Does this sound like a healthy school breakfast to you???

[Zach'smom]

I love Ds's school. Ds loves his school. I have been very happy with just about everything with his school. His school district was featured in the paper because they were trying out new "healthy" breakfast options. The new option was syrup or strawberry flavored mini pancakes in a bag. The bag looked like a single serving potato chip bag. Ugh!!! Now I remember why ds eats breakfast at home and only eats hot lunch once a week. We are in a very affluent school district. You would think that they could have better food in the cafeteria. They are always saying how healthy it is and how it meets government standards. The government standards must be pretty low!! Just had to vent.

[Raene]

Ugh, bummer

[CarrieMF]

the school here provides breakfast.

We've had waffles, they're on a plate.lol They can have maple syrup & butter.

they do serve dry cereal in a bag sometimes.

Usually it's things like crackers, toast, bagels, muffins, cheese, fruits, veggies, yogurts, smoothies, egg muffins, boiled eggs, pepperoni sticks.

Is the breakfast free or do you have to pay for it? If it's free don't be surprised if your son is also eating breakfast at school. We have 240-250 kids in our school, breakfast is free to everyone. We serve 100-125 kids each day depending on what it is, most of those have had breakfast at home.

When we have taco lunch(hot lunch is once a month) it is inside a taco chip bag. But that is the easiest way to do it. We have a tiny tiny kitchen(floor is approx 6 x 10, counter on 1.5 sides, fridge, standing freezer, carts, bag holders for juice box club. not alot of standing much less working room. We have no cafeteria. Everything is packaged up on the stage & taken to the classrooms to eat.

[Zach'smom]

Breakfast is only free if you are low income. I t would cost $1.25 for ds to eat at school. It would show up as a deduction on his lunch account if he was getting breakfast. Ds is a bit of a food snob and was also grossed out by the pancakes in a bag. He eats the chicken nugget hot lunch once a week at school. He thinks the rest of the food looks pretty gross and wants nothing to do with it.

[meemee]

in my two years of dealing with school lunches and bfasts - i have come to find that the cafeteria tries to balance junk with healthy since if you go really healthy no one will eat it. for instance they tried plain cheerios along with the others and no one, no one chose a plain cheerios tub.

i see our school offering healthy veggie servings with the main dish but rarely does a student which includes my dd accept a serving of that. thankfully after having free reign of cafetaria food, dd now asks for home lunch and bfast.

BUT i also look around at what the kids bring from home for homelunch.

gosh it is as bad as the school lunches. school lunches do more fat, but man their home lunches do a LOT of sugar.

fascinating stuff. for a while my dd was refusing healthy options at lunch. like broccoli which she otherwise loves due to teasing.

[kickchick2000]

Although that breakfast does not sound healthy so to speak it's much better than the sausage biscuts the school I work at sells for breakfast.

What ever happened to fruit and yogurt.

[meemee]

fruit - that canned stuff in sugar water?

yoghurt - the high sugar highly sweetened stuff with tonnes of food dye?

*bleh*

[sunnmama]

I don't know if that breakfast is healthy (I am guessing no), but it sure sounds gross!

Originally Posted by meemee

fruit - that canned stuff in sugar water?

yoghurt - the high sugar highly sweetened stuff with tonnes of food dye?

*bleh*

It is still possible to buy canned fruit without added sugar, and moderately sweetened/unsweetened yogurt with no food dye at the grocery store.

[ecoteat]

Yes, but when schools are buying stuff from huge distributors like Sysco, the fruit is usually packed in sugar and the yogurt is loaded with it too. Al least I know that is the case at my school.

A few years ago my school served apples to the kids that were pre sliced and peeled, packed in a plastic bag, and shipped from out of state. The kids, cook, and art teacher all wrote letters to the distributor about how stupid and wasteful that was and now they serve-get this-REAL Maine apples! Even when school food service really wants to use high quality ingredients they are limited by what commodoties are available to them. Schools basically have to grow their own food or buy directly from farms to get real food. (Which my school does! Yay!)

[phatchristy]

The breakfasts aren't that great here either, and it's free for all students. I wish they'd have *all* healthy options.

[ginger_rodgers]

I think this "the kids won't eat it" business is considerable baloney. If that's the choice, that's the choice, and eventually they will eat it.

My daughter still goes after school to her daycare of 3 years. Here's the sort of food they have at lunch there:

-Tray of olives, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and dressing
-salad
-various casseroles made with quinoa, pasta, eggplant, mushrooms, squash, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, etc.
-soups made with lentils, whatever veg is fresh
-tortilla chips
-fruit

The kids eat it and love it. There is no junk like pancakes in bags or sugar cereal. In fact my daughter still thinks most junk food is completely gross, and any junk involving meat (chicken nuggets, corn dogs) she doesn't even want to be in the room with.

It depends on what you teach them to eat. The problem is there's no big lady around telling them to eat the food.

We're eligible for the breakfast, but I can't imagine signing up for it. We'd have to be pretty much on the street first. It doesn't take that long to cook some oatmeal in milk & throw in some blueberries & brown sugar, and it's not that expensive, either.

[junipermuse]

My mom works at a preschool (so much smaller scale than an average public school) where they get a CSA basket delivered weekly and they make snack from that. I wonder if it would be possible for schools to do something like that on a larger scale. Maybe if the veggies the school was serving weren't the gross overcooked kind from a can that my school served us (usually canned peas or green beans) the kids would be more likely to eat them. Also veggies need to be served with a good fat like butter or sauteed in olive oil or tossed in a vinegarette or served with an oil based dressing for dipping. The fat adds flavor to make the veggies tastier and helps the body actually absorb the nutrients. I would take a high fat meal (as long as there aren't transfats) over a high sugar meal any day of the week.

