FoodRetro

Scratch Food with a Side of Geek Mom and Pop Culture.

Dear American Teens: School Cooking Fails Aren’t Michelle Obama’s Fault

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Oh, noes! Someone has dared to say that maybe kids shouldn’t be loading up on garbage “food.” Heaven forbid. So naturally the latest thing to do is take a photo of  your disgusting cafeteria food and say it’s the fault of someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, because I’m sure the school is using the First Lady’s recipe, right?

Granted, this does look pretty disgusting… 

 …but I would still argue that maybe it’s your lunch ladies’ cooking, first, and your school’s budget priorities, second, that are probably at fault. Certainly, I’d argue that they’re more at fault than Michelle Obama, even if you want to be all raeg-y over someone shooting down the delusions that pizza qualifies as a vegetable. 

Yes, tomatoes are fruit; sorry to shatter a 128 year old lie perpetuated by the Supreme Court over a tax on vegetables back in 1886. And unless you want to try to make a case for pizza being a fruit, you’d best go bark about dirty liberals interfering with your right to eat cardboard and artificially enhanced and flavoured “food” somewhere else.

Healthy food shouldn’t be a political issue. The right to good nutrition should not be a left-vs-right wing thing. I can’t quite wrap my head around the “logic” involved in some of the arguments any more than I can figure out why some anti-humanitarians insist they would be willing to pay 10 to 100 times more for medical care. It doesn’t matter if it protects everyone living in the nation–they would skip paying 10 cents on the dollar just to make sure none of it goes towards some freeloader (this is an actual argument I’ve been in with someone over government-funded vaccinations… polio, I think).

But we’re talking about food, and it seems that people’s memories are woefully short when political dogma is involved. I happen to recall rubber hamburgers in my lunch program in Florida, and that happened under George Bush’s watch. Our high school had no oven, so everything had to be boiled. EV-RY-THING. Which is why we had the rubber hamburgers… how else do you cook hamburgers for 300 high-school students in an hour when there’s no oven? Barbara Bush was far too busy with the war on drugs to give a crap about what we were eating and how it was made, although it could be argued that while the preparation might have been disgusting, at least we didn’t have to worry that what we were eating wasn’t food.

I’d wager that the many cafeterias are still equipped with ridiculous equipment and pennies per student to buy supplies, and that the ladies who work the kitchens are all minimum wage, part time, and they have no special incentive to put more care in a system that treats them like dirt than they have to. Surely, though, the answer isn’t ensuring that the budgets and the equipment are there! Or that someone provides some good recipes to the overworked and underpaid lunch ladies?

Fortunately, it seems like there’s at least a few schools out there who do get it, and students who seem grateful. So can we please take the politics out of food, and make sure people are just eating well, like these?

#ThanksMichelleObama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Bravo!

    This is a terrific post! You hot the nail *right* on the head!

    If people are taught how to cook on a budget (much like the beloved Naked Chef preaches) meals can be healthy and delicious. If there is ZERO priority put on either of those things the result will be gross.

    It’s no easy task to feed 300 people on the largest budgets. You can imagine the challenges that come with meals that must fit guidelines and stay within 40 cents per kid (IMAGINE that for a minute..). (http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/federal-school-nutrition-programs)

    Just excellent!

    Sharing with FLOTUS! I hope she favourites it! 😀

  2. You said what I was thinking. We could have easily taken pics of disgusting looking food in my high school cafeteria and it had nothing to do with Michelle Obama nor did it in any way resemble healthy food.