Web Weaving Herbals

As I raise my son (3 years old) I see just how easy it is to fall into a ’simple food’ trap with kids. Cheddar bunnies are easier than making a whole wheat PB&J. Raisins are easier than making carrot sticks. And so on. I am tired and I am busy and so I go for what will calm him down and make him happy fast. Sometimes I laugh at myself for feeling guilty about this – he eats mostly whole, organic food. But even whole and organic fast foods are still over processed and fall into my definition of junk.

But we talk about food and how it affects the body and he seems to be getting some of it. When his Papa jokingly asked if we could stay at the ice cream store and eat ice cream all night, the little one gave him an incredulous gaze and told him that too much sugar would make our bodies very sick. Score one for me and nutrition.

We are homeschooling. There are many reasons for this, of varying priority. One, not in the highest priority, is food. Many children are rushed to school without adequate time to eat a good breakfast – if any breakfast. If they do have time to inhale a bowl of cereal, they certainly don’t have time to pause, reflect, and digest…unless that kid likes to get up extra early! Certainly there is frequently not time for scrambled eggs, fresh oatmeal, and so on. A time and place where many parents I know (even the most conscientious, whole-food eating parents) rely on that whole-junk-food I mentioned earlier.

But let’s talk about School Lunch. It’s a hot topic. Michelle Obama is challenging us all to do better by our kids’ nutrition, and a lot of people are listening right now. I’ve been reading the blog Fed Up With Lunch when an anonymous teacher eats lunch in the lunch room every day this calendar year. She posts a picture. She’s doing research. She’s raising good questions and a lot of people are following her. It’s worth checking out.

There are 2 major problems with food in schools, as I see. The first is the one we know about – most cafeteria food is terrible. It is instant, tasteless, high in fats and sugars, made with low quality products…it’s not food. It’s a place filler until (hopefully) the kid can go somewhere to find some real food. Even when the school tries to do a good job, they provide things like slushies with the meal, and the kids down the slushies, throw away their apple and overcooked green beans. Look at this meal:

I think they are trying to get nutrition in kids, but just don’t have the resources to do so. It (technically) has all the food groups – there’s carbs in the croissant, we can call highly-processed chocolate milk and american cheese protein (though I would take some issue with those designations), and there are fruits and veggies. Unfortunately, the broccoli is so overcooked that most if it’s nutrients have disappeared in transport and processing. This is an elementary lunch and the littlest of the students will have trouble eating a whole pear – not by amount, they simply need it cut into chunks. I would bet money that on this day, most of the students eating the cafeteria lunch at this school at the croissant and the drank the chocolate milk. That’s exactly what I would want my kid learning and growing on (this is biting sarcasm…I;m a grown adult and I couldn’t survive on these rations for long, especially if this comprised 1/3rd to 1/2 of my daily food as it does for many American students). But kids don’t know that, so they eat what is provided and muddle through. For many, this is the best nutrition they will see…but they don’t know better. Unfortunately in this situation, what they don’t know will hurt them.

This brings me to my second issue with nutrition in schools. Health is not something we teach. Students have a “health class”. I remember the nutrition section of my health book – so blatantly funded by the dairy lobby it was disgusting. I don’t have anything against dairy, I have everything against imbalanced and politicized information in a nutrition text book. The other health information I received was similarly abysmal. We don’t teach kids how their bodies work – the miracle of blood carrying nutrients to every corner, the poetry of the stretch and contract of muscles as one moves, the adventure of connecting synapse and firing neurons in the brain – so they cannot possibly or fully understand why this food we provide is inadequate. They cannot fully understand why they need balance in their diets, exercise in their days, and time to process both things. We give them school funded laptops and teach them how to use these amazing and complex machines…but we never give them the proper instruction to use the most amazing super computer on the planet that they already posses.

I’m going to stop ranting now. I do think about nutrition a lot. Almost every client I see has an issue that is based in diet problems, and many of these problems are based on a lack of anatomical and physiological understanding and knowledge. If my son learns nothing else from me, I hope and pray that he grows up understanding, appreciating, and nourishing his amazing body (what parent doesn’t marvel and gloat over thier child’s graceful form?), and doing so with food he knows will help him in his myriad endeavors. I hope and pray that the kids who touch your life receive the same.

Here are some thought provoking links related to this subject.
British Chef Jamie Oliver and his thought provoking TED acceptance speech. I love this – all 20 minutes of it – and how extremely passionate he is about his subject.

A Letter of Apology to Our Children. We owe them an apology, we owe them real food. Do you know what your kids are eating at school? Can you go with them one day and find out?

“It Happens Every Noon” – a video from 1966 about the school lunch program. Some interesting history…

Please, take a moment and write to your school board, your congressional representatives, senators, President & Mrs. Obama, and anyone else who can add their voice to this issue. Search out programs in your area – like the School Garden Project of my area. Support these programs, be it with time, dollars, or just your voice. Teach your kids some basic anatomy and physiology.

And eat well.