"school lunch" news and stories

Kid-friendly panda bento box. Photo: luckysundae, Flickr

• How to pack nutrition and flavor into kids' school lunches and home meals.
• Cookie jars might be cute but they don't keep cookies fresh, so slip a zipper-lock bag inside.
• Corn fiends who hate the cob can pick up a "Corn Zipper," which works just like a veggie peeler.
• Wine deets: Messina Hoff's 2006 Gewürztraminer is a top 10 BBQ wine, Texan wines get play at the DrinkLocalWine.com event, and wine courses and tastings will be held at the Texas Sommelier Conference.
  
• If you find it hard to figure out how much a sauce has reduced, a clean metal ruler can come in handy.
• Max's Wine Dive's best-selling Kobe Beef Burger has been named one of the 50 best burgers in Texas.
• Spiffy products: Leigh Oliver's White-Hot Queso, Reese's Dark, Organic Batter Blaster, 100-calorie-portion sandwich crackers, and Tyson's Pork Loin.

School lunch.

For many of us, the dread words conjure one glimmer of hope -- that a delicious carton of chocolate milk could be sipped illicitly, far from Mom's watchful, sugar-phobic eyes.

White, gluey pizza stuck to the plate by "cheese"; burger patties so flat they looked like they'd been stomped on by the gym teacher; the terror of sitting on one of those red shared seats with a classmate of the opposite gender (red means love, orange means friends) -- school lunch, in the best of times, can be traumatic.

When we stumbled upon this Web site of school lunches around the world we felt not terror, but rage.

Look at the French lunch: mussels, a steamed artichoke, baguette, cheesecake, half a pink grapefruit and French fries. Seriously? Was this staged purely to infuriate American diners raised on beaten-down chicken nuggets and gummy peach slices from a can? And French fries? Does a beret come with it, too?

At my huge public middle school, overcrowding was addressed by serving school lunch in 25-minute rotating shifts. The earliest group, A Lunch, had to shovel down their chicken fingers and green beans at 10:30 a.m. By 3 p.m. everyone was starving again, just in time for the school to turn on the vending machines full of Coke and Butterfingers. Not exactly your model of healthy, mindful eating.

Now, some people are advocating higher-quality, less-rushed school lunches as a key to lifelong good health habits. In the New York Time's Well column, health writer Tara Parker-Pope talks with Dr. Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist and creator of the South Beach Diet, about promoting better childhood eating habits through better school lunches. "I think having the kids sit at a family table and get used to it at schools - and then bring the parents in to encourage that at home - that would be huge," he says.

What were your school lunch experiences like? How do you think they affected your current eating habits?

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I wish I had thought of this in high school. What I a great way to protest. About 29 kids at Readington Middle School, New Jersey decided to protest the short lunch period by paying for their lunch in pennies. Yep, entirely in pennies. That would be 200 pennies per person that cafeteria workers had to count. Brilliant!

The downside is that the group apparently caused some students to go without lunch that day, which is just a confirmation of how short the lunch time must be.

The prank also got its participants two days' detention. I'm a little torn on that. The students didn't break any rules. They offered legal tender. They only inconvenienced some school employees. At the same time, they inconvenienced some other students who didn't get lunch. Everyone needs to get a healthy lunch (such as it is in public schools). So I think maybe they could use the detention time to think of ways to express their concerns that won't hurt fellow students.

I still thing the protest was brilliant. I was friends with some of the creative, rebellious types, but being the oldest child in my family I was just a little too, um, "follow the rules"to think of something like this. I'm not saying I wouldn't go along with this stunt, I just wouldn't have thought of it.

[Via wcbstv.com]

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Last year I picked the 8 best school lunch items I remember from my school days (admittedly, a long time ago). But what about the lunches that a lot of kids hate? Here are my choices:

1. Mystery meat: What exactly was this? I'm trying to go through my mental Rolodex and I can't remember. Was it meatloaf? Salisbury steak? I'm not sure, but it just seemed to be this mass-produced glob of grayness topped with lame gravy. The days I saw that this was the lunch were the days I just had something to drink and maybe a bag of chips.