Monday, February 18, 2013

Better lunches spurned


You can serve school children better meals, but you can’t make them eat.

A school district in Illinois tried putting healthier foods on the menu, including fish and baked-bean burgers.

“This past year and a half, we added entrĂ©es that had exceptional nutritional qualities, with the hopes to change our students' eating habits,” reads a note on the Feb. 5 elementary school lunch menu.

“Unfortunately, we could not persuade the students to select these items.

“Beginning in February, we will no longer offer two hot choices on the menu due to the extremely low participation of the second choice.

“We will continue our efforts to educate our students in the value of choosing nutritionally dense foods.”

Now their choices will be “cold items such as a turkey sandwich, yogurt combination, or hummus and flatbread and hot items like hot dogs, hamburgers, cheese pizza, chicken nuggets, tacos and mini pancakes with Canadian bacon.”

Canadian bacon? Now, if it’s really Canadian – as they could determine under Country-of-Origin Labeling legislation and regulations, we might send up a cheer.

But they still might not eat it.