Nutrition In Schools

Parents at my children’s school want to see the nutrition of snacks and lunches improved: hormone-free milk, no nitrates in the lunch meats, no deep fried food, no white bread or empty calories. No one would disagree with these goals as my husband and I work hard to teach our children to eat a variety of foods and make healthy choices. But teaching children to eat healthfully and providing them with healthy choices is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle that is important not to lose sight of.

We not only need to provide our children with healthy choices, but we need to teach them how and why we combine these healthy choices. Yet, the puzzle is still larger.

I believe we also need to teach our children to appreciate the wonderful choices that they have and the importance of not wasting food since it is a precious gift. When I was a child, my mom used to tell us that children were starving in Ethiopia and that we needed to finish the food that we had taken. As a child I don’t think I fully understood the implications of what she was saying, but it clearly made an impact on me since I recall her words 30 years later.

I am torn on this issue because I have been asked to participate in a group of concerned parents who want to improve the nutrition at my kids’ school. I would love to see my children have healthier choices with no fast or fried food. And yet spending my limited free time to help my children’s school is like tutoring a child who scored 90% on a test so that they can get 100% the next time. There are so many children who need much more help since they’ve only scored a 30%.

The National School Lunch Program provides $2.57 per lunch for over 30.5 million children, and for many of those children, that’s the best meal that they get. If I am to help my children’s school improve its nutrition, then at least I can make sure that my children learn that there are others less fortunate than themselves and that we all need to make an effort to help others less fortunate than ourselves in any way we can.