Food+Revolution

Weston Grewe Mr. Geib Period 7 14 February 2012

Almost everyone, including those in other countries, knows that the USA is the fattest country, for those who don’t know, well now you do. Most people may believe that it’s rubbish that were the fattest country and 2/3 of adults are overweight, but take a look around you’ll realize that there are plenty of overweight, especially when you only look at those over forty the rate seems to have a huge jump. Young kids these days are becoming increasingly overweight and they’re not the cause of it as no kid under 11 can expect to make the right choices for their body. So who is the problem you may ask it’s the parents and schools, the root cause of who feeds these kids. Even school lunches are nasty; as I’ve heard from a person who surveys them is some school food is such crap doesn’t qualify to be sold in restaurants, and that’s what the schools are feeding the kids, the future, of our nation.

The biggest problems for kids these days are school food, whereas most of the food is simply just reheated for quick service. But that happens to be only one part of the problem, let’s take a look at education. I will say up until 9th grade I received very little food education throughout k-8 grade, maybe a cumulative of 2 hours in 9 years. Here’s another simple way to see just how uneducated our society is, just a simple survey was taken and here’s a simple question on it. “Where does honey come from? A Bear? Trees? Bees? Almost all the students in the survey managed to get that question wrong.” I’ve just got to be curious on how many people could possible get that answer wrong it’s so simple. Though a problem that could cause this stupidity may just be in location, such as places in LA, “people had to travel well over an hour just to get fresh fruits and vegetables.” With the lack of food education and all the cafeteria crap they serve is no wonder on why were all so overweight especially in those certain areas.

Luckily for us the cure to this epidemic is a very simple one starting with the three most important words in health: Diet and Exercise. Everything you need to be healthy can be categorized into those two words. It would be considered in diet to have food education. Here’s how kids in LA responded to the information that they were learning: “They soaked up knowledge, and told how it shifted their perspective- in just 1 hour.” It has shown in the past that simple things can still make a huge difference, such as just eliminating flavored milk loaded with sugar or just cut down to one hamburger instead of three. “It doesn’t take much, but it takes more than nothing.”

There is sadly still one more factor to be accounted into the diets of healthy school food: it has to taste good. “Super good at the summer tasting in LA unified central kitchen, but on campus he said, the chicken pazole was watery, vegetable tamale burned and hard, and the noodles were soggy.” The fact of the matter is that if the food is bad people don’t like it simple as that. Another thing is foreign food, people already not sure about healthy food but I don’t know one person who jumps out of bed for vegetable curry or quinoa salads. As it happened more and more people were skipping lunch because they straight up did not like the food. Another thing that started there was a black market for junk food so kids just had more junk in their life. What the district needs to learn is: “No matter how healthy the food is, if it’s not appetizing people won’t eat it.”

My opinion on this is that it can be considered to be very true. Though I have never had school lunch at Foothill I do remember how it was back at Cabrillo. It was nasty stuff with burnt cheese and soggy pasta. Also I tried there hamburgers once, I’m still not sure whether its beef or cardboard. I don’t understand why anyone would actually feed their kids that

To conclude this essay all I have to say is there’s a simple way to make school lunches good and healthy: make them good and healthy.