By Tom

Let me start by laying my cards on the table: I eat school lunch every day. And it’s not just because I‘m too lazy to pack my own lunch (which is true) or too poor or too rushed to go out for lunch. (Both of which are also true.)  I actually love the whole school lunch experience: the smells, the lines, the clatter of trays and the bad jokes that my third graders and I tell while we eat. But I especially like the food. Seriously.  

Recently, however, school lunches have come under fire; the most recent attack coming from the military. (Pun intended) Apparently, 27% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are too overweight to join the armed services, which, unless you’re a die-hard pacifist, is discouraging news.  A group of retired generals and admirals who call themselves "Mission: Readiness" wants to combat this trend with more money for more nutritional school lunches. (Their motto: “Fit to Fight!”) They believe that the chief culprit for childhood obesity is the National School Lunch Program and its insidious campaign to stuff our youngsters with bad food.

I disagree.

First of all, you could do a lot worse than school lunch in terms of nutrition. Take yesterday, for example. I sat down to a delicious scoop of spaghetti with meat sauce, (I love the very idea of “scooping” spaghetti!) a whole-wheat roll, a box of raisins, a fresh salad with lettuce, cucumbers and low-fat ranch dressing, a whole orange, and a carton of non-fat chocolate milk. In terms of nutrition, that’s not a bad lunch, as long as you engage in regular exercise. Our district keeps its lunches somewhere between 600 and 700 calories, which is fairly reasonable. And we are not out there on the cutting edge in terms of nutritious lunches. Google any major city’s School Lunch Program and you’ll see a fairly healthy offering. (I tried Cincinnati, Akron, Houston, Oakland and Stockton. All of them had about the same menu as my district.)

There is, however, a huge discrepancy between what the lunch program serves and what the students actually eat. Think about it: anyone can serve steamed Brussels sprouts and eight-grain rolls, but that doesn’t mean the kids are actually eating them. This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever known and fed a child. While the lunch I described above was pretty healthy, my dining companions didn’t do quite so well. Most of them turned down the oranges. All of them passed on the lettuce and cucumbers. The raisins were hit and miss. And the spaghetti was only one of three choices. The other main courses were cheeseburgers and Taco Hot Pockets, a mysterious hand-held item which is fairly popular, tastes sort of like a taco, yet supposedly has no meat.

But looking up and down the table, I honestly didn’t see childhood obesity happening. My students weren’t having the same balanced meal that I was trying to have, but considering the fact that they were nine years old and mostly making their own choices about what to eat, they weren’t doing too poorly. On the other hand, their cold-lunch colleagues weren’t doing much better. Some had the standard sandwiches, most of which were being consumed, but there was a lot of empty calories coming out of those Hannah Montana lunchboxes. I saw bags of Oreos, Cheetos, Bugles, and Doritoes. There was also a lot of nutritious food, much of it going straight into the garbage can. Apparently there are a lot of suburban moms out there, kidding themselves about what their kids are actually eating for lunch.

So if school lunches aren’t all that bad, especially in comparison to what kids bring from home, what accounts for the fact that a disproportional number of kids who regularly eat school lunch become obese? Here’s what I think: A lot of kids who eat school lunch do so because they get it for free or for a reduced price, which means that kids who eat school lunches are disproportionally poor. Families in or near poverty generally lack the means to feed their kids nutritious meals at home, and they also engage in less exercise than their middle-class neighbors. In other words, poverty itself contributes to obesity, and poverty is correlated with eating school lunch.  Correlation, we were taught back in college, does not imply causation.

So let’s back off on the condemnation of the School Lunch Program. Is it perfect? No, but what is? In my opinion, they do a pretty good job serving up a healthy meal that kids will eat at a low price. If those generals and admirals want to fight the real culprit for their overweight recruits, they need to go after a much more devious and dangerous enemy: poverty.

And I’ll take another scoop of spaghetti, please.