away from California half way through high school in 1986 and no other school I’ve been to had those unburgers.
Mitchell, we had those up in Washington State. And they WERE awesome.
Our greasy sausage/cheese pizza rectangles were awful/awesome in the same way.
Our elementary and (I think) junior high food was cooked off-site and brought on a truck each day. Not honeybadger nasty, but not very good. In high school, they cooked it on-site and it was really good. You could give them an extra dime or whatever if you wanted another roll or extra mashed potatoes. If you didn’t like what they were serving you always had a salad bar option. No complaints from me.