Briana Jordan

English 1010
Peggy Lopata
12/05/2015

Issue Exploration

In the wake of skyrocketing cases of obesity and obesity-related illnesses, the

topic of nutrition in America has become the subject of serious discussion by everyone
from health professionals to politicians to media personalities. While adult nutrition and
the many socioeconomic factors that contribute to it are typically the focus of such
conversations, more and more the debate has been geared towards childhood nutrition,
and what can be done to address the upswing in childhood obesity and nutritionallyrelated diseases. Much of this conversation comes to rest at one serious contributor to
childhood illness: the American school lunch. As public understanding of nutrition has
evolved, heavier and heavier criticism has been laid on the federal school lunch
program and the cheap, processed meals it offers its students. Though the notion of
communal responsibility for childhood nutrition grates against the individualistic
sensibilities of many, the fact is that children who consume junk food, soda and
processed foods at school are more vulnerable to developing serious diseases earlier,
and knowing this, it is our obligation as a society to provide our children with sound
nutrition.

That school lunches are nutritionally inadequate has become a fact widely
accepted by most Americans as common knowledge. Those of us who grew up in the
public school system may remember the endless rotation of pizza, tater tots and
chicken nuggets, and a relative absence of fresh, unprocessed options. But why is this
so? The truth is, most schools operating a federally funded lunch program are restricted
to an impossibly tight budget and, as of 1966, federal requirements governing what
vendors can be approved for reimbursable meals. As Amanda Ray explains, Schools
receive $2.68 for each free meal served through the National School Lunch Program, a
federal meal program. That $2.68 must cover payment not just for the food, but also
any labor, facility, and structural costs a school incurs. Additionally, schools are
mandated to use part of that money for milk purchases. The challenge of providing
meals that meet baseline nutritional standards for a mere $2.68, twenty cents more than
the average American prison meal (Wagner,) essentially guarantees the prevalence of
frozen, processed meals that can be both made cheaply and prepared cheaply.
Although studies of the topic are still in their relative infancy, most reputable
research regarding the impact of high calorie, low nutrition school lunches speaks to the
damaging long-term effects of these practices. Diane Schanzenbach, a researcher for
the University of Wisconsin, looked at the impact school lunches had on children across
a variety of age ranges and economic background. Her findings report, It appears that
school lunches increase students' weight and the chance that they are classified obese
or overweight. With regards to the differences found in children that qualify for
subsidized school lunches those children who will rely more heavily on their schools
contributions for their overall caloric intake she writes, I find that students just eligible

for free or reduced price lunch enter kindergarten with the same BMI and obesity rates
as those who are just ineligible for the subsidy, but that at the end of first grade they are
significantly heavier. While school lunches are clearly not the sole factor in the rising
rates of childhood obesity, studies such as this suggest they play an important role.
The fact that lower income students are more at risk for the development of such
diseases is unsurprising, but troubling regardless. As food costs continue to balloon in
an unstable economy, it is more often than not the working classes that suffer and find
themselves turning to cheaper processed foods in lieu of affordable whole food options.
It is naturally the children from working class families, then, that are more likely to rely
on subsidized school lunch and breakfast programs. Jamie Oliver, celebrity chef and
international lobbyist for school lunch reform, recently discussed the unique struggle
faced by working class families in a series of interviews exploring how inadequate
school lunches impact the poorest children the most. Oliver, who has campaigned to
change the nations eating habits, said feeding children healthily remained the preserve
of the wealthy, leaving working class communities suffering more, states one article
(Furness.) Our harder-to-reach poorer communities are suffering more (Oliver.) Given
that poorer children with fewer means of achieving a healthy diet are those most
severely affected by unhealthy federal meals, the problem becomes not just one of
personal responsibility of expecting parents to see to their childrens nutritional needs
but also one of public responsibility, a communal burden to care for those in our
society who are unable to do so for themselves.

The issue of what should be done about the school lunch program presents a
unique set of challenges, however. Clearly, the fact is that the program is critically
underfunded, and approaching the issue within a landscape of public schools that are
underfunded in every capacity is to ask schools to take resources away from one
avenue and apply them to another. In Should Schools Be Responsible for Childhood
Obesity Prevention? Writer Emily Richmond suggests several potential approaches to
the problem, such as the removal of junk food from on campus vending machines and
curriculum on healthy eating developed and implemented through community volunteer
work, but admits that even these simple solutions are not without their difficulties. But
even with that kind of goodwill effort, schools would likely struggle in the short term to
find time in an already crowded academic calendar for yet another instructional
mandate. This is only one of many potential arguments against an overhaul of the
school lunch system. One such objection is the ever-popular personal choice argument
that if a parent wants their child to be able to eat processed foods twice a day every
day, that is their right as a parent. Fair enough, but its not the parent providing the
meals or making the decisions in this scenario; its the schools, and by extension the
American tax payer. If we can agree that the health of our youth is a priority, then there
is little excuse for collectively contributing to eventual disease and potentially early
death; there should be no such thing as an unhealthy federally subsidized meal.
Other objections concern the practicality of a program overhaul without more
robust funding, or even the loss of potential revenue from schools via soda and candy
machines. Though such machines do provide some extra revenue, this should be
overshadowed by the fact that, as noted by Richmond, Recent reports have found that

obese students scored lower on standardized tests, and they're less likely to go to
college than their peers who are at a healthy weight. It would seem natural that such
serious long-term consequences would outweigh the short-term cash flow benefits of
school vending machines, but the objections persist. Even so, many school districts
have begun rolling out humble changes in policy designed to combat the problem, such
as replacing sodas with bottled water, and have seen some success and have managed
to preserve short-term cash flow benefits at the same time. Despite the fact that systemwide change seems unlikely from within the current framework, it is these smaller shifts
in attitude and policy that can eventually influence major reform, and thus should not be
discounted.
The issue of childhood obesity is a problem to which there is no simple answer.
While it is clear that daily consumption of processed school breakfasts and lunches is
only one part of a complex system of interlocking socioeconomic factors resulting in the
childhood health epidemic the American public is now witnessing, it is also clear that it is
an important part, and it deserves to be addressed. To knowingly and regularly provide
school children with the food that will contribute to the eventual deterioration of their
health on the public dollar is unconscionable. However one might feel about how much
control the government should have over the dietary choices of its citizens, it remains
true that a responsibility not to further endanger the most vulnerable members of society
must be paramount in concerns of policy and budget. To ignore such a problem
because the system does not avail itself to fixing it is to fail the children that rely most
heavily on that very system, and it is our collective responsibility to insure that those
children have the chance to lead long, healthy lives. We owe them that much.

Works Cited
Ray, Amanda. "Unhealthy School Lunches Not Making the Grade." The Art Institutes.
Web. 22 Nov. 2015.
Wagner, Peter, and Brigette Sarabi. "Section II: Incarceration & Its Consequences." The
Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry. Springfield, MA:
Prison Policy Initiative, 2003. N. pag. Print.
Schazenbach, Diane Whitmore. "Do School Lunches Contribute to Childhood Obesity?"
The Journal of Human Resources 44.03 (2009): 684-709. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web.
08 Nov. 2015.
Furness, Hannah. "Jamie Oliver Admits School Dinners Campaign Failed Because
Eating Well Is a Middle Class Preserve." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group,
24 Aug. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
Richmond, Emily. "Should Schools Be Responsible for Childhood Obesity Prevention?"
The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 15 July 2013. Web. 08 Nov. 2015.