Also I think it's hard to have a truly healthy meal based on the gov't standards because of how grain heavy the guidelines are. To me a healthy breakfast would probably beone small serving of a whole grain (oatmeal), plus a serving of low/no sugar yogurt, some apple-chicken sausage (nitrate and nitrite free), and a serving of fruit (fresh not canned). It's definitely more expensive and harder to do but not impossible if feeding truly healthy food was a real priority. I attended a summer camp that served this kind of food for three meals a day and it wasn't a hoity-toity place it was probably the cheapest away camp my parents sent me too but serving food that was good for the earth and good for the body was a real priorty. Obviously there is a difference between a camp parents pay for and government funded public school lunch, my point is just that it is possible to produce healthy food for children in an institutional setting.

Also I think it doesn't work to have a healthy "option" and then serve junk alongside it. Of course the children aren't eating the healthy stuff. If you serve a wide variety of healthy options though the children will eventually figure out which healthy foods taste good to them.

[CarrieMF]

fruit - that canned stuff in sugar water?

yoghurt - the high sugar highly sweetened stuff with tonnes of food dye?

fruit here is fresh fruit cut up by the parents serving it.

Yogurt, unless they're having yogurt tubes(which is a treat) the yogurt does not have food dyes & not alot of sugar.

the food is purchased at the regular grocery stores, funded(since it's free for all kids) by parents, local companies & grants from the Breakfast for Learning program. Most of the $ comes from grants & companies.

The cereals the kids get here are NOT sugar loaded, the teachers would kill us especially when it's too cold for them to burn off regular energy,lol.

I think this "the kids won't eat it" business is considerable baloney. If that's the choice, that's the choice, and eventually they will eat it.

I agree. We've started selling fruits & veggies at concessions, they go just as fast as the chips do. When we do fruit there isn't a piece left for the teachers(left over food goes to the staff room for the teachers)

Breakfast is only free if you are low income

That's too bad. The breakfast program started 3 years ago. It started with 1-2 days a week. Then after the first year the teachers noticed such a difference with the kids that they request it be 5 days a week. When we were looking at moving to another city I checked out some of the schools & their breakfast programs were for low income only, the kids had to go through a separate entrance to the gym to get the food. I immediatly rules those schools out. Here we set up a table in the hall & whatever kids want food they come & get what they want.

[meemee]

where i am the food at the public school is CRAP!!!!!

most of the daycares offer homecooked really healthy meals.

most of the afterschool places offer a reasonably healthy snack.

[meemee]

Originally Posted by ginger_rodgers

I think this "the kids won't eat it" business is considerable baloney. If that's the choice, that's the choice, and eventually they will eat it.

yup true in a ps/afterschool setting.

not true in a public school where you just dont have the staff/child ratio for encouragement.

and i have seen children go hungry than eat healthy options at school. at yard duty their tummies would hurt from hunger but they would NOT eat the fruit that was their desert choice. they had eaten but not enough.

plus i notice at public school the lunches children bring to school from home are pretty crappy themselves. maybe K and first and second are about crappy food. since i notice the slightly higher bring healthier options.

[mistymama]

Yuck. I eat lunch with ds at least once a week & the school lunches are pretty gross. We are also in an affluent area and our school is supposed to have healthy food. Some of it is healthy, most of it is gross looking and not healthy at all, IMO.

Ds eats breakfast at home and packs a lunch everyday. He thinks the school lunches look and smell "like trash" (his words).

I'd hate to see UNHEALTHY public school food if ours is considered healthy! That is a scary thought!

[ginger_rodgers]

Originally Posted by meemee

and i have seen children go hungry than eat healthy options at school. at yard duty their tummies would hurt from hunger but they would NOT eat the fruit that was their desert choice. they had eaten but not enough.

meemee, my sympathy glands are not welling up here. If those kids parents won't tell them to Eat That Food, then too bad. I don't see a reason to serve bad food to the rest of the kids because some won't eat anything else.

I'd be in favor of a one-week "reeducation" period, in which kids who're very hungry at yard duty get a chance to go in, eat the fruit, and discover that it isn't poison. After that, they can either eat the food served or be hungry. It's also a good time to involve the kids in food prep, so that the food is something they're more interested in by the time they get it.

It's amazing how well that works on preschoolers, btw. After a while they pretty much start eating.

[meemee]

Originally Posted by ginger_rodgers

It's amazing how well that works on preschoolers, btw. After a while they pretty much start eating.

oh i hear you!!! i feel sad for the kids not getting the support they need in public schools to eat healthier.

yeah even parents of psers would express surprise at what their kids ate at ps.

[hummingmom]

We're in a relatively affluent district, and one of the breakfast options at our local school is "Jimmy Dean sausage and chocolate chip pancakes on a stick." The sausage is coated in pancake batter, kind of like the breakfast version of a corn dog. It's not an occasional thing; this is available a few times a week. The other choices aren't much better.

Looking over the list, it seems like the cafeteria's main criteria are that the items can be heated in the microwave, and that they don't require any utensils or dishes. That would fit with the "pancakes in a bag" mentioned in the OP. Of course, it pretty much rules out most healthy breakfast foods, like hot cereal, scrambled eggs, yogurt (not in a tube), etc.

[ziggy]

I honestly don't remember what we ate in elementary or middle school, but I do know that one of my teachers in high school was a total rockstar. Somebody in her family had a farm, and every week would give her a couple huge boxes of fruit, which she'd put in the classroom for us to eat. We could eat any time we wanted provided we weren't actively taking a test (though getting a snack before the test was encouraged). Considering I had her class starting at 7:50am every morning my senior year, and I had to drop my siblings off at school before I went myself, this breakfast was a savior.