What's for Lunch: Baked Chicken

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

This is the last lunch of the season for us. Actually, this meal was served last week. It's hard to argue with baked chicken: unless, of course, you object to chicken cooked in a factory hundreds of miles away, shipped frozen and reheated. The kids seem to like it well enough. It has that breading reminiscent of Popeye's or something, only it's a bit more like concrete. But the breading qualifies as a grain serving under the federal rules governing the school lunch program, and each meal needs a grain offering.

There are two vegetables on this tray. Can you guess what they are? If you named ketchup, your head is still in the Reagan era. Actually, the Tater Tots, even though they might as well be bread for all the starch they contain, qualify as a vegetable. Potatoes of all sorts are kids' second-most favorite thing to eat at school, right behind pizza. And as you can see, they go to great lengths to spice up those Tater Tots with the ketchup.

Then we have the frozen peas and carrots. Would you eat these? Most kids don't eat the vegetable side dishes served in D.C. schools. They mostly end up in the trash. But the government requires that schools offer vegetables. What's a food service provider to do?

In fact, the 10-year-old who brought this tray back from the food line needn't have taken the peas and carrots at all. Under federal rules, schools are required to offer five items, and kids are only required to select three. The strawberry-flavored milk would have sufficed as the third item.

But you can say goodbye to strawberry milk. Beginning next week, school officials say they will no longer be serving flavored milk at all. If you believe the dairy industry, we should be bracing for an outbreak of rickets. How will kids get the calcium and Vitamin D they need if they are denied chocolate or strawberry milk?

Here's one case where the food services department for D.C. Public Schools actually seems to be ahead of public opinion.

What's for Breakfast: 15 Teaspoons of Sugar

Can you say c-e-r-e-a-l real fast three times?

That's what one little boy had on his tray at my daughter's elementary school. "See how skinny I am?" the boy explained, lifting up his skinny arms to show me. "I want to get big."

I wondered how he got past the ladies at the food line with three containers of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. But there it was, plain as day, along with the strawberry milk, the apple juice and a package of graham crackers already devoured.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch, made by General Mills, is one of those "healthy" cereals. "Whole Wheat" and "Rice" are printed in boldface on the label. It also has nine grams of sugar--a bit more than two teaspoons--in a 1-ounce serving. That would be in addition to the 28 grams of sugar in the 8-ounce container of strawberry milk (almost as much as Mountain Dew), the 20 grams of sugar in the 6-ounce container of apple juice, and the six grams of sugar in the graham crackers.

Let's see. We're up to 63 grams of sugar so far, about 15 teaspoons. A pretty sugary start to the morning, wouldn't you say? But that's if this little boy only eats one of those cereals. Oops. He's opening the second.

School meals are subject to a tangle of regulations that rivals the U.S. tax code. Even so, there's no limit to the amount of sugar a child can consume at school.

What happens, I ask him, if he can't finish all three cereals?

"I take it home in my back pack and save it for later."

Kids are just too smart these days.

Breakfast: Another Dose of Sugar

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Here's how D.C. kids get sugared-up at school in the morning: strawberry-flavored milk poured over Apple Jacks. I know, this picture looks staged, like a studio shot. But I assure you the person pouring the milk and eating the cereal was actually a third-grader. This time of year, we happen to get fantastic light through an east-facing wall of windows in the cafeteria of my daughter's elementary school, which makes for this striking photo.

The strawberry milk contains 28 grams of sugar in an 8-ounce carton. That's the equivalent of more than six teaspoons of sugar, a bit less than Mountain Dew. Of course, nearly half that sugar comes from lactose that occurs naturally in the milk. The rest is high-fructose corn syrup, which increasingly is being linked to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

The Apple Jacks are made by Kellogg's, a company with a huge footprint in D.C. school cafeterias. That's probably because giant food corporations like Kellogg's give big "rebates''--sometimes called kickbacks--to food service providers who use their products. These are like the stocking charges in supermarkets. The food makers pay to have their brands displayed.

Chartwells, the contracted food provider for D.C. Public Schools, itself is a huge company with a presence in more than 550 school districts around the country. With its vast distribution of products, it stands to take in huge sums of money in "rebates" from companies like Kellogg's. This might help explain why kids in D.C. are eating sugary cereals such as Apple Jacks in the morning.

A .63-ounce container of Apple Jacks contains 8 grams of sugar, about two teaspoons. Here are the other ingredients listed on the package:

Whole grain corn flour, wheat flour, whole grain oat flour, oat fiber, soluble corn fiber, salt, milled corn, dried apples, apple juice concentrate, cornstarch, cinnamon, natural and artificial flavor, sodium ascorbate and ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), modified corn starch, yellow #6, niacinimide, reduced iron, zinc oxide, turmeric color, baking soda, pyridoxine hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), blue #1, calcium phosphate, riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), red #40, Vitamin A Palmitate, BHT (Preservative), folic acid, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12.

There is some controversy surrounding BHT because it has been suspected of causing hyperactivity in children. But it is also sold in health food stores for purported anti-viral effects.