School Lunches Don't Protect Our Children

With pizza, hamburgers, french fries, soda, and candy being offered to our children each day at school, what child would choose the vegetables or salad bar? When schools give children a la carte choices at school, it endangers their health. For an educational institution, you'd think that they would want to do what is best for our kids, but it seems they are only wanting to make money in return for failing our children.

I used to work in a school that didn't offer a vegetable...It was a "store" that was filled with every soda you could think of, loads of candy, and pizza that had so much grease on it, you had to mop it off or it would drip all over yourself. Everyday, they had a different "lunch", but that lunch would be a high fat treat that kids loved. They did keep a couple of chef salads and cold sandwiches in a cooler past the line after you paid! I would walk through the lunch room and the kids were eating candy and drinking soda as their lunch. I was shocked.

Schools say that kids won't eat the healthy stuff, but my opinion is, if you don't offer it to them, they won't have a choice! I'm sickened to see school hallways lined with vending machines! It's like telling your kids to open their mouth as you pour straight sugar into them. Schools need to realize that giving the kids these choices at school is going to affect their choices at home as well.

9 out of 10 US schools offer a la carte menus to their students. We look at our nations rising costs of health care and the fact the percentage of youngsters that are obese has tripled since 1980, what are we doing wrong as a nation? Of course, we cannot place all of the blame on our schools alone, but they do play a large part in this statistic as well. One of the reasons is that a majority of the nation's school do not require students to take physical education. Kids need to run and play and just know that exercise can be fun.

Another thing that amazes me, is that some schools have fast food restaurants in their cafeteria! I will not lie, my school briefly had a Taco Bell while I was in high school. Naturally, we all loved having it, but what kid wouldn't? I just feel like schools fail us all when they give students these choices.

I have always been someone who has struggled with weight issues, and to see that our schools are shoveling these terrible things down our children's throats, it just horrifies me. I will definitely be packing my kids' lunches!