Eyes Wide Shut: Kids' Lunches

Last week I had the chance to eat lunch with my daughter's preschool class. It may sound dramatic, but I'm still processing what I witnessed. Out of those cute insulated boxes and bags came the most astonishing products. (I'm not going to call them food because I'm skeptical about how much could actually be considered nutritive.) Here was one little girl's lunch, along with the key ingredients that concerned me so much that I used up all my internet bandwith today looking them up:

• 1 minutemaid juice box (16 grams sugar)
• 1 package cheezits (230 milligrams sodium)
• 1 gogurt (10 grams sugar)
• 1 package sliced apples with caramel dip (12 grams sugar)
• 1 lunchables jr. (540 milligrams sodium)

For a grand total of 38 grams of sugar and 770 grams of sodium, just in one meal! And this sweet little girl, who at 4 years old is still quite slim and healthy looking, ate the entire contents of her lunch, by the way.

In case you're wondering, the recommended daily allowance of sugar for children is a mere 12 grams. We're talking per day, folks. And for adults, it's just 20 grams for women and 36 grams for men (no fair). Back in the real world, the average American consumes around 90 grams of sugar daily, so clearly we're all way off here. But it's no wonder when you consider that our kids begin their lives eating so much of it!

What about sodium? The recommended daily allowance of sodium for children between 3 and 5 is currently around 1,000 milligrams. We all know that salt is in practically everything we eat, so if in one meal that child is already getting at least 770 grams, chances are she's probably eating about twice as much sodium every day. And for the record, 1,000 mgs is really too much for a child, just like the RDA of 2,300 for adults is also much higher than it should be. Strangely, I can't find anything about this on the Internet now, but I remember that during my last year of grad school (2005), the public health community was all excited because the USDA was preparing to announce a new sodium RDA of 1,200 for adults. Ultimately the agency backed down after extensive (and expensive) lobbying by Big Food. Hmm, Big Surprise.

The really sad thing is, you can easily imagine mom or dad packing that little girl's lunch and thinking, "okay, we've got fruit (apples w/caramel dip + juicebox), we've got protein (lunchables jr. + gogurt), we've got carbs (cheezits + crackers), all the important food groups are covered!" And the child isn't complaining, so tomorrow she gets the same lunch again.

But you know, it wasn't just the contents of the other children's lunches that disturbed me. It was also the way they ate their food. Plastic wrappers, containers and foil packaging flying all over the place. The lunchroom trash can was overflowing by the end of the meal. And how fast they ate! I never thought about it, but whole food really does take quite a bit more chewing and therefore more time to eat than processed  food. The giveaway should have been the word processed, I know.

1st day of kindergarten lunch. Note the (3) candy corns! And the cheese sticks I've finally gotten them away from...

So there's my kid, eating her homemade whole wheat bread, her apple slices, her cheddar cheese, her rice cake spread with sunflower seed butter and homemade jam, her carrot sticks. (I include homemade to indicate that I control how much salt and sugar goes into these items.) She's chewing and crunching away. Opening up her water bottle periodically for a gulp. And all around her, the other kids are sipping juice through straws, slurping down gogurt, gobbling crackers and bite-sized pieces of processed ham and american cheese, licking caramel dip off their fingers. It should not have surprised me that she was the last one still at the table, and even then she didn't have time to finish before recess.

At age 3, she's still clueless that her lunch is not like the others...

Just for the record, there is no judgement here. I am concerned for the future health of these children, but I have a great deal of empathy and understanding for their busy, unaware parents, and a vast reservoir of frustration for the food conglomerates that make these products and market them so heavily. Until now, I had only a vague notion that these things even existed, and no idea that they were so popular. If you don't watch t.v. and you shop the grocery store like I do, sticking to the edges of the store and only venturing into the canned goods and baking sections, then you just don't see this stuff. But I know I am a minority in that regard.

At this point, I'm wondering: How long before my kids figure out the score and start protesting? Will I be able to convince them that it's important to protect their health and longevity by getting the most they can from the food they eat? Will they revolt as teenagers and young adults by eating all the junk food they can get their hands on? And I ask myself, Once this brief phase of being a stay-at-home mom is over, will I feel compelled to buy pre-packaged lunch items just to save a little time each day? Because it's not just making the food, it's also washing the lunch box each day, shopping more often to buy fresh produce, etc. And unless we win the lottery, we probably won't be able to afford the organic, low-salt, low-sugar version of all these foods...


Hey Kraft, Nestle, General Foods and PepsiCo: you can kiss my you-know-what!!!

To close, here is a link to one of our household lunch staples: squash muffins. I published it a couple years ago in this blog and think it deserves another viewing. For the record, when I make these I throw in whatever is in season, whether carrots, beets, kale, even canned pumpkin if there's nothing else lying around. I also add a handful of chocolate chips to keep the kids interested. They are always tasty and despite it being kind of a pain to make them every couple of weeks, I feel good knowing that there is always a healthy snack like this around. FYI, they also keep very well in the freezer.