What do you consider "once in a while" page 2

[Mud Flinger]

The fact is that most kids love crap food and will take it when they can get it. We used to do pizza about once a week (unless they chose chinese instead) before learning to eat this way. My teen will eat junk out at every opportunity. She sneaks off to the corner market sometimes and eats the crap before coming home or loves going to church as they serve donuts each Sunday. She knows the difference but is a rebelous teen (thanking the universe that her bad choices are mostly limited to a bit of junk food). My younger one would go for the pizza at every chance too. All you can do is teach them to make better choices and try to limit the junk to a level that you are comfortable with. Most of society is nuts and has no idea what these food choices are doing to them (they also don't want to know - ignorance is bliss - just give me a pill to fix it).

[Knifegill]

At Nampa High School, every day is pizza day. I ate two to three slices of horrid Sysco pizza every day I actually attended high school. I don't remember kindergarten, but I know I ate astronaut food first through fifth grade. The "puncture with fork" lunches made of peas and salisbury steak substitute.

*edit to answer original question! I'm consider once in awhile once a month, depending on what it is.

[sbhikes]

When I was a kid we had lunch ladies and mystery meat. We never had pizza that I can remember. I mostly brought my lunch to school and played the trading game.

[Leida]

My school offers 'fun lunch' program. What it is, it is a food order from various fast food joints. I am obviously not participating, and keeping my mouth shut, but can you believe the gall of conditioning the kids from K on to consider fast food places to provide FUN lunch????

[ChocoTaco369]

Pizza is wheat flour, cheese and tomato. Obviously, cheese and tomato aren't so bad. Possibly even good. The issue is the wheat flour. Consider the daily breakfast for the majority of Americans is a bowl of cereal or a breakfast sandwich. That equates to a slice of pizza. Consider that the average lunch for almost all Americans is a sandwich. Depending on the size of the roll, that's 1-2 slices of pizza. Consider that the average American's dinner is either a pasta-based dish or served along with bread. Obviously, this can vary, but I can easily see most people consuming 3-4 slices of pizza's worth of wheat flour a day. At that point, what does it matter if it's in the form of bread or pizza dough? Hell, the pizza dough may be better because it's usually cold-fermented overnight to add flavor, so replacing sandwiches for pizza may have benefits.

If you go from the typical cereal and sandwich heavy American diet to pizza once a week, that is a massive drop in wheat consumption. However, IMO that's far too much. When I say I do something "once in awhile," I typically mean around once a month. I also haven't had a slice of pizza from a restaurant in almost 2 years. I just don't miss it.

[nikitakolata]

My school offers 'fun lunch' program. What it is, it is a food order from various fast food joints. I am obviously not participating, and keeping my mouth shut, but can you believe the gall of conditioning the kids from K on to consider fast food places to provide FUN lunch????

My elementary school had that too. Although, we called it hot lunch and it was once a month. It was a big deal to me as a kid because my school did not have a cafeteria so we never had hot food for lunch; it was always whatever my mom packed. If fun lunches are an everyday or every week thing, then yeah, that seems excessive. I loved those hot lunch days as a kid though...

[Knifegill]

I don't know how you found pizza made with real cheese in a food desert. Sysco is among the worst and most common suppliers. None of their food is real. It's just refined oils, stabilizers, gums, colors, hydrolyzed feathers, etc.

[Finnegans Wake]

My wife has more of a tendency to crave non-Primal stuff, so maybe twice a month she requests pizza. I make a simple dough, but I know the oil will be olive oil rather than soybean or some other atrocity, and as Choco said, I ferment 3-5 days most of the time for flavor development. I prefer very thin crust, so it's even less of a wheat wallop. I don't see it as a big deal, honestly. To me, 80% means being good during the week and maybe having something less than ideal on the weekends, without going hog wild. It's a huge improvement over all the grain we used to consume in the name of health...

[Uncephalized]

If you don't have problems handling wheat, and the pizza is handmade without any industrial oils or fake foods/chemical flavorings in it, there's nothing wrong with pizza at all IMO. The problem is that pizza that's served to school kids probably doesn't meet those criteria, and is likely full of soy/canola/corn oil, etc. But if you make your own pizza it can be quite nutritious; tomatoes, cheese, meats and veggies, you can even do nuts and fruit and fresh greens for a "salad pizza" or whatever you want. I don't think that kind of pizza would be bad once a week. I'm sure there are rice-flour crust recipes out there too, which would avoid the gluten issue.

But factory-made cafeteria pizza? Yuck.

[Crabbcakes]

"Once in a while" anything at this house means 2 to 3, possibly four times per year tops. Kinda' like the seasons or semesters - once per.

I can only say "yeah!!" for your choice to homeschool - we do it as well - and one of the corollary benefits is that all of this public school food nonsense flies out the window. My public school years ran from 1972 thru 1985. My schools always had hot lunches, and I got them free because my folks were poor as church mice and we were on welfare everything. I had never heard of pizza day and fun lunch day and all of this until I had my first kid and started looking around at the educational options.

I don't think pizza per se will kill anybody (except my one celiac daughter and her grain-free sister), but you have a definite supporter in me that pizza every Friday is too much, unless it is made the old-fashioned way - by hand, and only from real, fresh ingredients - and that ain't gonna happen in this case.

You are the one who is well-balanced and also correct - all those SAD eaters are the ones out to lunch. Stick to your guns and don't let those loonies at your son!