I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

oh, darn, I'm drooling on my keyboard again....

gracie, First off the kids have 30 minutes total that includes standing in line to get their food, eat, play outside, no recess other than lunch time.

That being said a normal lunch includes say a hamburger, fries, corn, piece of fruit, plus milk

Another day might be a 6 inch piece of pizza, corn, fruit, and a salad..

Ohhh... sweet potato fries!  They have to be healthier than those starchy ol' Irish potatoes.  Give me a couple of hours to do the investigation, and I'll provide some evidence.  (Maybe we don't need evidence?)

Cukes... sorry.  They make me burp something awful.  I don't  know what it is, but even one cuke buried in a salad gives me an upset stomach.  Kind of like onions -- I have to pick them off, unless of course they're Vidalia onions (along with other sweet onions), which aren't onions at all.   No way could onions taste that good.

Sheesh.  I had lunch, but now I'm hungry again.

otter

No recess? Yikes....would hate to be a teacher with a bunch of cooped-up kids.

I work for a very poor school district. Lets just say it's the kind of place where fresh foods aren't in the kids diets. I wish we had a salad bar. I will say though they at least offer a small salad, but then all the other junk is still available for them as well.

I really wish our schools realized the importance of recess. It's all FCAT prep. Don't get me started.

Anyone watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution when it was on tv?  I absolutely love his attempts to get kids and schools to look at healthy alternatives!

I went to my grandson's school to have lunch with him last year.  A hockey puck tasteless hamburger, and some iceberg lettuce they called a salad.  Not a positive experience.  I think our lunches when I was in school were better, because they weren't using all of the processed foods and fillers.

FCAT is the state test. If the kids don't pass they can't move on to the next grade. It also gives the school it's school grade of A-F.  If your school is anything other than an A the government gets involved because the school is at risk of failure. A couple of years ago when we were a B school the Principal was fired(transferred in the district) the AP became a 2nd grade teacher so replaced as well.

The children do pay for the food I believe it's 2.50. At our school 95% get free or reduced lunch.

As I said it is a rural area surrounded by orange groves. The smell of the flowers can be over powering in my humble opinion.

Well, wow. Just wow.

I remember our school lunches being pretty good except for fish sticks every Friday. Yuck.

I say wow too. I can't wrap my head around a school cafeteria...we don't have that here.

I forgot to respond to Gracie's questions. The federal government subsidizes lunches for kids whose family income meets certain levels. When I was a kid this led to the embarassment of handing out the "free lunch passes" to poor kids. Now they typically each have an account and they give the lunch lady their number so noone knows who gets free lunches. I believe there are also subsidies for certain foods or districts are provided with some of the food the government buys (to subsidize farmers). There usually is a reduced lunch rate for kids whose families have inbetween incomes. In our district full pay lunches are $2.25 for elementary kids and $2.50 to $3.00 for secondary students. Menus are heavy on things like pizza, burgers, tacos, burritos, chicken nuggets, subs, etc. for the main course, but everything that can be whole grain is now.

I can't imagine what it costs to keep programs like that going. Kira, what's the rationale behind no recess?

My kids had a cafeteria a their elementary school.  The lunches were pretty healthy.  In high school, they brownbagged it or went to a sandwich shop for lunch.

I tend to bring my lunch to work.  I work in a college, and the cafeteria food is awful. 

Eating in the cafeteria isn't required in publics schools here. Many kids do brown bag it, and older high schoolers often go off campus to eat (that all depends on local policies). Parents can also arrange for their children to go home for lunch but depending on the local policies that can be complicated by saftey regulation -- like you'd have to come to the school and sign them out then sign them back in, in our district they wouldn't be allowed to leave during the school day without adult supervision. And then there are the parents who show up at lunch to bring the kid food from McDonalds or some such. See, it can be worse than cafeteria food!

In our school we have so many poor kids. The parents really do rely on the kids getting a good lunch. It isn't unusual for the kids to go to bed with something like a bowl of rice. We also offer breakfast in the morning, and a snack before lunch. Up till this year I would bring the snack, but this year with Obama's concern about the foods the kids eat the kids got either fruit of vegetables for snack.

Oh, tapioca was forever ruined for me by school lunches.  Bread pudding, too.  And as I was raised in the part of the Midwest with no water for fishing (because the fish in the rivers would hit you back if you tried ... or they had 5 eyes and a fin growing out of their noses), for many years I thought ALL fish was square and came with breading.  I actually didn't realize that tuna was a fish until middle school -- fish came out of the freezer and tuna came from a can!