Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution kicked off last Friday with a focus on school lunch in Huntington, West Virginia.  I have been surprised by how little fan fare there has been about the show since its launch.  I’ve been fighting with whether to write about it or not.  Actually, several people have asked me to address school lunch in this blog, but I have been avoiding it as I’m a bit conflicted on the issue.  Why am I conflicted?  Many reasons, including. . .

• Schools are required by law to meet nutrition standards that comply with the Dietary Guidelines, and they have to do it on a shoestring budget.  The federal rate for reimbursement for school lunches is currently $2.68.  I don’t know that everyone understands this.  Schools have to buy the food, hire staff to prep the food and clean-up, pay for the plates and silverware all at this rate.
• Offer vs. serve.  Most schools offer a variety of foods that comply with these nutrition standards, and then kids are allowed to choose what they will take.  The reason for this is that if you “serve” the kids, giving them no choice, a lot of food gets wasted.  The last time I was at my son’s school for lunch, kids had a choice of seven different fruits and vegetables – steamed broccoli, cut up apples, grapes, salad, oranges, celery, cucumbers.  Yet there were kids that took no fruits or vegetables.  Is this the school’s fault?
• No one ever talks about the lunches that kids bring from home.  Are they more nutritious than school lunch?  When I visit my son’s school at lunch, I see donuts and chips and sandwiches on white bread coming from home in lunch boxes.
• If a child eats three meals a day for 365 days a year, there are a total of 1095 meals eating by a kid in a year.  Many kids eat 5 meals a week at school for roughly nine months out of the year, totaling 195 meals eaten at school in a year.  That’s 18% of a kid’s meals.  What about the other 82%?  It seems so easy to put all the pressure on schools instead of on home, doesn’t it?
• My sense is that we as parents expect our schools to do an awful lot.   Is it fair to expect them to get our kids the perfectly balanced meal at school with all the right foods and nutrients if we aren’t teaching our kids what this means at home?  School lunch has to be perfect so we can hit the McDonald’s drive thru before soccer practice?
• Where does personal responsibility fall into all of this?  There are books and articles written every day about the current generation of “helicopter” parents who want to be their kids’ friend not the parent.  Are we doing our absolute best at home to get our kids to eat the most nutritious foods?

I’m beginning to feel like I’m on a bit of a soap box here, and I probably am.  It’s just that this is a complex topic, intertwined with family eating habits more comprehensively, yet it feels like the finger keeps getting pointed at schools.

I’m not saying I have an answer or know all the complex details of all the facets of this issue.  That’s why I’m conflicted.

I’m curious. .. where do you stand on these issues?

Visit www.nuval.com to see a program that will be implemented in schools in Independence, MO in the Fall of 2010.