Image by chidorian via flickr

I have many fond memories of my school days. I remember my friends and some of the teachers I had that really made a difference in my life. I remember all of the awesome things that I got to experience at the arts focused high school that I went to. I remember how fun my senior prom was, and how thankful I was that my date for the evening had convinced me to go. I even remember how much I just enjoyed learning new things, but that may be a case of me looking back with rose-tinted glasses. If my grades were any indicator learning was the last thing on my mind in school.

What I do not have fond memories of, however, were the school lunches. In fact, I distinctly remember hating the cafeteria so much that I never set foot in it once after my Freshman year in high school.  (My friends and I would either brown bag it or go without and hang out in the theater or a sympathetic teacher’s classroom.) Not only was the threat of bullying higher in the loosely supervised cafeteria, but the food was horrible. Our school’s gastronomical oddities included strange, pinkish meat on rectangular slices of pizza, spaghetti with thick, rubbery noodles coated in disgustingly sweet sauce, and cheeseburgers made from some kind of textured vegetable protein that were often dotted with a slimy gray substance.

The school cafeteria was a pit of doom that smelled of death and sadness. It was my version of Hell, and a few years ago when I sent to my son’s school to have lunch with him I confirmed that nothing has changed. In fact, there were a few items there even more disturbing than I recalled.

What I didn’t know, though, was that the food being served in our schools was not just a threat to the emotional and physical well being of the poor children who actually have to eat it. The problem, it turns out, is far more acute than bad taste.

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