Crap: it’s what’s for school lunch. But does it have to be?

For many, many years, the Big People diligently watched over the Little People and looked out for their interests, while the Little People followed their examples and grew strong. The kingdom thrived and prospered.

Alas, as time passed, more and more Big People seemed to have forgotten their duty to the Little People. The Big Corn People began to grow so much royally-subsidized GMO corn that they turned it into millions of gallons of high fructose corn syrup. The Big Cereal People began telling Little People that their highly processed breakfast products were “smart choices” for their health and would help boost their immunity. The Big Meat People started injecting their livestock with antibiotics that compromised the immune systems of the Little People who ate the meat. The Big Beverage People ominously warned that Little People would die if they didn’t consume the electrolytes in their calorie-filled sports drinks. And the Big Milk People menacingly insisted that Little People would suffer grave calcium deficiencies unless served sugar-laden chocolate milk at every school meal.

Long gone were the days in which the Big People encouraged the Little People to eat appropriate sized portions of fresh, whole, sustainably-raised cooked-from-scratch real foods. Instead, the Big People invented “Little People Foods,” and loaded them with hormones, antibiotics, chemical preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, and added sugars. They formed the Little People Foods into fun shapes, put them in convenient packages, and decorated them with colorful cartoon characters. Then the Big People ran multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns telling the Little People that they were “lovin’ it” and to “raise their hands” for more.

In an Orwellian contortion of reality, saboteurs portrayed themselves as stewards, and napalm masqueraded as nourishment.

Before long, all the added sugars and chemicals in the Little People’s food began to take a dire toll. Little People who had once been fit and healthy became overweight and sick. They could no longer focus in their classrooms because of all the added sugar in their diets, and they fell further and further behind in their studies. One in three of the Little People developed Type 2 Diabetes, a deadly disease previously suffered only by the oldest of the Big People. They even began to develop signs of cardiovascular disease before reaching middle school. And, worst of all, the Little People began to die at younger and younger ages because of diet-related illnesses, and no longer outlived the Big People.

The kingdom itself fared no better. Increasingly populated by overweight and sick Little People, its royal treasury was rapidly depleted to cover calamitous healthcare expenses. Without enough healthy Little People to grow into healthy Big People, the kingdom could no longer raise an army strong enough to defend itself against invaders. And with a food supply that was so reliant on industrial agriculture and processing, the kingdom became more and more dependent on foreign oil, its once beautiful valleys became landfills for discarded food packaging, and its skies became toxic with emissions from long distribution chains and factory-farmed animals.

Although the warning signs portended the kingdom’s ultimate destruction, the Most Powerful Big People used their wealth to persuade the legislature to pass laws allowing them to exploit the kingdom’s progeny in unbridled pursuit of hallowed profits. The Less Powerful Big People exhibited an air of complacency, either too ashamed to admit to their own complicity or too ignorant to recognize it.

And the Little People, helpless and innocent victims of the rapacious greed of so many Big People, lived their shortened and sickened lives unhappily ever after.

The End?

Supersize me.Photo: bookgrlToday, 30 percent of American children are over-weight or obese. For children born in the year 2000, one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African American and Hispanics will contract diabetes in their lifetime, the CDC warns. Recent research has shown that the average age of children with kidney stones is ten, and that food additives and colorings contribute to ADD and ADHD.

In short, we’re failing to feed our children well. For us, this has become the social justice issue of our time. We believe that we all have a moral imperative to assure that, as a birthright in our country, no child is hungry at school and that the food served is both delicious and healthy.

Most of what our children are served in schools has almost no relationship to real food. Chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk with high fructose corn syrup and canned fruit cocktail or popsicles are served weekly to children all across America. Highly processed foods, often high in salt, fat and sugar are the usual fare in schools, where canned fruit and vegetables outnumber fresh by an exponential margin. These products bear little resemblance to a diet rich in fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and whole grains, which we know is the healthiest way to eat.

Enter Dr. Janey Thornton, whose job it will be to help form policy for the Food and Nutrition Service Department of the USDA, the department that sets policy for the National School Lunch Program. (Tom Philpott discussed Thornton’s appointment here.) We don’t know Dr. Thornton. Although we were glad to see that a Nutrition Services Director was picked for the post, our research about her school district makes us question whether she has the experience to confront the children’s health crisis.

Thornton’s small school district (15,000 students) in Kentucky has menus that are similar to ones that school advocates like us are trying to replace. The ubiquitous chicken nuggets, chicken patties, and popcorn chicken (all products of the USDA commodity food program) are weekly menu offerings. Pictures of children drinking chocolate milk adorn the district’s website, and cookies are on the menus on a daily basis. And to put the proverbial icing on the cake, fresh baked cinnamon rolls are served at breakfast.

