Forget soda machines and dogmeat tacos -- they're serving up everything from venison to pork osso buco at my cafeteria, along with fresh pineapple, tuna tabouleh appetizers, and pistachio custard. Every meal is made up of four courses: an entrée, which is usually vegetable crudite (ha) or a salad; le plat, which unfortunately is always meat, but the accompanying veggies aren't always so bad; a dairy product, usually cheese (of all kinds! brie, morbier, chevre, fromage frais…) or yogurt; and a dessert, which may be a sweet concoction or just fresh fruit, or both. There are no other drinks besides water, which you get yourself from the fountain. You can choose not to take something, of course, but you can't take more of something else. Add all this to the steep hill that leads up to the cafeteria, and you will no longer wonder why France has a seeming dearth of obese youths.
Eating steamed green beans and cold couscous salad today made me reflect on the coveted hot lunch of my primary years. (Since by high school, I'd figured out it was gross.) Waffle fries, tacos, chicken nuggets, TATER TOTS, fish sticks, pizza… It astounds me that these things were available to us as delicate, pre-pubescent organisms who shouldn't be touching taco meat with a ten-foot lunch tray. Just thinking of all the BPA and ammonia-treated beef that has entered my body before I had the sense to reject it makes me wish for retroactive bulimia (like, really retroactive, since I guess bulimia is retroactive by nature).
Again with the adults -- who made this happen? Who decided to serve children the lowest grade meat possible? Who forgot to mention fresh vegetables? And why on earth aren't all trays, cups, and silverware in every cafeteria everywhere made of non-disposable materials?!?!?
Here's a theory: the Board of Education is in cahoots with the private insurance companies, who want children to develop health problems at an early age so that by the time they need medical help, they can be considered to have pre-existing conditions and not be offered coverage. Oh yeah!
I'm assuming these are the same people that are in the process of searching for loopholes in the new healthcare bill.
It's bad enough that adults scam each other without moral constraint; under no circumstances should children be involved in this mess.
3 comments:
oh my god you have no idea. we were actually lucky in division because we had the option of a deli bar with boars head cold cuts and salads. the poorer the district, the shittier the food. it all comes down to money in our capitalistic country. i observed in westbury last month and bought a pb&j because it was the only edible choice i was given. there was so much sugar in it that i could actually feel the granules as i bit into it. it was disgusting.
although, i bet the health care conspiracy you're on to is probably true. but they're poisoning all of the poor and the minorities with this garbage.
There's a new show about this exact topic -- Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. It shows the food being served in US school cafeterias, the process, who makes the decisions, that the regulations are so bogged down in all this red tape...and he's trying to change it.
Even though it is kind of just another reality tv show, I watched the first episode and found it pretty interesting. I hope he's successful!
Oh yeah, and he won a TED prize for this kind of thinking. You can see his talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
good for him. if it takes a reality show to get the point across to more people, i say go for it.
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