I BELIEVE THE MOVIE YOU'RE THINKING OF IS "TOUGH GUYS"
Posted on 12/22/2011 4:59:26 PM PST by SeekAndFind
"Nasty, Rotty Stuff"
That's the verdict from student Mayra Gutierrez on the new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District. And she's not alone, according to the L.A. Times.
"At Van Nuys High School," reports the paper, "complaints about the food were so widespread that Principal Judith Vanderbok wrote to [food services director Dennis] Barrett with the plea: 'Please help! Bring back better food!'"
Readers might wonder how, with all of the challenges in reading, writing and arithmetic, school administrators decided that reducing fat and sodium at the cafeteria was a top priority for L.A. schools. And it turns out that the city's decision to ban chocolate milk and chicken nuggets in favor of quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles has created a full-blown crisis.
"Many of the meals are being rejected en masse. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students," reports the Times. "Students are ditching lunch, and some say they're suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia. At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving."
So the healthy food is so bad that kids are literally starving themselves rather than tucking into vegetarian curries, or else engaging in a black market. Apparently even an art teacher has been among those caught selling illicit candy, chips and instant noodles. Andre Jahchan, a high-school sophomore, tells the Times, "No matter how healthy it is, if it's not appetizing, people won't eat it."
No one is against healthy eating, and obesity is a growing youth problem, but L.A.'s education whizzes forgot the law of unintended health-food consequences. You can't make a child eat vegetables without a little dessert to wash it down.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
/johnny
Trying to remember a movie with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas..Burt is let out of prison in his old age and ends up in a nursing home where he leads the inmates in a demand for...”REAL FOOD! REAL FOOD!”
If I am not mistaken, this has something to do with Michele Obama’s Anti-Obesity food program.
Maybe the Dept. of Education can have Eric the Bigot go to LA and threaten the kids. He should be able to use a little extortion there... no eaty good for you food, grades reduced.
Goes to show you that you can’t out-stupid a bureaucrat, they are just too well practiced!
***”Many of the meals are being rejected en masse. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students,”****
Do Like I did back in 1956. Bring your own from home. A couple of sandwiches, and a cookie or apple. Certainly better than the slop they served at ONE school I went to!
And four slices of bread with lunch meat won’t break the family budget.
I read a related article on this, and from the gist of it looks the program has three big problems:
1) It’s pretty obvious some of the dishes were just bad choices. Black bean burgers, for example, are one of the new offerings. Done properly, a spicy black bean patty is actually pretty tasty stuff. Kind of like a southwestern falafel. But even the best BBB on earth is not going to make you forget the juicy goodness of an actual hamburger. Reading the list, I can see where a lot of kids (teens are notoriously picky anyway) just wouldn’t go for many of the new offerings.
2) Preparation also seems to be a real problem. Most of the new foods were taste-tested at the L.A. school district’s central kitchen. Many selections got raves there. But some of those same dishes being served in the actual schools - like the pozole stew - are barely recognizable from the test kitchen offerings. I don’t know if it is a problem with the kitchen staff, or the school cutting corners with ingredients to keep food budget costs low, but in many cases the kids just aren’t getting the same thing as was advertised at the test kitchens.
3) Just speculation on this last point, but as another FReeper pointed out to me: some dishes just don’t hold up well under the heat lamps. Pad Thai, for example (sort of the Thai equivalent of Chow Mein, sort of), is out of this world done right. But it’s not a dish that lends itself to sitting around in a steamer tray for a couple of hours. A school cafeteria simply can’t do food “to order”, and I would suspect that in at least some instances a decently-prepared dish has gone to dreck because it sat around too long.
Well,allrighty then...guess the “large-posterior”ed one with the “big butt”’s program is a-perish the thought!!-colossal failure....COLOSSAL..like her butt.
AN organized boycott would be cool.
Public school is child abuse.
Are they still allowed to bring lunchboxes? I am sure those will be banned if this persists.
Yes it is and the sooner we as a society recognize that, the sooner we can be on the road to recovery
How to Create Black Markets.
:D
Smells like Teen Drama. "I'm starving!! STARVING!!!" If you turn down free food because you are too finicky for anything but Hot Cheetos and cupcakes, you are more spoiled than one of those fluffy white cats with the pug faces. This is a temper tantrum and everyone here is buying it. I work at LAUSD and I have been eating these meals ever since they appeared a few weeks ago. They are quite good, and these kids are being brats.
And FReepers crowing about Free Markets better remember: these are mostly low-income Hispanic kids and about 25% of them are markedly overweight. Their parents have a variety of weird health problems that they tell me about, and whole families look like pre-diabetic poster children whose medical care you're paying for.
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