When we think of the sugar, fat and salt children are consuming, we cringe. When we think about the multi-national agribusiness companies this type of school food service system supports, we cringe. And when we think about the negative overall effect that this system has on People, Planet and Sustainable Profit, all sense of optimism just drains away.

As we mentioned earlier, we’ve never met Dr Thornton, nor do we know her plans to help move FNS forward, but if we had the chance to speak to her and explain what we believe would bring back our optimism and assure the health of our children, here’s what we’d propose:

•    Make meals, both breakfast and lunch universal, a system where every child is fed every day.
•    Replace the current system of tracking menus by nutrients, to one where the guidelines are based on healthy, delicious balanced meals. These meals should consist in large part of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains, and should include plant based protein.
•    Replace the definition of nutritious food, on which the current system is based, to one that defines and is based on real FOOD. (See full definition below.)
•    Raise the federal reimbursement rate to $4.00 – $5.00, based on the cost of living of the geographical area, and dedicate a minimum of $1.75 to be spent on food. Additionally, dedicate at least $1.00 be spent on fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains with a priority placed on procuring regionally produced food.
•    Dedicate resources to building or rebuilding kitchens in school districts to accommodate scratch cooking.
•    Dedicate resources to set-up a training program to teach school food service workers to cook from scratch.
•    Set-up a National Culinary Cooks Corp which allows culinary students to work off student loans by working in K-12 schools.
•    Institute hands-on experiential learning in the form of cooking and gardening classes that become a mandatory part of the educational system.
•    Dedicate resources to a National marketing campaign to help change children’s relationship to food, so that healthy/delicious school food becomes cool food.
•    Underscore the importance of eating healthy food by instituting questions on the SAT tests that highlight sustainable food and agriculture.

Here are some principles we urge Dr. Thornton to consider as she moves into her new job.

Healthful Food is wholesome.
•    Includes whole and minimally processed fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, eggs, dairy, meats, fish, and poultry.
•    Contains naturally occurring nutrients (e.g., vitamins, minerals, phyto-nutrients).
•    Is produced without added hormones or antibiotics.
•    Is processed without artificial colors or flavors or unnecessary preservatives.

Healthful Food is produced, processed, and transported in a way that prevents the exploitation of farmers, workers, and natural resources, and the cruel treatment of animals. The process of healthful food production:
•    Upholds the safety and quality of life of all who work to feed us.
•    Treats all animals humanely.
•    Protects the finite resources of soil, water, air, and biological diversity.
•    Supports local and regional farm and food economies.
•    Replaces fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.

Healthful Food should be available, accessible, and affordable to everyone.
•    Is distributed equitably among all communities.
•    Is available and emphasized in children’s environments such as childcare, school and after-school settings.
•    Is promoted within institutions and workplaces, in cafeterias, vending machines and at meetings and events
•    Is reflective of the natural diversity found in traditions and cultures.

We hope that Dr. Thornton can become an advocate of these changes for all of our children. If she doesn’t, our children may die at an ever younger age because of the food we’re feeding them is truly unthinkable.

Undoubtedly, most of this potentially tainted beef has already been eaten by the 30 million children who participate in the National School Lunch Program every day. Clearly, the USDA is not protecting our children. In essence, the agency slammed the barn door shut after the downer (severely sick) cows had staggered out of the feedlots and into school cafeterias.

Why does the USDA fail so miserably at this critical task?

The USDA’s own strategic plan explicitly sets out “key activities” that include “improving nutrition and health by providing food assistance.” This food assistance takes the form of cheaply produced food products that are purchased in mass quantities from large industrial agribusinesses and given to schools and other federal nutrition programs that help feed our nation’s poorest citizens.

If this were the only key activity of the USDA, it could arguably be viewed as a noble use of federal resources. However, attempting to improve nutrition through such food assistance programs directly clashes with the USDA’s parallel activities of “expanding markets for agricultural products” and “enhancing food safety by taking steps to reduce the prevalence of foodborne hazards.”

How can the same agency be responsible for expanding markets, improving nutrition, and insuring food safety without sacrificing one priority for another?

The all-too-real consequences of these conflicts of interest became appallingly obvious when the Humane Society released its undercover video of the horrific slaughtering practices at the Westland/Hallmark meat company in Chino, Calif., a company that received the “Supplier of the Year” award from the National School Lunch Program in 2004-05.

But while violently forcing disabled cows to their feet prior to slaughter in order to supply the School Lunch Program may nauseate even the most ardent carnivore, the role of the USDA in this process is even more unconscionable.

