Tag Archives: school lunches

Lunchbox Wars

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At this point in September, most kids have returned to school after summer break. Our daughter had a lot of back-to-school anxiety as she started third grade, as this is the year that teachers start assigning homework. We are still working out the kinks with the new routine, but so far, the new school year is off to a great start. One of my responsibilities is packing our daughter’s snacks for school every day. We tend to rotate between the same snacks, with some variations. I always include a salty/crunchy snack, a fruit snack, and a granola bar or little bag of muffins. Occasionally, I feel bad that I don’t pack “healthier” options such as fresh fruit and vegetables, yogurt, etc., but most of the time, I feel good about what I pack for her, and she enjoys her snacks.

Last month, a story started circulating online about a school parents’ group chat text. Apparently, in this chat, one of the mothers of a student (Let’s call the student Suzy.) asked the other parents to stop packing “unhealthy” food items for their own kids because Suzy is not allowed to have these types of foods at home (or anywhere else). Furthermore, Suzy’s mom tells the group that Suzy has been trading her yogurt for another student’s Oreos, which is horrifying to her mother. In one instance, Suzy’s mom allegedly showed up to school one morning to look in another child’s lunchbox to see if they had been given Oreos. And, in response to Suzy’s mom’s “bizarre” request, the other parents in the group decided to send all their children into school with Oreos in their lunchboxes.

It is unclear if this story is 100% true or if it is fictional, but it nevertheless got a lot of parents riled up about what kids should and shouldn’t be bringing to school to eat. As I am sure you are all aware, sugar is still enemy #1 in most people’s minds, as we are constantly fed messages that giving our kids sugar will result in giving them diabetes, making them fat, and causing their teeth to fall out. As Jonah and I have written about extensively, these messages are damaging to kids because it perpetuates the idea that there are “good foods” and “bad foods,” leading most kids to have a preoccupation with the latter. Kids who are restricted from eating sugar often become hyperfocused on these foods, and when presented with them, say, at a friend’s house during a playdate or at a birthday party, they often end up fixating and overeating these “forbidden” foods.

I believe that parents are doing a major disservice to their children when they deprive (or heavily police) their sugar intake. As these kids grow up, there will be many times when they will be faced with these foods outside the home, and since they have not been allowed to have these foods at home, these kids will likely have very charged experiences around these foods. Most of them will likely overeat these foods when given the chance, which will result in not only feeling physically unwell, but most importantly will lead to them having feelings of shame, guilt, and worry about their parents finding out.

Our goal as dietitians is to help people reach a peaceful place with food, where all foods are seen as morally neutral. Much of our work centers around helping adults who were sugar-deprived as kids because most of them end up having a disordered relationship with food and their bodies. The messages we give our children about “good foods” and “bad foods” while they are growing up often stick with them through adulthood. The best thing we can do is give our children access to a variety of foods (including obviously nutrient-dense foods and “fun foods”) and teach them that all foods have a place at the table (or in the lunchbox).

“Salad is a girl food”

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Needham elementary school lunches have changed quite a bit in the decades since I was a student at Broadmeadow. Each morning, our teacher would collect cash from the kids who wanted to buy that day’s lunch, stuff it in a metal Band-Aid container, and send the money down to the cafeteria so the workers knew how many meals to prepare for lunch. My favorite days were when they served pizza rectangles or tuna salad sandwiches, but others – such as American Chop Suey day – I was very happy to have brought lunch from home.

Now 40 years later, the cash and Band-Aid container are long gone, as basic meals are free, and my daughter has a four-digit code she enters into a computer to pay for any supplemental food she wishes to purchase. The other significant change is that instead of offering just one meal choice as they did when I was a kid, the cafeteria now provides an array of options. The main meal varies day to day and includes chicken in various forms, cheese nachos, pastas, hot dogs, hamburgers, “breakfast” foods such as assorted cereals, and different styles of pizza. Students who are not psyched about a given day’s main meal can choose from alternative options, including bagels, soft pretzels, and sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches.

Our daughter says that over the course of the year, she had each of the alternative options at least once, except for one: the chicken Caesar salad. When I asked her if any of her classmates routinely got the salad, she rattled off five or six names, all of whom are girls. According to her, rarely would any male students get the salad. 

With this information in mind, I thought about cultural norms and how children learn expected gender roles and behaviors at such an early age. Since our daughter was in kindergarten, we have had to counter messages she has picked up, like science, math, and sports are for boys, but not girls. Add “salad is a girl food” to the list.

Then I remembered a lesson that I learned at the very beginning of my nutrition career: cultural norms vary between settings. My first job as a dietitian was a research position that had me traveling the country gathering data regarding elementary school lunches and eating behaviors. On a typical day, I left my hotel room early in the morning in order to get to the school as soon as it opened so I could observe the cafeteria staff’s process for preparing the day’s food from the very beginning. My job involved taking a detailed look at the foods and their nutrient profiles, documenting the school’s food environment – including photographing the cafeterias and any nutrition-related signage that may have existed – and observing the children as they ate their meals. 

The variations between locations were striking. In one Chicago suburb, eating vegetables was considered “uncool.” Because students were more likely to use veggies as ammunition for food fights rather than for consumption, cafeteria supervisors intercepted the kids exiting the lunch line and removed the vegetables from their trays before they sat down. I remember looking into a trash can and seeing thousands of peas that were served but never had a chance to be eaten. In contrast, I visited a Tennessee hill town where the school was trying to figure out what to do about students trying to eat too many vegetables from the self-serve salad bar. I watched the cashiers ring up students with one hand and pick vegetables off the trays with their other hand in order to keep portion sizes in line with system guidelines.  

Given the contrasts, one could reasonably argue that cultural norms regarding what, when, and how much to eat are not inherent to age or gender, but are rather externally created and imparted upon our children. “Salad is a girl food” – or at least it is here in Needham, where very young girls have already picked up said message – but the situation could be different. What would school lunch selections look like if we taught our children to base their eating decisions upon internal cues rather than external expectations?