Sense and sensibility

Schools are back in session, and apparently that means open season on school foodservice. This week alone I have seen no fewer than 10 opinion pieces on the state of school foodservice, most of them negative and at least one, as you’ll see, just a bit over the top.

One of the great things about America is freedom of speech, and the Internet has given virtually everyone a place to utter their opinions freely. That doesn’t necessarily mean we get substantive and reasoned debate as a result, however.

Earlier this week I saw a column in an online publication called Natural News that was titled “School Lunch: Where the Real Weapons of Mass Destruction Lie.” You can see why it got my attention.

It was written by a Hawaiian “citizen journalist” by the name of Hesh Goldstein. His bio listed him as “vegetarian since 1975, vegan since 1990. Moderator of a weekly radio show in Honolulu called Health Talk since 1981.” Goldstein doesn’t say what his background is in health and nutrition, other than to note that he “obtained a master’s degree in nutrition, in 2007, to silence the so-called ‘doctors’ that called in on my weekly radio show asking for my ‘credentials.’”

His opinion piece blamed school foodservice and the federal government for the childhood obesity problem. He calls the National School Lunch Program “a disaster,” claims that the public “is kept nutritionally uneducated,” and suggests that school meals “routinely fail to meet nutritional standards.”

Goldstein makes a number of outrageous and/or contradictory claims and suggestions in the article. For example, he says that “very little” of the reimbursement money schools in the NSLP receive actually goes to food. Why? “Because the schools have to use it to pay for everything from the custodial services to heating the cafeteria.”

Really? Then what money pays for the food the districts obviously have purchased?

Later, he states that many schools use prepared, processed foods because they do not have kitchens. Two paragraphs later, he cites a few groups who “are demonstrating that schools can be in control of their own menus.” How? By cooking food from scratch—an impossibility if your school doesn’t have a kitchen.

Finally, he says that “a lot of the so-called ‘nutrition experts’ believe that to fix the NSLP you have to throw more money at it.” Two paragraphs later, he says fixing the NSLP could be done so long as Congress is willing to spend $27 billion a year—three times what it spends now—“plus a one-time investment in real kitchens.”

To give Goldstein his due, there is just enough sensible information and commentary in his article that one might almost take it seriously—were it not surrounded by ads for products like “The Gabriel Method—Lose Weight Without Dieting” and a site called campuscuisine.net. This site offers to deliver fresh, “wholesome” meals in bulk to schools, from such purveyors of healthy foods as Moe’s Southwest Grill, Jersey Mike’s Subs, Quizno’s and Papa John’s.

Congress is preparing to debate the reauthorization of the funding mechanism for the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs. There is no question that if school foodservice is going to be able to help reduce childhood obesity, some significant changes will have to be made to the program. But what we need at this juncture are reasoned, and reasonable—i.e., workable—solutions, rather than incendiary comments and idealistic suggestions.

I will admit that I have to admire Hash Goldstein’s passion for healthy food. But if you talk with school foodservice directors, you quickly learn that passion, we got plenty of. What we need is a healthy portion of sense and sensibility.