It was not until after the horrific video was released to the media that the embarrassed USDA withdrew its inspectors from the Westland/Hallmark plant, thereby forcing the company to issue the recall. This raises the obvious and shocking question of why the onsite USDA inspectors didn’t stop the illegal practices before they were secretly filmed and publicly exposed.

The USDA’s excuse that this case was “an isolated incident of egregious violations” is as lame as the cows that were subjected to the inhumane treatment. The 21 recalls of beef related to the potentially deadly strain of E. coli last year alone are proof enough that the USDA is incapable of ensuring the safety of the food produced by the industrial agricultural system that it exists to support.

The symptoms of Mad Cow Disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, often take ten or more years to develop. Consequently, it may be decades before we know whether the conduct of Westland/Hallmark will cause a particularly insidious foodborne illness that will prematurely end the lives of today’s children by eating away at their brains.

In the meantime, it is incumbent upon the United States Congress to remove the responsibility for ensuring food safety from the USDA’s jurisdiction and place it with an agency that is not simultaneously promoting and distributing the very products to be inspected.

And we, as voters, must challenge Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain to propose viable recommendations for repairing a national food system so fundamentally flawed as to put our children’s health at risk on a daily basis. Until that happens, our children will continue to move through the school lunch lines like calves to the slaughter.

No, that’s not enough for the giant multinational “food” service company. Now McDonald’s has purchased the right to put a Happy Meal coupon on each of the student’s report cards in a Seminole, Fla., school district for less than the price of a small bag of fries.

This is depraved.

Why is it acceptable to reward our children for successful academic performance with something that will harm them? How can we, as a society, allow this kind of corporate conduct when the most recent study on Body Mass Index (BMI) states that over 19 percent of American children are currently overweight or obese, and that a higher BMI in children is associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease as an adult?

How can we turn a blind eye to this blatant exploitation of our children when the Centers for Disease Control has stated that, of the kids born in the year 2000, one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African Americans and Hispanics will develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime, many before they graduate high school, and that this generation could be the first to die at a younger age than their parents?

What’s next? Ten years from now, will McDonald’s be offering Happy Meals coupons for kids who keep up with their insulin? Displaying the golden arches on insulin kits, artificial limbs, and coffins?

In an effort to help children lead healthier lives, we and other school-food reformers and childhood health advocates work tirelessly to encourage kids to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. We serve them whole foods cooked from scratch in schools, we teach cooking and gardening classes, and we support academic curricula that link food, health, and the environment. We know that we must change children’s relationship to food if we are to successfully influence their lifelong eating habits.

And McDonald’s knows this, too.

But while our interest is in improving the long-term health and well-being of our nation’s children, McDonald’s goal is to boost its profits. So McDonald’s promotes its own self interest in building lifelong brand loyalty in young children, increasing the “pester factor” (in which kids nag their parents to purchase targeted items), and convincing children and parents alike of the necessity of “kid food.”

All the while, McDonald’s is blatantly ignoring the obvious: that their insidious marketing schemes could cause their young customers’ BMI to rise even higher. And now they’re doing it in the context of academic report cards.

There really ought to be a law.

Indeed, there are such laws — in over 50 countries, governments regulate marketing campaigns that target children. But in America, millions of corporate dollars are paid to hundreds of lawyers and lobbyists to insure that the First Amendment is interpreted in a way that values corporate profits over children’s health. Add this to the ubiquitous underfunding of education that drives school districts to look for innovative ways to increase revenues, and Happy Meals are virtually guaranteed the right to contribute to unhappy health.

What makes this so intolerable is that children are sent to school to learn. Parents and children agonize over academic performance. Teachers and administrators struggle to comply with increasingly rigorous state testing standards. Even our federal government has mandated that no child be left behind.

But then we put our children in an environment in which they learn that unhealthy food is not only acceptable, but a coveted reward for successful academic achievement: something to strive for. In doing so, we’re manufacturing desires that could ultimately cost kids their health and their very lives.

All the adults involved in this debacle should be ashamed: the management of McDonald’s who dreamed up this scheme, the school district administrators and board members who approved it, and the parents who failed to complain. But the rest of us who read the press accounts of such events and merely shake our heads with little more than apathy should also be ashamed. As voting taxpayers, we are equally to blame.

If we are to save our children from a future plagued with diet-related illness, we must find within ourselves sufficient remorse at our own inaction and outrage at our corrupt system, to demand change in our nation’s marketing laws. Sadly, our fear is that we will fail to do so before our children look up at us from their hospital beds and ask us why we weren’t better teachers.