"Healthy" School Cafeteria Food

"Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil." ~Plato

So my school has decided to "go healthy" mostly because it's now required to by the province. Which is great, or it would be. Except that in actuality they're worse off now then they were before. They have effectively replaced the obviously unhealthy food in the vending machines and being served, to apparent healthy foods. The chip bags are now chip bags with pictures of fields on them, the high calorie chocolate cookies are now high calorie oatmeal cookies. The greasy, cheesy pizza is now greasy, cheesy pizza with microscopic slices of onion and pepper. You see the problem.



It seems more effort has been going into making the food look healthy, instead of actually being healthy.

This kind of thinking about health supports consumerism more then it supports health. With all their claims about how much "better" the food they serve is, I have seen no nutrition facts at all, or any evidence of what might be going into them. School is supposed to be a place of education, where students learn to think for themselves like in the "real world". All this is teaching students is to not question healthy claims made by big companies.

Take for an example products like Nutri-Grain bars which almost all the kids and teens I know would call healthy and even myself at one time would call healthy. But, if you actually read the back you'll learn quickly that it's filled with high fructose corn syrup, sugar etc. It's basically just breaded jam. And there are so many like it in the vending machines that some teens are fooled into thinking that the school is actually healthy.

So I went on a little search to find some facts on this "health" movement and maybe some ideas that might redeem my school. What I found was that basically their main requirement is that food should be low fat. Big companies use this too. They have little to none nutritional value, and make claims based on the misguided precept that all fat is evil. Low fat products are sweeping the market, while companies fill their products with sugar, and aspartame to make up for the taste. This is supposed to be a good thing? Am I the only on who's bothered by this? My school serves giant brownies, mac and cheese, and breaded chicken sandwiches but can still call themselves healthy because they throw in an apple and it's low fat. If a school finds that their food is healthy enough then so will the students, effectively supporting the lifestyle of cheap, processed low fat foods.

I didn't love it when the school sold unhealthy crap, but I hate that they've dressed up the unhealthy crap to make their inch of improvement seem like a mile.  The school is not a company, and it should have it's values in the raw facts not cheap low fat labels. Feed students junk food, ok, but at least have the decency to feed students the truth.