'Mommy, There's Chemicals In My Food!'

It has now been two weeks since we started our new school and daycare routines. And I gotta tell you. I am beat. Like crazy beat. Like blind and ready to feed the kids pop-tarts. Okay, maybe not that tired. Though more than ever I totally get it. Most people aren't too lazy to cook. They are just way too tired to cook from all the other stuff they have to do to keep their lives in balance.

We have been managing well enough with school food. I have packed a healthy lunch, a bottle of water and a whole fruit everyday for Thing 1. The routine of preparing lunches in the evening is getting easier. Now if I could just same the same about the morning routine!! For the most part, Thing 1 eats my food and not the school's food. He does drink the juice that the school provides almost every day. That is something I do not buy at home, so it's a huge treat!! I have not checked if their juice is additive free, but right now it is a peace keeping measure. So while I assume that there might be some yuckies in there, I can't possibly take his juice away.

I have asked several questions of my biggest Thing every day after school. Did you like your lunch? What was the school serving? What didn't you like in your lunch? Were you full enough? Many days he comes home with about one third to one half his lunch uneaten. But that's the thing about whole foods, whole grains and full fat foods, they are filling. We are so accustomed to overeating in our culture that to see a child with an already small tummy eat real food, well it can seem like they are only picking at their food. My kids could down a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting. But give them an egg and raw cheese on whole wheat and they won't finish it. It isn't because they don't like it, it is just that real food is filling. Give the kids good foods and they will figure out how much. We as caregivers can't be swayed to give them junk foods just to see them actively eat.

On the third day of school Thing 1 brought me home a present. A single serve bowl of Malt-O-Meal Berry Colossal Crunch Cereal. This sweetened corn and rice cereal contains both natural and artificial flavors. Oh joy. The cereal contains only 12 grams of sugar. There are 6 grams of sugar in each teaspoon of sugar. And since those 12 grams include any natural sugars from the corn, 12 grams is on the low side for sweetened cereals. I was surprised enough to check the ingredient list for sugar substitutes. Nope, none. Then I thought...since the serving size is only one ounce (or three-quarters of a cup), sugar still makes up a sizable portion of the total cereal. You see, one ounce weighs in at slightly over 28 grams. This one ounce of cereal has 12 grams of sugar, so the cereal itself is around 43% sugars by weight.

Thing 1 brought home the cereal because he said he had had it for breakfast and he liked it. He said it was a present for me. So sweet. He has begun to bring home little cups of juice and other treats for DH and me. I need to do better about consuming these gifts. I don't want to hurt his feelings, but I also don't want drink artificially colored juice.

This brings me to the next part of this post. You might be asking yourself 'If you don't want your kid drinking colored juice and fake food, why not just put your foot down?' That is a valid enough question. In the first few days I told Thing 1 that he was free to choose the food he ate. He ate some food from school and some from his back pack. I didn't like the trend so much, so I had a talk with him during the weekend. I told him that Mommy would not be mad at him for eating the school food. I wanted it to be his decision. But that I wanted him to look at certain things as treats, like that cereal, as opposed to every day meal items. And then I dropped a bomb on his impressionable little mind. I told him that some of the school food has chemicals in it. And I would prefer that he eat the food that mommy makes from scratch.

I define the term 'bully' as a person who is mean because they can get away with it. A bully is someone who picks on people who are smaller, weaker or otherwise not in a position to fight back (I am sure everyone knows an office bully who hides behind some trumped-up title). I have questioned, was I bullying my child by telling him that his food had chemicals in it? On one hand, I really wasn't. The Malt-O-Meal cereal contains artificial flavors, synthetic vitamins and BHT to name a few. That cereal does indeed contain chemicals. Do I know for certain that all the food the school serves contains chemicals? No, I do not. I did notice that after our chat, far less school food was consumed. On the other hand, I know that Thing 1 does not fully understand what it is to eat food containing chemicals. Does he believe that there is cleaning solution in his favorite grilled cheese sandwiches? Does he believe that there is lighter fluid in the juice? Even the average educated adult can't explain the difference between chemicals we know are bad for us even in small doses (think posion control) and the items that the FDA says are Generally Regarded As Safe in the doses they prescribe. I certainly can't. I just know I don't want to eat ANY chemicals if I can help it.

