The Sugar Kids Bring from Home

Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Yesterday I wrote about the chairman of the D.C. Council relying on "research" conducted by a six-year-old to conclude that city schools should bring chocolate milk back to the cafeterias. As I noted there, children may not be the best sources for nutritional advice. Given a choice, they will always pick sugar over real food.

I do not exaggerate. Take a look at this photo from the lunch room at my daughter's inner-city elementary school a year ago. This fourth-grader's lunch from home consists of a 12-ounce can of Sprite, a gigantic cupcake (she'd already licked off the icing), a bag of Oreo cookies and a lollipop.

In case you're wondering, a 12-ounce can of sprite contains 36 grams of added sugar (high-fructose corn syrup), or 9 teaspoons.

Also that year, kids were bringing this Safeway brand cola to school. I'm not sure how much sugar is in it, but you can bet it's a lot.

Things didn't change this year, when my daughter transferred to fifth grade at an elementary school in a more affluent part of the city. Except the sodas have gotten bigger. This 20-ounce bottle of Sprite contains 60 grams of added sugar, or 15 teaspoons worth.

Some kids at least skip the sugar by bringing diet sodas. Does that make it okay?

This boy was nursing a 32-ounce bottle of orange-flavored Gatorade Power G. An 8-ounce serving delivers 14 grams of sugar--about the same amount added to a typical carton of chocolate milk. Do the math, however, and you see that this is just one-fourth of the sugar in the entire bottle, which contains a whopping 14 teaspoons of sugar.

The same boy then pulled out a foil pouch of Kool Aid "Jammers," tropical punch flavored. This 6-ounce serving contains 19 grams of sugar--nearly five teaspoons worth--making it even more potent than the Sprite.

What do you think? Should schools do something about children bringing sodas with their lunch?

Lunch from Home

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

In a film that we recently featured here about the city of Rome switching from re-heated factory meals to school food cooked fresh from scratch, one important element in the system's success was removing choices from school lunch and prohibiting children from bringing food from home. Here in the states, school systems such as the one I recently visited in Berkeley, CA, also prohibit kids from importing snack and junk foods. But that is not the case here in the District of Columbia.

In fact, in recently approved "Healthy Schools" legislation, while schools are expected to remove junk foods and sodas and raise the standards of meals served, a big exception is made for "food" supplied by parents. At my daughter's school, you see kids in the cafeteria reaching inside their backpacks for all kinds of things. Here's an array that one girl brought as part of her lunch: a bag of Oreo cookies, a lollipop, a chocolate cupcake and a can of Sprite.

Still wondering where all the sugar is coming from in kids' diets, or why we're battling an epidemic of obesity?

Most of the icing from that cupcake got left behind in the plastic container it came in. The girl simply passed it to the boy sitting next to her, who was only too glad for this unexpected finger food treat.

On another day, the girl brought "Lunch Makers" chicken nuggets from Armour, and a big, 4.4-ounce Hershey's chocolate bar. She broke the chocolate bar into squares and shared them with the kids at the rest of the table.

What's for Lunch: Cheese Bread

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

The marinara sauce (in the cup) was pretty weak, and it's not clear exactly how this is supposed to work. Are the kids supposed to pour the marinara sauce on the cheese bread? Or are they supposed to dip the oversized, rectangular bread into the round, plastic cup?

I saw mixed reactions. Some kids just sat and stared at it and didn't eat at all. Others ate it, although tentatively. They didn't care much for the canned green beans.



This was the alternate: curried turkey wrapped in a big, flour tortilla. This little girl brought her own soda from home, to go with the chocolate milk, I suppose.

What's for Lunch: Beef Teriyaki Bites with "Go Cola"

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook


These "beef bites" are small patties of beef donated by the federal government mixed with soy protein and pre-cooked with an Asian-flavored glaze, then imprinted with phony grill marks before being frozen by Pierre Foods in Cincinnati, OH. From their frozen state, they only need five minutes reheating in a 350-degree oven before than can be placed on the steam table and served to children.

In the upper left is a sad mix of cauliflower, carrots and broccoli. When I spent time in the kitchen of my daughter's elementary school earlier this year, this same mix arrived frozen from Mexico in 20-pound bags. The vegetables look great coming out of the bag, but then they're dumped in a steamer and by the time they've been on the steam table awhile, the broccoli is completely disintegrated. Most of these vegetables will end up in the trash because the kids don't eat them.

They say that what kids bring from home often is worse than what's served at school. One 10-year-old girl got this "Go Cola" out of her backpack. The 12-ounce can contains 44 grams of sugar--11 teaspoons--or 176 calories. That's five teaspoons more "added" sugar than the American Heart Association recommends as the maximum a grown woman should consume in an entire day.

Still, the strawberry-flavored milk routinely served in D.C. schools at breakfast and lunch contains only slightly less sugar, ounce-for-ounce: 28 grams in a one-cup serving (13 grams occurs naturally as lactose, the rest is added high-fructose corn syrup).