More healthy lunch, less messy lunchroom

Woodbury Bulletin - 09/16/2009

As another school year has started, many parents start thinking about school lunch and packing lunches for their kids.

Are my kids eating healthy food at school? Is it better to have school lunch or bring lunch from home? Should I let them eat doubles or triples or should I set a limit?

An article that appeared in the Aug. 12 issue of the Woodbury Bulletin titled “More healthful school lunches moving ahead” also made me think about those questions.

I was glad to know that more healthy choices, more fresh and fewer processed food will be offered at our new middle schools. I hope the Farmer’s Market lunch menioned in the article will be expanded to both elementary and high schools next year.

Giving students choices of healthy and unhealthy food, I think the majority of kids will choose unhealthy food. I know my kids will, even though we eat mostly healthy food and not processed food at home.

So the ideal is not just more healthy food choices, but also fewer choices or no choices of unhealthy food in schools. This is difficult if not impossible to achieve, because Our standard American diet is a SAD, unhealthy one.

In my opinion, it is not only our school’s responsibility to provide our kids with healthy food, it’s also, or more importantly so, the responsibility of each family and the society as a whole to help our kids build healthy eating habits.

I think parents should pay attention to their kids’ lunch accounts and make their kids responsible for their spending. Instead of complaining to the schools that their kids spend too much money on school lunch, they can limit their kids’ spending to one lunch, and not allow doubles or triples.

Once I found out that my daughter spent extra money on dessert, I told her no more doubles or extras. Whenever she questions me why she can’t have seconds or extras like some of her friends, I tell her, she can always get more vegetables or fruit for free if she needs more food. I know well that she can’t usually finish everything the first round.

This is a problem that concerns me - the messy and wasteful behavior in the school lunch rooms.

On a few occasions I visited my kids during lunch, I was not pleased to see what’s going on. Some kids played with food, some kids, including my daughter, ate only a few bites of food and had a few sips of milk or juice, then threw more food away than they consumed.

Since I grew up with the teaching of eating everything on your plate and not wasting food, I don’t tolerate my kids’ wasteful behavior. I make sure that they eat everything they have on their plates. But I can’t control what they do at school.

The lunchroom scene was pretty heartening for me. What a waste and what a mess!

I hate to see food go to waste and money go down the drainage. I think most parents will agree. But some of them might just not know what is going on in the school lunch room.

There are also parents who don't care how much their kids spend and how much is wasted. These kids can purchase whatever they want, as much as they want.

The fact is in our society kids are very spoiled. Many live a life of prosperity and abundance; they don’t know hunger and they don’t know how to value what they have.

As a parent, I encourage our kids to bring lunch from home. But that remains a real challenge.

When my son first started school, he brought lunch from home every day for the whole kindergarten year. Then when he started the 1st grade, he no longer wanted to bring lunch from home. He said most kids eat school lunch. He wanted school lunch too.

If more kids bring lunch from home, that might encourage other kids to do the same.

From the school side, more education and closer monitoring would be helpful.

We need to remind our kids to bring or purchase in the cafeteria only what they will eat, no more and no waste. When bringing lunch from home, use unpackaged food (an apple) rather than packaged food (a cup of applesauce) if possible, and pack lunch in re-usable containers, rather than disposable items.

As we focus on providing more healthy lunch, let’s not forget to also teach our kids to be resourceful with our food and mindful with our environment, and to keep the lunchroom from becoming a waste site.


Qin Tang can be contacted at quin_tang@yahoo.com