National School Lunch Program

School lunch in the U.S has been around since the end of WW2 when the National School Lunch Program(NSLP) launched in 1946 by President Harry Truman. Even before the program came around some areas started serving lunch in 1894 like Boston and Philadelphia. The early start was to make sure to not let the kids go through a malfunction in the 20th centuries. The lunch hour was considered the main meal of the day and before kids and parents would go home to enjoy their meal.

The Lunch committee was added and some of more schools in the major cities joined the program.schools in the rural area had a different problem with building a lunchroom with limited spaces they had.

The money to fund these school lunch comes from the government like the Federal Department of Agriculture in where they oversee the school lunches. In which they can cut school lunch budget or add to the budget and pass bills to change school lunches.

In school lunches can get long or not, if you can get there quick enough you won’t have to face a line but if you don’t make it in time then there’s the line. The lines can get long early if there is a certain meal that serving that many kids like. These programs help a way to feed the millions of kids in school every day with little cost, by using the surplus materials from farms that kids are munching on every day.

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Yet these kids are being fed everything with the food they are given, there are negative issues about these kinds of lunches that kids don’t deserve.

When the kids are being fed school lunches there usually unhealthy and the kids start to develop bad habits. According to the (Government of Southern Australia and Food Revolution), the causes of poor eating is not eating enough healthy food including under or overeating. Undereating is when you’re eating less than what you are supposed to in one day if it becomes an everyday thing then it could lead to malnutrition. Overeating is when you are eating more than your suppose to in one day, overeating can be unhealthy if you do it mostly and can lead to higher rates of obesity and more health issues. Also having a drink with high sugar amount, low in fiber or high in fat. Having bad eating habits comes with many consequences with the most common one, obesity. Other high consequences of bad eating habits are Cancer and Diabetes. Depression and Osteoporosis are other along with eating disorders and more. There are ways to develop healthier habits, It’s never too late. Also, its good for you to add 2 servings of fruits and 5 servings of vegetables.

Some reasons to eat the number of fruits and veggies is that it can make you less prone to obesity and make your body stronger, some other reasons are you’re less likely to have a health issue when you become older. Don’t drink any surgery drink like milk or any kind of juice. Don’t skip or delay the meal. Reasons to not drink anything kind of surgery drinks are that you can end up with high blood pressure and having to deal with health problems as you become older in life. Another reason is that sugar itself can harm your teeth by eating the tooth skin and make cavities. When you skip or delay a meal your body is not getting the energy it needs to keep going throughout the day and has to rely on the fact that is stored in your stomach and eventually lead to malnutrition. Developing diabetes as a child can be worst off because you can have an issue later in life with diseases like Alzheimer and kidney cancer etc. Once you develop a habit which can be hard to change when you become an adult because your body is becoming used to those habits at a young age.

School food funding in the past decade has been increasing but the price of food, in general, is also increasing which is causing a problem to feed these kids healthier food. ( According to NRCP.com) The budget trend in meal production has been increasing more than the revenue within the last 5 years. According to a report by the USDA Research in July of 2008 suggested that the ¨cost pressure may be the barrier to improving school food¨. which means it costs more to make a school lunch than the reimbursement rate of $1.75 for Free and $1.45 or more for a reduced-price lunch. According to states that it would cost 4 million dollars which means that its $4 per child and some are arguing that you can make it $3 per child. Also according to Obesity in the U.S cost 147 billion in medical cost usually. According to, some of the schools in Iowa have turned to private donations because of a bill that a got passed for lunch shaming, Which means that anyone who owes money in their school account is not allowed to get lunch.

Many people are not happy about this and some even get fired for giving lunch to kids who owe money. According to (CNN News) in the U.S alone, there are 76% of schools in where kids are in debt. Many kids were ridiculed for being in debt. It caused the U.S government to step in and tell the districts to stop singling out and harassing them. (According to theconversation.org) Every year there are more kids that are getting free or reduced-price because many of the family are either in poverty or the lower middle class. School lunches should be good quality food but it just seems that these politicians on those kinds of issues which is highly important if we want to have healthy generations in years to come. Politicians have the role of being in charge of schools and they should take these school lunch seriously.

Back in 2010, Obama made a law called the Hunger-Free Kids Act where the kids would have to be served the number of fruits and vegetables they need every day. Today the Trump Administration rolled back on the roll saying they don’t need the number of fruits and vegetable the kids need every day. According to(CNN News) they did this because each state had a decline in student participation at lunch and a school report showed that 60% of school food was being thrown in the waste like salads and other vegatables. which is not healthy for the kids because it won’t help these kids become healthier being and could have long-term effects like malnutrition. The Trump Administration today are only gonna support the schools in the area that support him like deep red states in the south where the obesity rates are higher. Programs like the Hunger-Free Kids program like to give out money for and rules for school lunches.

Politicians, in general, like to focus on funding for school but not school lunch in a more depth way. School lunches are usually created with the surplus of extra products that come from farms. These kinds of food are taken to factories and made into the school lunches we have, but the lunches that are served can have a little microscopic creature within the food. There have been cases where kids were served food that was poorly made in the factories and caused the kids to become sick. In Nashville Tennessee, an inspector Ivone Rodriguez went to Julia Green Elementary and found one of the common violations made. To keep food at the wrong temperature can cause an extended amount of time for many of the bacteria to grow and cause illnesses to the kids. The test strip discovered that the school dishwasher didn’t have any chlorine, meaning it did sanitize the plates the kids were eating off of and removing germs.

Last Spring the school was cited for mouse dropping and insects. Another situation happened at Finley Elementary in Washington State when a child at the time who was 10 had non stop vomiting and bloody diarrhea and the school had more violations with contaminated. There are more cases like dead rodents near the food what the children are eating and found cockroaches and mold in the kitchen area. The school and the district need to make the school a better place for children to eat their food otherwise the food could be infected with bacteria or diseases, means that there would be a lot of parent complaints and more. School lunches over the years have been in terrible quality and drastically in need of improvement. There are many ways to improve what the kids eat in school and make their eating habits better.

According to a (Ted talk on A teacher going green in the Bronx), which the teacher talked about how they were using empty spaces to grow gardens in the area for food purposes and eventually they expanded to other schools in the city which helped with the improvement of other school lunches. To this day there are gardens not just in New York but in other New England cities that have gardens to help feed the kids better and healthier food. Many schools don’t have this because it cost the district too much money to do this kind of thing by making the lunch at school where they´re fresh and they would test better without all the processed food with no child getting sick from the bacteria. They should also put chlorine in the dishwasher so the plates can be sanitized to make sure that there are no bacteria forming on the plates. Chlorine in the dishwasher can have chemical in the bleach that kills bacteria within the plates and other messy items that were left on the plates. Chlorine, in general, is pretty cheap to get the job done.

Most schools have right now is plastic containers which is cheap but not really environmentally friendly which can harm the planet. School lunches overall are a parent’s worst nightmare with their child being fed unknown products and ingredients in the food. The horror that the kids and school lunch create is not a good healthy environment for the school system could lead to bad habits, mental issues, disease, funding etc We should find better ways to fund better school lunch quality and be able to have our kids to become smarter. The food quality we give them now is not acceptable to what we standardize and not up to the best potential of what they really deserve. This problem is up to the politicians to make a change in how kids should eat at school and it should be now or never.