What Really Is A Nutritional Lunch?

Thesis: Promoting the consumption of modern school lunches will benefit student health and education better than modern homemade lunches because of the well-balanced and variety being presented to students at school.

A school lunch or school meal is a meal provided to students and teachers at a school, typically in the and/or middle of the day. It is completely self choice whether or not a student chooses to eat their own homemade lunch or the lunches provided from the school. The feeling as if it has become a social norm that if you bring your own food for lunches it’s better for you rather than if you had bought the school lunch, but counterintuitively that may actually be wrong. 

A modern school lunch is the meals being provided to students currently. The argument isn’t involving what students used to eat 10 years ago or 20 years ago. The fact that school lunches are tremendously more nutritional these days than they were a decade ago isn’t very known by many in society. Some may have an ideal answer that they think they have gotten better, but they don’t know the extent to which they got better. Looking at what parents of students today had eaten for lunches back then versus what they eat now, anyone will flat out say that modern lunches are 10 times better. Although that argument could be presented, it’s not really thought about by parents because they are not the ones eating the modern lunches. They might remember lunch as a limited variety of food that was unhealthy and bland. That’s true though because they had no where near the technology and knowledge people have now. With the technology and education provided now there have been many programs created and introduced into schools that provide the proper nutrition with the right vitamins and minerals needed for daily needs. Therefore, these modern school lunches have different identities then just the term school lunches.

A school lunch according to society is constantly given a label similar to prison food. Lots like to present their opinion on the food as terribly unhealthy and trash. Lots of parents don’t even let their child purchase any school made food because they pride the thought of it being better to have their child bring food and not to waste money on the “unhealthy” variety provided by schools. Many see school lunches as being highly processed and lacking in vitamins and minerals needed daily. That being constantly being used causes the label for these lunches to suffer. Margaret Brown, NRDC’s staff attorney, argues for the protection of these lunches by saying, “Many schools are still hard at work increasing fruits and veggies and phasing out more processed foods,” in NRDC’s article “Getting a Better School Lunch.” The elimination of these processed foods and exchanging them with more nutritional snacks like fruits and veggies will provide a much more sturdy positive label for the subject of the healthiness of school lunches. 

School lunches to the government are extremely important and viewed to be getting better by the year. The government funds the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) which works hard to better the food presented in schools. The article, “NSLP Fact Sheet” on the USDA says that, “It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or no-cost lunches to children each school day.” As with their goal on well balanced nutritional meals, they have been increasing their assistance with students by millions and millions each decade. With the government funding programs that better school lunches the outcome is seeming to be great as the improvements of nutrition is prospering through more schools every year. 

Now understanding the school lunch aspect, let’s take a look at nutrition and what it means scientifically. Nutrition is the science that interprets the nutrients and other substances in food in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism. In simpler terms, it’s what goes in the body and how it affects the body. By saying modern school lunches are more nutritional than homemade lunches it’s scientifically implying the foods provided by the school are more positively affecting the body health and maintenance while the home brought lunches may not be hitting those necessities.

Nutrition often thought by society is the label slapped to the bag of everything pretty much eaten. If anyone ever wonders what in their food or how much of everything is in it you can find it right on the nutrition label of the package. Given most people don’t know what all the ingredients are and what they do for the body, but the main concern people think of when asked about nutrition is the calories, proteins, carbs, sugar, fats, etc. People consuming these products don’t know the nutrition of their food scientifically, but rather based on simple knowledge probably learned from the internet or from health class. Therefore, saying school lunches are more nutritional than homemade would interpret the idea that the food may have less fat/ less sugar and more proteins and vitamins.           

Pairing school lunches with the words nutritionally good may seem very wrong in many people’s eyes, but in fact they fit perfectly. The feeling as if the past of school lunches have completely controlled the perception of modern school lunches. No, the argument here is not if the food tastes bad or good, it’s not restaurant worthy food, but it’s just there for you to get your lunch intake in and the school is trying to make it the most nutritional to benefit students moods and academics. It’s known that food is your main source of energy and given that these modern school lunches are becoming nutritionally better each year, there’s definitely more energy being consumed into the body.                                                                                                                   

Now knowing that there are many different thoughts and ideas given to a simple term like modern school lunches and nutrition ,but how does it play into the idea being that these school lunches nutritional value are improving the academic success of the students consuming them? In the Wilder Research paper, “Nutrition And Students’ Academic Performance,” sources say, “Nutrition also indirectly impacts school performance. Poor nutrition can leave students’ susceptible to illness or lead to headaches and stomachaches, resulting in school absences. Access to nutrition that incorporates protein, carbohydrates, and glucose has been shown to improve students’ cognition, concentration, and energy levels.” That right there describes a academically-beneficial lunch perfectly and shows that having the proper nutrients and options given to students for lunch has direct correlation to how they do academically.

References

Graves, G. (2019, June 25). Getting a Better School Lunch.

National School Lunch Program (NSLP) Fact Sheet. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/nslp-fact-sheet

Nutrition And Students’ Academic Performance. (2014, January). March 9, 2020