I want my kids to want to eat clean food too. My search for a better meal isn't just about ethically treated meat, or local foods, or even pesticide free foods. There are dozens of chemicals that seep into our food supply in myriad different ways. I simply want as many of them out of my chow as possible. And I want the same for my kids. Did I resort to scare tactics when I exploited my young child's impressionable mind? I suppose I did because I didn't give him the full story. I haven't told him yet why there are chemicals in our food, how they got there or who put them there. How can he make an informed decision with only half the story? In this case I am a little too much like the New York Post.

But while I negatively motivated Thing 1 into eating clean last week, I did not accomplish the ultimate goal. I do not want my kids to be afraid of processed foods. I want them to be confident and empowered to eat clean, fresh, healthy foods. I don't want them to feel guilt when they will undoubtedly be faced with Cheetoes and Coca-Cola. I want them to have a varied experience. And while I want them to ultimately choose to eat ethically sustainable raised clean foods, I want them to choose it because it is what they want. That is true empowerment.

Of course I do still intend to TALK with them about their food choices. My children are a captive audience for me. While I want them to make good choices for themselves on their own, I do fully intend to sell my viewpoint. And considering that I work in sales for a living, this is a deal I fully intend to close. Though I promise to not be too judgemental if they grow up to be men that eat McDonald's every other day and drink Coke with every meal. Right now I think Thing 1 is squarely in my camp while Thing 2 might end up in the food industry's camp. Time will tell...I promise to keep fighting the good fight.

This Post is shared with Simple Lives Thursdays and Real Food Wednesdays

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I took this picture last weekend when I was in the High School for Food and Finance. What is wrong with this picture? Do school kids really have open access to this kind of non-food? And could it really be sold in a vending machine as though it was healthy? Is anyone under the impression that this stuff is healthy?? How could this type of vending machine even sell the whole foods that are pictured on the outside? Are you as pissed as me?

My children will not enter NYC public schools without nutrition education. I want to make sure that they are as knowledgeable as possible before they start school. My kids' health starts with me.

Sugar and School Lunch

School lunch is a hot topic these days. Whether it is Jaime Oliver or Michelle Obama, everyone seems the be growing aware of the swill that has been served to our children for decades.

I attended public schools for elementary, junior high and high school. I ate school lunch at my elementary school virtually every day for 6 years. I remember that lunch cost 95cents. You could buy ice cream for 40 cents, so I would try to keep up with all my leftover nickels for two weeks to get an ice cream bar. I remember the lunch room distinctly. The lunch ladies were very friendly. I remember there were some things I liked (tacos) and some things I didn't like (hot ham sandwiches) and I remember the square pizza tasting weird (it was actually rectangle pizza, I am fussy about my shapes!). I still ate it though. I don't remember there being a lot of choice. I am sure there were some veggies beyond potato flakes. There were virtually no raw vegetables, like carrot sticks. I remember lunch being hot every day. We did get whole fruit sometimes if I remember correctly. We were only served lunch, not breakfast.

In the summer I went to camp at a lovely place that functioned as a private school during the year. This private school had a huge estate of land, a pool, a lake with canoes, soccer field, a baseball field, a full playground, woods. The place was enormous! The food that was served there I noticed to be much better than what I got during my school year. The offering was simpler most of the time, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pasta with meat sauce. There were lots of whole fruits available, and raw veggies a lot too. There might have been salads too. I can't quite remember.

When I moved on to junior high school and high school I never ate lunch at school even once. My mother never packed a lunch for me after that, it became my responsibility to pack my own lunch when I turned 12. School lunch was really gross at my high school. There was always a hot offering, but they served an alternate of hamburgers and fries or pizza virtually EVERY DAY. Now I was just learning to eat properly myself, so there were days that all I packed for myself was cheese and crackers (not that healthy). But when your lunch period is at 10:45am, a full meal almost doesn't matter. I had eaten breakfast four hours earlier and I usually ate again when I got home.

