Healthy Trash?

Reaction to the newly minted federal laws that require healthy school lunches is far from settled. In Tavares Florida, Lake County district officials might even attach cameras to school trash cans to monitor the amount of food that kids toss, according to News TV10.

In fact, some states are already spending millions of dollars taking pictures of lunches before and after they are eaten to determine the amount of waste.

While concerned adults suggest the possibility of school gardens to acquaint students with healthy food, the students themselves have a different way of coping with the enforced health epidemic — Organized lunch strikes in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where in late August the hashtag “brownbagginit” was trending on Twitter, and “outside Milwaukee, where the Mukwonago High School principal, Shawn McNulty, said participation in the lunch program had fallen 70 percent.”

A spoof music video, “We Are Hungry,” written by a Kansas English teacher and performed by high school students, scored nearly a million hits on YouTube.

“The federal government is trying to solve a problem that every kid doesn’t have,” said Jacob Taxdahl, an eighth-grade football player at Jordan Middle School in Michigan who started a three-day boycott via a Facebook page. “They’re trying to solve obesity in America, but not every kid is obese.”

“Before, there was no taste and no flavor,” said Malik Barrows, a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, who likes fruit but said his classmates threw away their mandatory helpings on the cafeteria floor. “Now there’s no taste, no flavor and it’s healthy, which makes it taste even worse.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
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