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I wanted to post an example of my kid's school lunch menu - here is what they get to choose from on Mondays
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Yeah, that is interesting.
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A Cheeseburger
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MSG in the hamburger? Processed pre-sliced cheese for sure ... mass-catering, white, quick-rise bread
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B Macaroni and Cheese / Warm Roll
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Possibly better cheese but still not good cheese ... and lots of refined cereals.
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C Smiley Face Sandwich (Bagel / Cream Cheese / Ham)
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Do I begin to see a pattern here? I guess the ham will be processed ham and loaded with nitrates, possibly sugar, too.
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D Garden Salad / Cheese / Breadstick
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See option B and add some salad. Either no dressing or a fake low-fat dressing made from water, soya oil, and glucose, etc.
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E Critter Bag (this is a paperbag with a Crustable PBJ" sandwhich, chips, and a cookie)
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Why would anyone feed that to a creature?
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* they get a drink with lunch - choice of LF milk, choc milk, water, or lemonade ...
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Low-fat for children. That's almost a crime.
Even dieticians who accept the "lipid hypothesis" don't recommend low-fat foods for children.
Quote:
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DOCTORS fear that health- conscious parents are starving their children by insisting on low-fat ... foods; and as many as one in 20 young children now admitted to hospital are malnourished.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/mueslibelt-kids-face-the-threat-of-starvation-1160104.html
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* they can also get a "SNACK" .. this could be a piece of fruit, a cookie, or ICE CREAM !!! .....
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So more refined cereal and sugar. As for that "ice cream" - which will again be loaded with sugar and which probably never saw much cream, what might lurk in that? It seems the Chinese are shipping out animal feed that's got melamine in it. If that combines with cyanuric caid (found in bleach, for example), the result is plastic kidney stones.
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China and other countries like Canada and the U.S. have reported melamine contamination of milk-containing products, including infant formula, commercially sold milk, frozen yogurt dessert, coffee creamer, ice-cream, chocolate, toffees, cookies and candies.
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http://editor.nourishedmagazine.com.au/articles/deceptive-protein-toxin-is-becoming-more-widespread-in-your-food
One should avoid panicking about these things, but still and all ...
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The basic problem: cost-cutting, viewing anything and everything through the lens of lowest unit cost. Only about two or three decades ago, the school my mother taught at had its own canteen, and everything was made fresh on the premises. It may not have been highly nutritious food by really stringent standards, but it was made from fresh ingredients by knowledgeable cooks and made on site. Some of the meat was even sourced locally: they had an arrangement with a local chicken farm.
The county fired most of the staff. Now the food's bought in bulk at lowest tender, pre-cooked, brought in from outside and warmed up. The nutritional value of it must have fallen through the floor.
Same story across many areas. The same site I found the melamine story on has a story about Australia in the fifities. All the baking was done by real bakers, and the bread was given time to ferment properly - several hours - so that it was more digestible. Then wealthy foreign interests moved in:
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During the 50’s, the US-based bakery giant Tip Top came to Brisbane, and started to buy up all the small bakeries it could; other giants competed with them, meaning that in very quick time we had only 2 or 3 bakers in the entire city, ditto in all parts of Australia.
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The result?
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One of the very first actions these corporate bakers were to take was to introduce the fast loaf (3 hours from start to finish), effectively eliminating the need for half, or one entire shift, of their labour force.
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And then people talk about unemployment. So costs are shaved by laying people off and by buying in inferior ingredients. Someone makes a lot of money of that; everyone else's health suffers.
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Vegetable crudites are nice in a lunchbox. If it's not too warm, a length of celery stick makes a nice way to carry a piece of butter to keep one's animal-fat intake up.
Salads you can take, but they go soggy if they're dressed, and a child would probably not want to carry a separate jar of dressing.
Cold meat is an obvious option. I've found that if I have to buy it pre-packaged the Italian air-dried ham is one of the few cured meats that doesn't have a lot of additives, sweeteners, and nitrates - just pork and salt.
Hard-boiled eggs are another.
Personally, I'd happily take a piece of long-fermented sourdough bread and eat it with a piece of raw cheese, although I'd avoid most commercial bread. Of course, a lot of people here avoid bread completely, but there's bread and there's bread, and Weston Price's Swiss seem to have maintained superb health on the right sort.
