by GEHRY OATEY
[Editor's note: See Steps 1-3, 4, and 5-6 of The Schoolyard Foodie's 12-step program to help schools rid themselves of their systematic addiction to processed food]
Step 7: We humbly asked Him (we will say ‘It’ for those agnostics sensitive to specific language about the Almighty) to remove our shortcomings in designing a school lunch system that fails to nourish our children.
Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
In an effort to learn more about the causes of the public school dependence on industrial food (and humbly reveal my own ‘shortcomings’ of knowledge in regards to the causes of teen obesity), I spent a few days in Los Angeles for the biannual Obesity Conference that is sponsored by The California State Department of Public Health and the State Department of Education.
The conference was filled with a number of compassionate Public Health professionals (about 95% women) and everyone from academics, to health advocates, to public policy wonks aiming to tax the junk food industry ‘weighed in’ on existing and proposed ideas that could help reduce the number of fat kids filling our public schools.
Much of the conversation revolved around what money was being cut from programs across the state of California. This included funding for AIDS medication, over 200 state parks, and yes, of course, education and after school programming. As always in the United States, there was an entrepreneurial spirit alive and well, as evidenced by the pre-packaged marketing kits from education publishers and tables full of USDA propaganda. Don’t get me wrong, I was there to learn about my shortcomings, but making amends with this desert of ideas was simply not all that inspiring.
There was one critical piece of the puzzle missing here among the 2500 or so Public Health Experts. There were no youth in the house! No voices from the youth who ultimately are the ones who will be spoonfed our bourgeois ideas on how to improve their bodies!
If you want to hear what went on at the conference—go here and fall asleep: http://www.first5la.org/events/2009-childhood-obesity-conference-creating-healthy-places-for-all-children. Or you can simply bask in the ineptitude of those 5 a day USDA nutrition guidelines that do nothing to influence a food industry that churns out nearly 70,000 new food products every year. (Some of the largest lobbyists who influence the farm bill and therefore school lunch policy coincidentally represent the largest food companies in the world. Do you think they are going to listen to the 5 A Day rhetoric that taxpayers spend millions on?)
However, if you are truly interested in making amends with our addiction to industrial food, go listen to what the youth are saying about these issues at www.werefedup.com.
Read that URL again—it says they are f’ed up and fed up. As educators, we should take this message to heart. The youth are fed up and until we include them in the conversation about re-humanizing our school lunch programs, then we cannot make amends with the outdated industrial school lunch model that has been with us since World War II.
WereFedUp.com is what a group of youth in Los Angeles is doing to address obesity in their own neighborhoods. The site is a publicly funded project to encourage youth involvement in their communities and to document some of the inequities that exist around health/food issues. It also serves as a social networking site for students, and would be an excellent place to send your students to connect with other members of the community interested in improving school lunches.
This site is an example of youth being included in the process of improving our public health (and making amends with our failure to include them in the conversation).
I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think I will be attending another Obesity Conference anytime soon without the accompaniment of my students. I have to think that the desert of ideas on display was a direct result of the desert of youth. And that’s f’ed up.
4 Comments
July 10, 2009 at 1:51 am
I am sickened everyday that I walk into the school cafeteria and see the garbage (poison) our children are being fed.
I know that individual schools are taking action on this issue and I would love to hear more about the organizing in the school, district, and state wide (?)level that you are involved in.
Another issue around cafeteria food is the amount of waste that is created. Those brown box trays (in Oakland) are required to be thrown away whether they have been tainted with food or not. The food itself is regularly thrown away by students because, as your students have stated in the past, it’s nasty.
Just saw the film, Food Inc. (www.foodincmovie.com) – excellent documentary that breaks down how the food industry really works… which affects the health and future of our youth.
July 10, 2009 at 11:00 am
When my daughter attended private school, we packed lunch every day until they brought in a caterer to serve lunch about three days a week, for cost. Those bought meals were pretty okay, the hamburger and french fries notwithstanding.
But that was nothing compared to public school lunches. I was thrilled the cost was half of what I’d paid at the private school and bought up a year’s worth. Until I found out they served ice cream and cookies daily. I was able to manipulate the lunch card so that my daughter was denied these goodies, much to her dismay.
Nothing wrong with the occasional sweet but I don’t want it at school where I cannot control it. There is simply no place for junk food at school. Why is this SO hard for school officials to understand? There was a campaign going to eliminate them but last I heard, ice cream is still on the menu. Why?
Dessert at our house is fruit, and ice cream and pastries are rare delights. I tend not to buy much of that stuff, we save those treats for our house of worship receptions and parties. Then, I just look the other way, no cookie limit, go, indulge.
But here was the rub at school. While volunteering one day, I happened to notice the kids in line got served ice cream first. I could hardly believe my eyes. Children have smaller tummies to begin with so when confronted with string beans or melting ice cream, just which food group are they going to dig into first? I watched children hungrily scarf down mushy ice cream and cream filled cookies, with entire platters of chicken nuggets and salad shoved right into the trash. The amount of daily waste was staggering.
Never mind that the “nutritious” part of the lunch wasn’t much to write home about either. And in high school, there are vending machines with unhealthy snacks. At many schools, kids can also get soft drinks out of those machines and several buy advertising from companies such as Pepsi.
At least they don’t sell coffee at our school but that the teens bring from home. In copious amounts. At high schools where kids can leave campus for lunch, they stoke up on more coffee to stay awake and down yet additional caffeine between school and sports. Schools don’t address the coffee issue at all so kids think it’s okay, but as an education professional pointed out to me, coffee is a gateway drug. We know that Starbucks heavily markets to teens, despite their denial, but that’s another topic.
We are always talking about childhood obesity, yet many schools have eliminated recess. Alfie Kohn is right on target on that one. And recess is but a blurred memory by the time kids hit middle school. I say scrap the useless health units in middle and high, they eat up WAY too much time, and fling open the doors for recess. Outdoor play, sleep and wound nutrition will do far more to promote healthy habit, both mental and physical, in our children than all those time wasting “health” classes where the kids are circling worksheets, taking tests and sitting sedentary while watching videos.
July 10, 2009 at 11:03 am
Um, SOUND nutrition, not WOUND nutrition. Freudian slip, there?
July 13, 2009 at 11:39 am
I think that’s a great idea to include youth and am glad there is a website. It just might be the antidote to all the food marketing going on in schools. It would be interesting to know how the food gets into the school system. Are there some kind of kickbacks to the schools for placing vending machines in the buildings? I guess the focus of the conference was what is offered in the lunch line.
Thanks for the link to the website.