"What I saw during my week in Berkeley's central school kitchen was a pair of seasoned, professional chefs who knew what the deal was with kids and vegetables. Being chefs on a budget, they take a clear-eyed, pragmatic approach to making school meals. They weren't just slapping peas on a tray to satisfy some standard dreamed up in Washington, D.C. With stoic determination, they were finding ways to incorporate vegatables that would actually be eaten in daily meals, often by making them much less obvious. They don't waste time or money on broccoli side dishes. They serve lots of beans, which satisfy government vegetable requirements cheaply and efficiently-just in case that Tuscan bean salad ends up being scraped into the compost bin.
Why serve kids local brussels sprouts if they just end up in the trash? That was exactly the message D.C. school officials sent legislators here when they tried to adopt new Institute of Medicine standards calling for bigger portions of vegetables: Please don't!
In the District of Columbia, canned green beans, steamed carrots and broccoli cooked to death appear on Styrofoam serving trays on a regular basis, only to be ignored by the children for whom they are intended and dropped into trash receptacles at the end of the meal. "They're nasty," is how my 10-year-old daughter and her classmates describe them. Isn't the defininition of insanity repeating the same behavior over and over, expecting a different result?"
http://www.theslowcook.com/2010/05/17/lessons-from-berkeley-can-we-handle-the-truth/
I can't even dream of how bad most school lunches are. We ate a steady diet of bread, milk, and some protein back in "my" day. The veggies were OK, if not great. Now, I wonder if they can still provide meat based burgers? Whole milk? I bet you still get a dose of sugar for a dessert at every meal. You could live on those meals, but I'll bet many, myself included, had a predictable blood sugar spike followed by a post-insulin crash, resulting in the post-lunch fog. I didn't even know enough then to know the benefit of bringing my own food to school. At least my kids won't suffer the same fate, nor need yours.
By the way - the best way to get kids to like veggies is to eat a bunch while the kid is in utero!
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