We continue to struggle a bit with out son and his lunch ingredients. We seem to have reached a happy compromise by getting him veggie chips and fruit roll ups from Trader Joes. He has also convinced his dad that he likes simpler lunches. 🙂
Around the web, I found a few interesting articles pertaining to kids’ lunches.
The first pertains to Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution show that aired last year, “Jamie Oliver Attacks Krafts Lunchables – A First for Network TV“.
Also, Trent from The Simple Dollar wrote a post about Taco Bell’s current fight against the lawsuit that says their taco meat is not at least 40% meat. He linked to an article, “Fast Food Standards for Meat Top Those For School Lunches.” The article says that meat that is rejected by soup companies as below their standards is used in school lunches. Once again I am glad my son does not have a hot lunch program at school.
Here is an update on our decomposition experiment.
We don’t let our son get school lunch very often. Our reasoning is a little different though, although I do agree with you that the quality of school lunches is not very good. The kid is a huge talker and socializer, and doesn’t eat most of his lunch on any given day at school, so we would rather have him pack a lunch at home then us spend $2.35 a day for him to waste a school lunch. 🙂 I loved your video – very interesting!
Your son sounds like my son; he loves to talk. He wants us to buy him milk at school, but we are resistant because he doesn’t usually finish all of his milk at home; why pay for it at school when I know he won’t finish it?
My older kids ( high school and Jr high age) both usually eat hot lunch. Although when they get to this age there are alot more choices. Like a salad bar and soup etc… My youngest who is in 2nd grade gets to eat hot lunch 2x a week. That is our compromise. The other 3 days she brings a cold lunch. Most of the time she bring more then half that lunch home. So I am positive she is not eating much of the hot lunch either. She is in to big a hurry to go out for recess which they get to do as soon as they are finished eating. This year I bought her a thermos so that she could take some hot times in her lunch which has worked out well. I refuse to buy lunchables. One because they are not good for you and two because I can make my own up much cheaper.
It is good to hear about the healthier choices! My son school has hot lunch twice a month; it is basically catered by a local restaurant and is not the healthiest, but it is only twice a month, so we are okay with it. You are right, you must compromise! 🙂