Public Health in Oregon - Join The Conversation

school lunches may seem to improve focus in some of the better parts of the world. In my state most lunches consist of fries and pizza or chicken nuggets which franquely, are the second most disgusting things i’ve ever consumed in my life. The grease practically pours off your plate and when vegetables are served they are so overly cooked and mooshy that it is obvious all nutritional value as been sucked out of them and replaced with the water they were soaked in. Every day that i have to eat in school i want to throw up all of it right after. The fats and sodium dry out my mouth and make me feel fatigued and sick which results in an intense lack of concentration in all of my preceeding classes for that day. School lunches need to take on a dramatic change for the better before it starts to make all students as sick as it does myself and hundreds of other children today.

While I feel that school lunch programs do help children improve in their concentration, there’s a lot more that parents and schools have to do.  It’s true that children who are malnourished and starving don’t do as well academically as those who are well fed.  This Quebec study only suggests that school programs aimed at reducing food insecurity can effectively break the cycle of poverty. I do believe that getting nourishing meals daily can help a child academically, but there is no proof from this research that getting fed well at school will end poverty for underprivileged children.
There are plenty of well fed people who struggle academically, remain stuck in their socioeconomic status, drop out of school, and continue the same cycle with their children.  Nourishing food helps the brain function, but it won’t necessarily help someone rise from out of the only life they know.  People, environment, education, sports, role-models, reading, and so much more, are also the things children and adults need in order to better themselves so that they can move up in society.  Food alone cannot accomplish that.
One idea I had while reading this was something that could accomplish two things at once- a community garden on the school grounds.  First off, it could be part of the school curriculum to teach kids how to plant their own food.  Many people are starting to do this; some because they like to and others because they have to.  Aside from learning how to grow their own fruits, vegetables, and herbs; the children would have access to these foods.  Priority could be made to those who need it most, but it would also be available to all students and staff.  The students would be learning, working together, and doing something earth friendly.

This article jumped out at me because it seemed to correspond with two different topics I have discussed at school, food as it relates to our health and how our social status affects our health. What the article brought to my attention was that the two were directly related. I recently wrote a report on the film Super Size me. The film really stressed the affect food can have on our physical health, but didn’t really touch on social health. The article talks about how kids without a lunch (because their family can’t afford it, not because they forgot to pack it themselves) will face social and academic hurdles that they wouldn’t normally have to face. These hurdles can unknowingly force them into lives of poverty, which they have wanted to escape. They can have trouble focusing on an empty stomach, which will affect their grades negatively. Before you know it, an adolescent may be held back, then drop out of school all together. It’s sad to think all of this would happen just because they couldn’t have a proper lunch. As far as the social repercussions of not having a lunch, a good article to check out is the WHO on Health Inequality, Inequity, and Social Determinants of Health (population and development review 33(4) December 2007). It complements the article’s view on how social inequality will force children (in this case) into lives they haven’t necessarily chosen. Even elementary students would be able to ascertain from someone not having anything to eat for lunch every day of the week that they were poor. Children can be very cruel and uncaring towards the issue of poverty. I think that every school should be able to provide a lunch for each child. The article suggests a social determinants approach for better hope for sustainable and equitable outcomes (Baum 2002). Definitely google it and check it out, really interesting stuff.

I am positive that when President Harry Truman began the National School Lunch Act in 1946, he never anticipated it to be of this magnitude. Since the modern day National School Lunch Program (NLSP) has started, 219 billion lunches have been served! It has definitely grown from the $70 million program it started out as. With an increasing number of research results proving the long term effectiveness of adequate nutrition that stimulates a good learning environment, there is all the more reason to increase the budget for a policy that works. Although the figure of $10 billion spent in 2009 sounds like a very large sum, it is microscopic when compared to the budget you had mentioned for war. The research demonstrates that the next step in the right direction is to continue to fund the National School Lunch Program.

The lunches served under the NSLP meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; with the new release of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2010), there has been an increased effort to provide better nutrition. This in turn is going to cost the program slightly more in order to provide more nutritional meals. With federal and state budget cuts looming in the future, we need to be mindful of maintaining funding for school lunch programs such as this one. There is hope around the corner because we have what it takes to break the next generation out of the cycle of poverty.