If you thought tatter-tots being treated as vegetables in school lunches is horrifying, you probably don’t want to know what students at one unidentified California high school have told the blog Slow Food USA their school is offering. What could be grosser than sloppy joes full of unidentifiable shredded meat? Cheetos covered with melted cheese.
You’d think that, particularly in a state with brand new healthy food in schools laws that are, supposedly, being heavily enforced, even non-lunch line vendors (like the ones responsible for this particularly disgusting indulgence) would be just a little bit more careful with what they’re offering kids. If teams and clubs aren’t allowed to sell candy bars, the school itself should certainly not be allowed to offer fake cheese melted on top of fake cheese as if it was anything resembling lunch.
Even worse, according to Slow Food’s mole, Rameen, the “competitive foods” lines that serve the concoction appeal to students whose lunch period is too short to wait in the longer line for school lunch. That means, not only are children being sold this high calorie mess, they’re scarfing it down at top speed while walking to their next class. It’s every bad eating behavior we want to teach our kids to avoid rolled into one.
Luckily, kids like Rameen know enough about their own health to be worried, and to try to get enough of the adult world’s attention to make a difference. As he told Slow Food:
“I really hate seeing this kind of food going around at the school because it probably causes some of the most long term problems in any of the kids at my school. I’m not going to lie, many kids at my school are overweight. One student was so big, he broke his ankle just by trying to run. Fortunately, that problem doesn’t affect me directly, but it affects my friends and people I care about. If this kind of food is the only food a student can get at his school without wasting his whole day waiting in line, well every kid is going to have to pack bag lunches to school for the rest of their high school lives.”
