One prime frustration of school cafeteria workers who are trying to make lunch more nutritious is the competition from vending machines and snack bars. These usually sell foods high in fat and sugar that satiate students’ hunger without satisfying nutritional requirements.
According to Healthy People 2000, a report published last year by the Department of Health and Human Services, an average American grade-school student eats three snacks a day, most of them high in fat and sugar.
Salty and sweet snacks are readily available in retail stores near schools, but snacks also are being sold during the lunch hour by booster groups, in school vending machines and often in the lunchroom itself.
Although the school system limits these so-called “alternative foods” by such methods as locking the pop machines during lunch hours, many schools bake cookies and sweets and sell them for extra income during lunch time, concedes Thomas Costello, chief of the Board of Education’s food services. Sometimes the lunchroom manager can add revenue to the school’s food budget by baking and selling brownies, cookies and cakes.
“Snack foods and vending machines get into schools for a variety of good reasons,” said Alicia Moag-Stahlberg, a registered dietitian who has worked to develop more healthful school lunches in Chicago schools. “Sometimes it’s a booster club project, maybe its running a snack shop to raise money for a new copying machine. Or maybe the lunchroom manager wants to make extra money for the cafeteria by using up free commodity food like butter, so she makes cookies and brownies. But when it gets tied to the regular lunch program, it diminishes the effect of promoting more healthful eating. There’s temptation enough for junk-food eating outside the schools.”
Given the availability of alternative foods, some students dump their mashed potatoes and vegetables and fill up on snack items, teachers and lunchroom workers say.
At Gresham Elementary School, Principal Alfred Bridges stopped offering cookies and artificially flavored fruit drinks. “The children were eating cookies rather than their real lunch,” he says, “so I cut them off.”
In a statement calling for more restrictions on the sale of competitive alternative foods, the American School Food Service Association, a national organization of school food-service workers, says “students are being put in a position of deciding between nutritious and non-nutritious foods while the financial and nutritional integrity of the child nutrition programs are being jeopardized.”
Current federal regulations ban the sale of soft drinks and candy only in the cafeteria during lunch, but a bill introduced in the Senate by Patrick J. Leahy (D.-Vt.) to reform school lunch procedures would permit school districts to ban sale of such foods at any time and would encourage the sale of fruits, fruit juices, milk and other nutritious foods in vending machines.
Many administrators and food service personnel say students are eating just as well or better at school than they do outside of school and at home. They justify the items served at lunch and alternative foods by saying that cutting down on plate waste and assuring that pupils at least get something to nourish them outweighs other nutritional concerns.
“As far as nutrition goes, we are trying to walk a fine line between getting the best foods and a product the children will eat,” Costello says.
School dietitian Joyce Meyers sees it differently. “The overriding philosophy of the school lunch program as it is exercised day-to-day seems to be to have the kids eat something rather than nothing. But I think we can do better than that.”
