Last week at the Canadian Food Summit 2012 I was fortunate enough to get a sample of the new Moo Moo Bar from Dairylicious. Now, I’m not sure if you get the full picture in the photo above so I’ll lay it out for you here as well. This bar is made from cottage cheese and is “great for kids lunch boxes”. Yes, great if you want to send your child to school with a 100 calorie bar (that’s a whopping 1.5 inches long) containing 3.5 grams of fat (3 of which are saturated) and 11 grams of sugar. Here’s the full spec sheet for the original bar. In case you were wondering, that’s a LOT of sugar and fat for about one bite. For the sake of science I took a tiny little bite from the end. I thought “this isn’t that ba… OMG THAT’S SWEET!” It took me several swigs of water to eliminate the residual sweetness from my mouth. So, if you want to feed your child a high sugar, energy-dense diet to promote obesity and tooth decay then why stop at popping just one in their lunchbox? Why not just give them a whole box for lunch? After all, you can never get too much of a good thing, right?
Tag Archives: school lunches
Smarties sandwiches, part of a balanced lunch
I received a link to this article in my twitter feed today from @yonifreedhoff. It’s about a child being sent to school with a Smarties sandwich for lunch prompting a free school nutrition program. I think lunch programs are great and whatever it takes to initiate one is fine by me. I just think it’s a little sad, and absurd, that a Smarties sandwich was the impetus. For decades now children have been sent to school with utter crap for lunches. Now, I was one of the lucky ones who got to go home for lunch every day, up until high school, and have a balanced lunch courtesy of my mum waiting for me on the table. Other kids were not so lucky (although at the time I was pretty envious). Lunchables? Very little in the way of nutrient content there apart from calories and sodium. How about sandwiches made with cheesewhiz? Or grape jelly? Or “Fluff”? Or… NUTELLA? How many kids did you know growing-up that had “chocolate” sandwiches at lunch? I bet, if you weren’t one of them, that you at least knew one. And really, what’s the difference between a sandwich made with Nutella and a sandwich made with Smarties? I’d say candy coating is pretty much the sole distinguishing feature. We need to be taking a closer look at the marketing of foods and what’s really in them. Just because Smarties are marketed as a candy treat and Nutella is marketed as “part of a balanced breakfast” doesn’t mean that they’re all that different.
The question is not: Is pizza a vegetable?
Alright… I can’t stay out of this one. The headlines state: Pizza is a Vegetable! In case you’ve somehow missed this disgrace, and don’t feel like clicking on the link above, US congress is all set to allow pizza to count as a vegetable serving for school lunches. Now, the headlines are a little misleading, pizza is clearly not a vegetable, it’s a “mixed dish” which may contain vegetables. Apparently this classification is not new, the change would have been to disallow it to be counted as a vegetable serving. The argument put forward by “food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress” is that 2 tablespoons of tomato paste should count as a vegetable serving. The proposed standards would have changed the serving size to 1/2 cup, pretty much impossible to fit on a slice of pizza, thereby preventing the sale of pizza in schools as it would not contain a full vegetable serving. There are so many problems with this issue that I hesitated to wade into this debate. I’ll try to state them as succinctly as possible. First, I think it’s shameful that governments (yep, that goes for our own in Canada, both provincially and federally as well) allow food industry and lobby groups at the table when creating standards and policies. The decision about what foods to sell and provide children at school should be based solely on scientific evidence and common sense. These decisions should never be based on profit. Secondly, I do think that pizza can be a nutritious food, but redefining a serving size of vegetables (yes, technically, tomatoes are a fruit but that’s really not the issue here) does not make it healthy. Maybe if you piled on some other vegetables, used minimal cheese, and whole grain crust, and served it with a side salad or vegetable sticks then it would be a nutritious school lunch. The question is not: Is pizza a vegetable? The question is: Should we be setting children up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating habits in the name of profit?
