Healthy vs. happy debate in Goshen schools

GOSHEN, Ind. — It’s close to noon at Goshen High School, and students are hungry.

They shuffle into the cafeteria for the first school lunch period of the day. They walk past tables where other teenagers sit biting into sandwiches or chewing on apples. Along the serving line, lunch ladies fill students’ trays up, hand them over and send the teenagers down to the cashier.

Each of the lunch items on these trays have been planned out months in advance, down to each scoop of mashed potatoes. Cafeterias have had to follow new federal nutritional requirements over the last two years, which some said have left students wanting more.

Parents and students have had a number of complaints about the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. They’re concerned school lunches – which follow the United States Department of Agriculture’s nutrition standards – are smaller and have fewer calories.

Take senior Lynnsey James for example. She’s a student athlete who swims around 3,000 yards in the morning and between 5,000 to 10,000 yards in the afternoon. Those two-hour-long practices are enough to work up an appetite, but James said it’s hard to fill up with the food on just one tray.

“I would normally get about double of what they had,” James said. “I would get at least one burger, two fries and then a couple of bags of chips, and that would mostly get me through practice.”

Cafeteria workers have to find that sweet spot between 450 to 600 calories for breakfast and 750 to 850 for lunch, which is required by federal guidelines. To give you an idea of how big a meal that is, an 8-ounce carton of chocolate milk has around 140 calories.

An active 17-year-old boy – one involved in sports – should eat around 3,500 to 4,000 per day over four