Lunch Program Defended Brown Bags Too Often Contain Sweets, Not Nutritious Foods

The Smithsburg High School food manager cringes when she sees what some brown-baggers bring to eat. Rich or poor, they may come bearing sweets and treats, not what healthy bodies are made of.

“Fruit roll-ups,” Nancy Detrow said. “No sandwich. Cookies or cake.”

The people proposing to change the national school lunch program should take note of those bags, she suggests. “They ought to look back at why this program was started, and figure it can happen again.”

Whether it is a necessity or a luxury to offer federally subsidized meals to all students is being decided in Washington, in the protracted way Washington decides things.

To advocates of the $4.8 billion program, the lunches are close to a guarantee that all students will get one reasonably healthy meal a day. Every approved school lunch comes with a federal subsidy.

Critics point to waste in food and paperwork. Theirs is what might be called the 17-cent solution - the 17 cents a meal, or $1.8 million a day, that subsidizes lunch for kids of the middle class and wealthy.

The Republicans, in legislation that passed the House, would end the entitlement and shift money for nutrition to states in multipurpose block grants.

Even so, the lunch program kids are leaving behind for the summer might look much the same in the fall. The Senate has yet to take up the issue and Republicans there have not been as keen on wholesale changes.

The House plan might leave the states enough money to feed the poor while forcing them to curb or end lunch subsidies for others, observers say. Now, half the lunches are served free to the poor and most of the rest get the 17-cent boost.

Amid rolling hills 70 miles from Washington, the politics seem far away as students at Smithsburg High chow down.

It’s the end point of a 49-year-old program created when too many men were coming into the military malnourished, and guided now by countless hands from farm to plate.

Unlike the bland old ways, the lunchroom at Smithsburg resembles a mall food court.

Chef’s salad, a la carte. Ground ham patties, tasty but ignored. Real turkey roast under gloppy yellow gravy, with stuffing and sweet potatoes or sauerkraut. And pizza.

Patrick, in Grade 10, agrees with nutritionists who say a kid can’t learn on an empty stomach. “Takes away your attention span,” the aspiring weightlifter says. “You look at the clock and it doesn’t move.”

He loads up on subsidized pizza, plus a pretzel and cookies. “I could eat pizza every day,” he says.

Nutritional standards in the program haven’t changed much since 1946, although Washington has been pushing big increases in fresh fruits and vegetables. Officials try all sorts of sneaky ways to add healthy stuff.

Ground turkey might be slipped in with the ground beef. Vegetable protein may be mixed with meat. Prune cake was gobbled up when it was given the pruneless name Spiced Delight.

Only when a meal is served does it qualify for federal reimbursement. Every day is a struggle to jazz it up and move it out.

“There go two big cookies,” lamented Don Trumble, director of food and nutrition services for Washington County’s 43 schools, as a boy walked through the cafeteria clutching his sticky prize. “You can’t win them all.”

But he thinks he wins enough to contend American youth would be ill-served by ending the program.

“Yes, we have to make choices,” he said. “But I think very, very few people in this country will be willing to say kids will be that choice.”

Only on the question of paperwork does he agree with Republicans. Trumble rattles off a raft of federal accounting requirements and complains, “I’ve got a whole drawer full of audits.”