"Clementine for snack today, Medha?", I hollered. "Sure! Peel pannaadhe, I'll peel it at snack time!", came the reply.
As part of the customary early morning scene with Medha and Mira sitting at the kitchen island eating their breakfast at their vastly disparate speeds as usual, Pavana yanking Medha's hair trying to comb it as she kept wiggling around contrary to common sense order, and me packing Medha's lunch bag at a frantic pace, a conversation that never hitherto been had germinated out of the blue.
"What do they serve at the cafeteria?", asked Pavana.
"They have two options", replied Medha, "Usually for meat they have something like popcorn chicken and for vegetarians they give pizza or something".
"Both sound great", I said sarcastically.
"Maybe it's OK for her to eat pizza once in a while...", began Pavana.
"Nah", I interjected, "I would rather her have cold lunch from home than eat that junk!"
"I don't even like pizza", lied sweet little Medha in endearing solidarity.
This conversation took me back to a day in December 2010 when President Obama brought Michelle Obama's vision to reality by signing the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act into law. That day was supposed to go down in history as a step toward combating childhood obesity and helping parents feed their kids better. The day certainly went down in history, but not because it ushered more fresh produce and whole grains into school cafeterias as was the intent of the bill. Because it did not. The fast food lobby obviously couldn't allow that. I remember listening on the radio how the House GOP had declared that pizza and french fries with ketchup were vegetables! And this is not something the food lobby doesn't routinely do. This is no different from the argument presented by a certain gentleman belonging to the National Soft Drink Association to the Senate Agricultural Committee that soft drinks are not harmful because they can provide part of the 2 liter liquid intake as part of a balanced diet!
The story of school lunches in America is quite a saga. The Great Depression was when it all started with society was bedevilled to an extent that was sufficient to get the Feds involved. Specifically, the early 1930s saw extreme food price collapses that drove farmers to financial ruin. Laborers weren't finding work, and hunger and malnutrition ravaged poor communities with children. That's when President Roosevelt's New Deal came to the rescue by having the federal government buy surplus crops from farmers, employing thousands of women to cook using this surplus, and then serving this food to hungry students. The system managed keep up this perfect solution through and after WW2, thanks to the National School Lunch Act of 1946. Remember, this also marked the beginning of the baby boomer era, and keeping a burgeoning population young boomers fed meant that school districts had to ramp up production substantially. With the post WW2 food industry rapidly growing, private companies began lusting for a slice of the action and started signing contracts with school districts. However, the food industry was also rapidly transforming at the time, especially with the onslaught of fast food chains like you know who. School lunches went from food like soups and sandwiches made from surplus farm produce, to rich fare like meatloaf and shortcakes, to pizzas and hamburgers, all within a span of two decades. Luckily for the food industry, Eisenhower and Nixon increased the budgets for school lunch programs and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 added more subsidies for school milk and school breakfast programs.
All of a sudden in 1981, the Raegan administration slashed Federal school lunch spending by $1.46 billion and infamously declared that ketchup was a vegetable so as to meet nutrition standards while keeping the food lobby happy. The 2010 Obama administration law was an attempt to somewhat reverse this debacle by increasing the School Lunch and School Breakfast per meal reimbursement by six cents for the first time in 15 years. While it was mandated that the schools had to meet new nutrition standards in order to receive the meal increase, the new nutrition standards themselves were questionable. Like me, you too might remember the House GOP in 2011 classifying pizza as a vegetable, or more specifically, allowing tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable to 'prevent overly burdensome' regulations! You might also remember the asinine argument that surfaced at the same time that kids stuffing themselves with ketchup doused french fries were basically 'eating their vegetables'! As they say, history repeats itself! In essence, aside from the fact that the feds proved that weren't any better in 2011 than they were back in 1981 at telling the difference between fruits and vegetables (tomato is a fruit, duh), no noticeable change took place nutrition-wise. And of course, the USDA under the Trump administration in 2020 famously had Michelle Obama get smoked on her achievement by allowing schools to reduce the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. On her birthday!
I have to feel happy though, because my kid doesn't really like the unhealthy stuff. Medha doesn't like cakes because they are too sweet and too "frostingy". She'll eat chocolate once in a while if offered to her, but never ask for it herself. She'll occasionally ask us to buy her Taco Bell's fiesta potatoes, but without their signature fake cheese sauce. On occasion though, she flummoxes me by asking why a homemade potato roast curry isn't junk but a bowl of Taco Bell's fiesta potatoes is!
