© Minyanville
Mother Jones has picked up on an outrageous report out of Minnesota, where two elementary school students claim they're given a measly 10 to 11 minutes to eat lunch. 10 to 11 minutes! Let's break that down. That's one to two minutes getting served food with highly questionable nutritional content, another minute trying to squeeze a seat in at the cool-kid's table. Finally, these sixth graders are given a whopping seven minutes to socialize -- and do I dare say, enjoy themselves -- and, oh yeah, carefully chew and digest their food. School administrations might shave off another minute if they switched to edible packing, allowing students to avoid a trip to the garbage by saving their trash for an afternoon snack.
Fast eating among US students is an unfortunate nationwide norm. The School Nutrition Association, whose mission it is to educate and empower its members to provide healthy meals for children, estimates students have on average 25 minutes to eat lunch. Cost restrictions are equally as tight. Even with new federal guidelines, which provide more funding for fresh and healthful foods in cafeterias, schools have less than $3.00 per a student to spend on mealtime. That's roughly the cost of large cup of coffee at your local Starbucks.
Dubbed "the incredible shrinking lunch period" by one University of Iowa professor and public-school parent, the problem's cause can be traced to the No Child Left Behind Act, which has put unmanageable pressure on administrators to hike-up standardized test scores. Lunchtime, with all its valueless non-learning, is primed to be chopped.
But these efforts are full of empty calories. On her food blog, Karen le Billion, author of French Kids Eat Everything, argues the cut isn't worth it:
But do you really think Americans will take a cue from the French? Bad eating habits are as American as apple pie. A double-deep-fried apple pie on a stick. And we'll be damned if our children don't eat poorly, too!If we are giving our children a short lunch break, we are teaching them that food is an inconvenience, and eating is an interruption in the day. We encourage them to gobble their food, when the research shows that eating more slowly is healthier. In fact, the French spend longer eating...because they believe that it's important to teach kids to eat well -- it's a life skill, like reading.
The fast-food industry can rest assured knowing Big Macs and buckets of KFC aren't likely going out of fashion anytime soon. The only thing they should fear is heart attacks killing off all of their customers.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended grade school in the 1960s and we had an hour for lunch. you could bring your lunch and buy milk for a nickle or pay 35cents for a complete meal made by the lunch ladies. The main course would be beef stew, spaghetti with meat sauce, chili, meat loaf, etc. Further it always included a serving of vegetables, fresh baked bread, a pint of milk and nice desert. Though this meal was prepared and served in the school cafeteria it was of good quality though the veggies were often over done. After everyone was served if there was extra food the lunch ladies would announce seconds were available, at no cost. I especially remember the chili beans with a side of corn bread being quite good and waiting to see if there was more.
We were also given plenty of time to eat this meal, up to the whole hour if we liked. Usually it would be eaten without wasting any time so we could get outside and play. If it was raining we would just stay in the cafeteria till the bell rang for class.
Just think, a meal made entirely without GMOs high fructose corn syrup, MSG, aspartame, no soy nor ingredients you cant pronounce. Non of this food was prepared buy off campus fast food retailers or corporations. Just 35 cents, but back then the money was still made of silver. A silver a quarter and dime in today's market fetch about 10 dollars more or less so they are spending far less to feed the children these days. Is anyone surprised they are feeding them garbage?