photo credit: Malak Chahboub
Slimy apple slices, misshapen clementine, mysterious hamburger patty “meat”: Everyone has experienced the horrors of school lunches at some point, only to eat seemingly inedible food and still find oneself hungry.
Public school lunches in the United States are known for being repulsing. While students around the world are consuming hearty meals with delicious ingredients and fresh produce, students in the United States must settle for frozen foods that don’t even comply with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans outlined by the federal government, according to Tufts Now.
Not to mention, many American families who are paying for these nauseating meals cannot afford to do so as the school lunch debt in various states demonstrates. The Ohio capital journal found that meal debt around different school districts in Ohio varies from $10,000 to $60,000.
It’s clear that school lunches need major reform. The federal or state government should step in so that lunches are decent quality, meeting dietary guidelines and accessible to all students.
Various pictures have been recently published on social media and news articles comparing school lunches from Italy, Finland, Japan and others to United States school lunches. It became a popular topic of conversation as people in America saw what other countries were doing for their students and wished they could have the same quality of food as these countries.
This has become a recognized flaw in the United States’ National School Lunch Program. In an interview with Civil Eats, the director of the Global Child Nutrition Foundation explained how these programs with good quality and delicious recipes excite kids to eat nutritious foods and set examples for parents to follow healthy meal guidelines at home.
Along with improving the quality of school lunches, it would be extremely beneficial to adapt the school lunch guidelines to meet the standards of the federal government’s recommendations. This is another necessary change to the school lunch program as according to Tufts Now, one in four school lunches lack nutrition in the United States.
To combat this, the federal government needs to establish a school lunch program that follows its own dietary guidelines. By doing so, American students’ health and eating habits are expected to improve and continue into adulthood, as stated by Tufts Now.
However, making these changes to the composition of American school meals would not be enough because many students in America cannot afford a simple school lunch. According to the Education Data Initiative, 30.4 million students in the United States can’t afford school lunches.
Many families have no other option but to have their kids buy school lunches, even though they cannot afford to. This leads to the bigger issue: a massive national public school meal debt of $262 million a year.
There is a clear solution to making school lunches easily available and affordable, making them free to students. This was done earlier and has continued to be done for a handful of students.
Making school lunches free would guarantee that kids in the United States have reliable access to healthy meals that they enjoy consuming and therefore improve national health in the nation as a whole.
The national school lunch program is in serious need of reform. Improving the quality, nutrition, and accessibility of lunches for kids in America creates countless benefits for the health of the country.
This is why students need to take action, lobby for change, call the school board and district representatives and ask for changes in the school’s lunches. Every student deserves a healthy meal and a happy stomach.
