The Repulsive Truth Behind School Lunches Essay - 1514 Words

The Repulsive Truth Behind School Lunches Thirty one million kids nationwide eat school sponsored meals twice a day for a hundred eighty days and on average for twelve years. In this sense school lunches are an important and critical component of childhood nutrition and development. Yet these meals are highly processed and filled with chemicals and preservatives. School lunch rooms are essentially fast food restaurants; they unload shipments of frozen food then heat it up in glorified microwaves and serve it hot and ready. This is the same basic principle of fast food restaurants and people all know how terribly unhealthy fast food is for them. Still America feeds this toxic material to kids every day. This has been a tremendous issue†¦show more content†¦As a country, we spend $110 billion a year of fast food and $50 billion on diet aids.† We are killing our kids with pitiful food in school and at home, parents send their children to school to eat cheap lunches and th en feed them fast food at home. All at the same time combating a costly war with diet related illnesses that America is creating. This is a fight the people cannot win with just diet aids; people must cut back on fast food consumption but first and foremost we must cut off the head of this monstrous snake; school lunches, for it is biggest issue and priority one is getting healthier foods in our schools for the sake of our children and for the sake of their futures. It is a monumental challenge that is worsening every year which is why we must act quickly. Children in the United States in the 1950’s were fed unhealthy school lunches of high fat, high cholesterol foods, consisting of ice cream, whole milk, mashed potatoes, and pot roast, with 1,000 calories, 33 grams of fat, 1,300 mg of sodium. Today sixty years later, school lunches throughout the nation are lacking vegetables, still loaded with carbohydrates and fats, two percent milk, canned fruits, processed meats, with 45 grams of fat, 1,200 calories, and almost twice as much sodium. Lunches that are healthier of our kids consist of