Eat Your Peas!: Launching the School Lunch Revolution

Pre- Listening

1. Think back to your experience of school lunches, or if you’re in school now, reflect on your current experience. What do or did you think about the food served there? Is or was it seen as cooler to buy lunch at school, bring your own, or go to a supermarket off-campus, if that is/was an option? Did you like the food served at school? What are or were your favorite dishes – and your least favorite? Do you think the food is healthy? Is healthy enough or does it also need to be tasty?  What makes for healthy food? What makes food tasty to your palate? How do your school lunches compare to the food you eat at home? What did/do your parents think about your school lunch?

2. Many public schools are so short of financial resources to run basic programs that they accept large payments from soft drink and fast food chains to allow them prominent product placement in food service facilities in their school cafeterias. What are the tradeoffs of making such agreements? Do you think sugar-rich sodas and high-fat fast foods should be served in schools? If not, why not? If so, what impacts, if any, does the accessibility and promotion of such foods have on the current epidemic of childhood obesity?

3. Many nutritionists say the food currently served in public school lunches is actually detrimental to children’s health. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

4. What is the extent of a school’s responsibility to teach good eating habits to its students? Does this job belong primarily to parents? If so, why? If not, why not?

Chef Ann Cooper, food director of the Berkeley School District

1. After hearing the kids and the teacher at John Muir discuss this revamped school food program, what were your impressions of their reactions? Would you like a chef like Ann Cooper to run your school district lunch program? If not, why not? If so, why?

2. Cooper talks about what school lunch was like when she ate it as a kid. It may not have been gourmet food, she says, but at least it was real food cooked from scratch using basic ingredients.  How and why have school lunches changed over the past few decades?

3. We often hear complaints that kids make poor food choices that lead to obesity, diabetes and other long-term health problems that burden both themselves and society as a whole.  But in her interview Cooper assigns primary responsibility to skewed parental and public prioritiesWhere do you assign responsibility for the often poor food choices our kids make? Parents? Schools? TV and print ads? Peers? Or all of the above and more?

4. Cooper maintains that school lunch is not just about having to eat yucky food; it’s about the future health of our citizens and the long-term societal costs of coping with health problems caused by poor childhood nutrition. How large a role do school lunches play in the health and well-being of children? Justify your argument using Cooper’s interview as well as some of the other interviews in this program.

5. What impacts do high-sugar and high-carb diets like those provided by fast food service providers have on the ability of students to focus and learn in school?

Janet Brown, Center for EcoLiteracy

1. What factors do you think could be at play in the disparity among the statistics Brown shares: “a Latino or African-American child born in the year 2000 has a 50/50 chance of being diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime… If it’s a Caucasian child, they have a one in three chance.”

2. Brown mentions that health insurance providers say their business will be adversely affected by bad food choices and would thus “prefer that someone take some preventive action.” Aside from implementing a weight profiling program that raises insurance rates for overweight families as an incentive to reduce caloric intake, in what other ways could you imagine health insurance providers teaming up with food advocates to provide an effective set of incentives to reduce childhood obesity?

3. Why do you think preventive programs such as the one Brown describes in which there is “a marriage of public education and public health in public schools” face resistance? From what sources does this opposition arise? How can the concerns of opponents be effectively addressed?  

4. What do you think would change if school lunch were seen once again as a matter of national security?

Eric Weaver, parent activist and attorney

1. Weaver says that it’s not enough to improve the taste and nutritional value of school lunches. The most successful programs around the country also include student-run gardens and extensive nutrition study programs. If you were assigned to design a school lunch program, what elements would you include based on what you’ve heard during the course of this program? Use the chart below to help get started:

2. Discussion: Weaver argues that when it comes to the reluctance of kids to try unfamiliar, healthier foods, unfamiliarity breeds suspicion rather than lasting dislike. Do you agree or disagree? Have you ever resisted trying new foods that you ultimately enjoyed? If so, what were they and what did it take to learn to enjoy them? Once you tried one unfamiliar food and liked it, did you become more open to trying other new foods?

Mark Arakelian, director of the Healthy Lifestyles Program at Perspectives Charter School

1. Arakelian believes it’s best to start early, introducing healthy food choices to younger kids before they become set in their ways and strongly influenced by peers and advertising. He says the “just try two bites” method works much better the littler the child is. What strategies would you recommend to get high schoolers to try healthy foods that they may never have been previously exposed to? What ways besides the “two bites” technique would "hook” younger kids on healthy food?

2. Is thinking of food as medicine and/or behavioral modulator a new concept to you? What do you think of the idea

1. Is it important that students learn how food is grown and marketed and the understand differences between healthy and unhealthy foods or is it enough that they just eat nutritious school lunches? If so, why? If not, why not?

2. Dr. Koch says tracking the impact of these school food reform programs will be a difficult task. What do you think will be the short- and long-term impacts for students, schools and our society, based on everything you’ve heard in this program?

Concluding Discussion Questions

1. Connect the lessons kids are learning in school nutrition, cooking, gardening, and other food-based curriculum with larger topics. What might be some additional school subjects that benefit from being addressed through learning about food systems and healthy eating?

2. In April of each year Earth Day is celebrated in most schools. What kind of messages does the conventional school lunch send to kids about the earth and the environment? How is that message affected by studying food systems, eating healthy foods, and raising some of your own food in school?

3. We heard throughout the program the importance of involving parents and families in the process of school food reforms. What are some educational and food access issues that schools and their partners need to address outside the classroom to really include parents in the process and make sure that, as much as possible, food choices in the home change along with those at school? Is it appropriate for public schools to seek to influence eating habits at home?

4. Go back to Question 3 under First Reactions: School Lunch. Has your thinking about this question changed? Why or why not?