Our Sweet and Salty Schools

Earlier this month, Hemi Weingarten wrote about one of those things I always think but don't say enough. The food at our schools is not helping kids.

Weingarten's nemesis? Chocolate milk. To be fair, I, too, love chocolate milk. It's not completely banned in my house. Rather, it's a treat here and there, particularly for Nipper, who loves the stuff. But what drives me crazy is walking into our school's cafeteria and seeing the lunch ladies OFFERING chocolate milk to kindergartners. Walk around the cafeteria and you'll see very few children with plain milk. If a slightly different approach were taken, such as giving chocolate milk only on demand with those little ones, I'm willing to hold out hope that fewer kids might spend their afternoons on a sugar high.

That point hopped into my head this morning as I read about a successful breakfast program in D.C., which also mentioned Montgomery County Schools' breakfast program. In the program, some schools are providing kids breakfast in the classroom. Personally, I think this is a fabulous idea and am thrilled the schools are noting officially that kids learn better when they've been fed. (Yes, yes, many of us could have told them that!) But here's what threw me into a tizzy: The meal described is Fruit Loops, milk, juice and graham crackers. I hate to be the person around when those kids come crashing down from all that sugar and those carbohydrates. How about bananas, apples, oranges or grapes anyone? Or maybe a cereal that's not a dessert?

But just look at a few food items on the Montgomery County Schools menu, which does have some whole grain cereals and grains along with oatmeal, and the list is only slightly better: French toast sticks with 8 grams of sugar and 2 grams of trans fat (syrup, by the way, adds an additional 18 grams of sugar); egg and cheese wraps with 490 milligrams of sodium, strawberry milk with 23 grams of sugar. And that pizza my 7-year-old insists on eating every Friday for lunch: 13 grams of fat (4 saturated) and 920 milligrams of sodium (that's almost as much as he should have in a single day!). While such things are fine every so often, our school offers pizza twice a week. And when my son forgot his lunch and ate school food last week, he said he couldn't even find fresh fruit or a simple grilled cheese sandwich to grab.

I know schools have a huge undertaking to feed tons of kids at an unreasonably low cost, but come on. Healthier foods should be in the forefront; the unhealthy ones should be less accessible. Somehow I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels this way. Anyone else?