More on School Food
It's been a busy few weeks as I've been finishing up one chapter and then headed down to Philadelphia to start reporting the next. So, time for another installment of things I've been reading. This time it's a lot about school food, in part because I'm getting ready to write a chapter on learning to eat in poverty.
New Mexico outlaws lunch shaming, a barbaric practice where kids who can't pay their tab are stamped with "I Need Lunch Money" signs, or forced to clean up after their peers as a way of working off the debt. Which seems not at all humiliating and also totally fair to do to children who aren't actually the ones responsible for the bill in the first place. (And here I thought teachers judging kids on their packed lunches was bad; at least those kids are eating!)
That story also reminded me of Refinery29 writer Ashley Ford's tweet from a few months ago: A cool thing you can do today is try to find out which of your local schools have kids with overdue lunch accounts and pay them off. (This is, admittedly, a Band Aid solution to a really complex problem. And there has been some subsequent debate on Twitter about how easy this is to do, but I just left a message for our school district's cafeteria director to find out.)
Yet another reason why school lunches are so important: Preschoolers eat more vegetables at school or daycare than they do at home for dinner, according to new research published in Preventive Medicine Reports. I'm guessing this happens through some alchemy of kid peer pressure, less parental pressure, and the fact that most 3 year olds are bananas by 5 pm (or maybe that's just my kid?).
Oh and this one is not really about lunch, but a survey of kids aged 7 to 11 found that being teased about their weight was worse for kids' psychological health than just the sheer fact of being overweight. Yet more evidence that we need to parse out when weight itself causes health problems and when it's weight stigma that's the real problem. (You can guess where I tend to land.)
PS. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw this post about my visit to Rebel Ventures last week. I'm going to talk about them a lot more in the book, but wanted to give a quick shout-out here. They're an awesome group of kids coming up with healthy school food items that they know kids will actually eat -- and they're figuring out how to run a successful business in the process. I had so much fun peeling bananas and chatting with them last week. If you want to show some love to a really innovative school food initiative, you can donate here.
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1. Want to be in an article?
(Yes this one is totally off-topic from food.)
I'm looking to interview women in their 30s and 40s who rely on any kind of over-the-counter medication (especially allergy meds, sleep aids, or pain relievers) to get through their day or night. What are you taking, how long have you been taking it, and are you worried you're starting to get hooked or experience side effects?
2. Want to be in an another article?
I'm investigating the connections (or lack thereof) between obesity and fertility. So if you're a woman of reproductive age who is overweight or obese and have been told that your weight is the reason you can't get pregnant, I'd love to hear your story.