For the last couple of months I have been follow a great blog, Fed Up With School Lunch. An anonymous teacher by the pseudonym of Mrs Q has been eating school lunch every day since January and has been documenting the offering, what it tasted like, how she feels afterward and also how much waste is produced every day. It is a fascinating blog and the daily debate among followers is very interesting. She has guest bloggers from time to time. And last week she had a piece written by Ed Bruske of The Slow Cook and Better D.C. School Food. One thing he said really took my breath away. On a trip to his daughter's school, he had seen the kitchen where meals were being prepared. The breakfasts the children were eating were swimming in sugar. Candy frosted cereals, flavored milk, orange juice and POP TARTS!! The average kid was wolfing down 50-60 grams of sugar, or around 15 teaspoons! That is more than a quarter of a cup of sugar. Would you let your kid put a quarter of a cup of sugar on his first meal of the day?

Bruske's posting was what got me thinking about sugar in the first place. I mentioned earlier in the week that the Sugar Association had successfully lobbied the USDA to remove all mention of added sugars in their food pyramid literature? Well that directly translates to the National School Lunch Program. To date not one piece of legislation has successfully regulated the amount of sugar in school lunch. Now the American Heart Association came out last year with sugar limits for adults (no more than 5 teaspoons for a moderately active adult woman). But their recommendations failed to offer advise for children. Unfortunate, but not shocking either.

Several school systems and food service companies who cater school lunches have thrown their hands in the air saying "this is what the kids want to eat, we can make other food but how do we get the kids to eat it rather than throw it away?" Or one of my personal favorites "flavored milks are way better than sodas in the nutrition department, if we stop serving flavored milks the kids might not drink milk at all!" Well, I looked it up. Wisconsin Dairy Farmers have a very easy to use website that the shows the consumption of fluid milk and milk products since 1960. The data is the most complete between 1980 and today. Whole milk consumption has, as you would expect, gone down dramatically. Lowfat milk consumption has risen. Flavored milks were barely on the radar in 1960 and even today, although their consumption has more than doubled since 1980, they are only 7% of the total. What I think is interesting is that consumption of cream products(whipping cream and half and half and sour cream) have more than doubled since 1980. So although we are drinking more low fat milk, we are still eating the fat that has been taken out of our milk. We are just eating it in prepared foods now.

There is no clear evidence that kids won't drink regular milk if they are not offered flavored milk. This is just one more sales tactic of food companies to protect a business that they have carved out for themselves. But without proper legislation the sugar problem will never go away.

The newest Child Nutrition Act, which is up for review right now, also dos not discuss setting caps on the amount of sugar that children are served during the school day. In some schools now the estimate is that 44% of a child's school lunch calories are coming from solid fats and sugars. Remember what I said earlier this week, the WHO quietly recommends getting no more than 10% of your calories from sugar. And while they didn't stipulate different percentages for adults and children, I think this is a good gauge. Children's nutrient requirements per pound are enormous when compared with adults. Staggering physical changes and growth take place during the formative years. There is only so much room for food in a child's tummy, and I think that food really should be filled with the proper nutrients, vitamins and good things that will foster proper growth.

I could go on forever, and i probably will. The debate is on in many places. Follow the links I have provided to learn more.

I am really happy to say that after I wrote this, but before I published it, I read on Ed Bruske's blog the DC schools will be banning strawberry, chocolate and other flavored milks starting with the next school year! They will also be banning sugary cereals. Hooray! I love that there is so much dialogue out there, but what I really love is action!


Notes:
Bruske, Ed. Sweet and Low. Grist, A Beacon in the Smog. http://www.grist.org/ 19 April, 2010.

US Fluid Milk Product Sales-1960-2007. Wisconsin Dairy. http://www.wisdairy.com/ 16 June, 2010.

Nestle, Marion. Sugary school meals hit lobbyists' sweet spot. http://www.sfgate.com/ 2 May, 2010.

Main, Emily. Chocolate Milk Debate Rages On. http://www.rodale.com/ 30 Nov, 2009