You know it’s bad when KFC and Jack In the Box shun meat due to low quality. However, the USDA doesn’t mind that the meat has been declared icky by fast food standards, they’ll buy that meat and serve it to your kids for lunch!
According to a new a USA TODAY investigation, “The government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants.” Awesome. Not that this is a big shock. For years many campaigns have been focused on getting rid of the crap the USDA serves up in school lunches, but money is an issue, and most of these campaigns have had little success at creating any substantial changes. Parents and our government reps need to get on board fast with school lunch reform.
Some scary facts from the USA Today investigation:
- McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco have far more rigorous meat checks for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. The ground beef these place buy are tested five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.
- Jack in the Box has bacteria standards that are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.
- The chicken that the USDA has been feeding our kids comes from meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. These are chickens that KFC and The Campbell Soup Company refuse to serve.
- USA TODAY examined about 150,000 tests on beef purchased by the for the school lunch program. Some was safe and some not so much. Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), who purchases meat for schools, bought nearly 500,000 pounds of ground beef with unusually high levels of an indicator bacteria known as “generic E. coli.” Meat was also purchased that had more than double the limit set by many fast-food chains for total coliform. Coliform is used to assess whether a beef producer is minimizing fecal contamination in its meat.
- Tests are also lacking. Ground beef bound for schools is tested eight times in large amounts, which is far less testing than most of the major fast food chains do.
This low quality USDA-purchased meat is donated to almost every school district in the country and served to 31 million students a day, a fact that’s especially concerning since kids are more prone to food related illnesses, yet they’re sometimes being served questionable meat. PLUS since the meat is cooked by school staff it’s hard to regulate if it’s being cooked correctly.
It’s not just meat quality though. Even if the schools served 100% safe meat at all times, school lunches are still notoriously bad…
The CDC notes, “One in three children born in the year 2000 will have diabetes, and 30 percent of them are overweight, and the cost of treating diabetes in the United States is estimated at $174 billion each year.” While experts can’t prove that school lunches are at fault, most do agree that the best way to halt the child obesity epidemic is to serve kids healthy foods while engaging them in physical fitness. However, kids in schools are served commodity foods, like cheese and ground beef, and served lunches with no national standards related to limits on sugar or other ingredients like artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.
Basically school lunches can be legally full of junk (and most are). Poor nutrition can lead to a host of problems related to education (pdf) too, with kids who eat poorly scoring worse on tests, repeating grades, and more.
Organic Consumers Association points out that school food contains plenty of over-processed starches, fats, genetically modified ingredients, meats laced with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, and milk that has been produced with the use of genetically-modified bovine growth hormone. Even worse schools don’t offset the bad choices with good ones. Almost no fresh fruits and vegetables are offered on most school lunch menus and soda or fizzy juice is now the top drink of kids in school.
It’s seriously insane when fast food is safer than a school lunch. It’s equally insane that’s there’s lazy food standards and junk food served in school. Especially when you consider that everyone knows that fresh fruits and veggies are vital for healthy kids – in fact the USDA says so, yet they’re version of a “healthy” lunch doesn’t support this.
Coming up some ideas about how to help change your local school lunch programs and how to create change on a national level. Really though, I’d pack your kids a lunch if you can. A simple inexpensive packed lunch is way healthier than what the schools are serving up.
[image via stock.xchng]
Post from: Blisstree