5 Reasons The School Lunch Program Is Starving

Sure, the idea of assisting underprivileged children eliminating hunger is a great thing, but right now we are just stuffing them with high-calorie, low-nutrition foods, at the cost of their present and future health. It is important to keep children satiated so they are able to concentrate and get the most out of their education, but as schools cut down on precious exercise time, and we continue to fill them with tons of calories and aren't allowing them burn them off, the problem is only redirected. The fact of the matter is that there aren't enough healthy school lunches
out there. Even with an increase in funding, it's necessary to be proactive in the selection of foods available to our youth. Children need to be supplied with healthy alternatives at lunchtime, as well as healthy vending options during snack time.

Everyone has heard the age-old adage "give a man a fish and he will eat for a night, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime." The same can be said about the dietary education we provide for our children. It's easy to tell someone they should eat better, eat less, and exercise, but children don't respond well to these methods. Will a child standing in front of a vending machine choose an apple over a candy bar? The truth is most won't, unless they've been shown the reasons why they should. Our educational system fails to provide our children with adequate education about the causes and effects of what they put in their body on a daily basis.

It's not only the waistlines of America that are growing larger-the lines at the soup kitchens are growing as well. With a growing number of unemployed and underemployed citizens seeking aid to feed their children, The School Lunch Program is being stretched to it's limit. Even with an increase in funding of $1.2 billion and the Obama Administration's pledge to end childhood hunger by 2015, it will be hard to provide quality lunches and healthy vending options to all of our underprivileged youth. The School Lunch Program provides 30 million children in over 100,000 schools nationwide with free or reduced-price lunches. Clearly this a dilemma of epic proportions for America, and with the current state of our economy, it's safe to say the amount of needy citizens will only increase.

Kids love television, it's a fact. And it's here to stay. The problem for children is not the television, and not the programming-the problem is the advertising. Advertising has an amazing way of getting into kid's heads and turning on them. Agencies on Madison Avenue are not deliberately out to make our kids fat and prone to heart attacks, but they have a job to do, and when the junk-food kings hire them to sell products, they do their job very well. Children are bombarded with commercials showing yummy chocolate, potato chips and sodas from the time they get home from school until the moment they are sent to bed, so it only seems natural for them to seek out these goodies when they're hungry at school. Even when children have healthy lunch and vending options, the last thing they think about is nutrition-they're thinking about the spaceship that promoted the artery-clogging candy and deep-fried cheese curls. Much like how legislation prohibits ads on television for cigarettes in an effort to stop kids from smoking, perhaps the government should more strictly regulate food advertising especially since obesity is the only other healthcare cost that rivals smoking.

The government's worst enemy has always been itself. The shortsightedness of politicians, and humans in general, makes it hard to prevent an epidemic before it's too late. Pre-planning has never been a strong point of democracy, and perhaps because of the relative brevity of a human life, we tend to not consider future generations as we try to just get through our own lives. Because of this, many problems are put off or ignored to the point where they become virtually irreparable. Childhood obesity is a problem for our country, in both the present and the future, but as long as the government continues to make a sport out of disagreeing, even something positive like The School Lunch Program can sit in limbo for an eternity. It would seem that passing beneficial acts and bills for our children would be at the forefront of any political debate, but sadly this is not the case, even if they claim it is.

There is no doubt that The School Lunch Program is starving. All the well wishing and the hope simply just isn't enough. Our children deserve better. If we provide healthy, nutritious lunch and vending options while providing our children with the necessary information needed to learn how to take care of their bodies, we are only creating a better country and a better world. While the current administration is going to great lengths to aid the increasing need for nutrition in our schools, The School Lunch Program will continue to wither unless we provide our children with all the necessary knowledge to implement a healthy lifestyle into adulthood.