Every Monday and Wednesday students from ChannelView High School, outside Houston, are treated to Domino’s for lunch. Delivery drivers from a local branch of the fast food chain arrive at the school with dozens of pizzas fresh from the oven, served in cardboard boxes from the Domino brand. Children can be picky eaters, but few foods are more universally seductive than freshly cooked pizza – only from a restaurant students are almost certainly already known. “For children to see Oh, they serve domino’sI think it makes a huge difference, “Tanya Edwards said, the food director of the district.
The deliveries are part of Domino’s “Smart Slice” initiative, which sends pizzas to school districts throughout the country – often against few or no costs for students themselves. “Smart Slice” is part of the National School-Lunch program, so the taxpayers foot a part of the bill to guarantee that every child has lunch to eat. Despite the enthusiasm of children, you can see the problem: students who chew fast food for free may seem to embody everything with the American diet. If school cafetarias can be considered as classrooms that children learn about food, giving Domino’s are related to students of the driver who have to drive by having them play Grand Theft Auto.
The days of school Domino’s and school pizza in general – are numbered. Health and Human Services -Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And his supporters are on a mission to revise school lunch. At the end of last month, the Trump administration America Realy Again Commission released a long-awaited report on the health of children that orphans at school meals as a location where ultra-processed food is offered to children unabated, which contributes to obesity and other types of chronic diseases. Unless cafeteria employees make school pizza all over again, almost every type of industrial ingredients that qualify the meal as an ultra-processed food contains. In fact, Ridding School Lunch or Ultra-Processed Foods means the end of Pizza Day as we know it.
Many of the food reforms that are due to the movement of RFK Jr. be pushed, are popular. Removing artificial dyes, for example, is much wiser than Kennedy’s conspiracy about vaccines. But in the case of banning most school pizza, RFK Jr. can be confronted with a more difficult sale. Maha’s vision of food is about to walk forward a bunch of hungry children in a school cafeteria.
Although Domino’s school pizza is supplied by Domino’s drivers who wear Domino’s pizza boxes, the smart slice of the company would arrive at your door if you would order a cake for dinner tonight. Cafeteria pizza must adhere to nutritional standards for school meals that the Obama administration led in 2010. The overly cheese-like rectangular pizza with a cracker-like crust that you might have eaten at school, no longer cuts. Consider Domino’s Smart Slice Pepperoni Pizza: it is made with usually whole -grain flour, lace cheese and pepperoni that has half as much sodium than typical Domino’s Pepperoni. It is in no way a green salad, but Domino School is far from the worst that children can eat.
Other common cafeteria offers -such as mini -corndogs, mozzarella -sticks and chicken offers -are now also more nutritious than in recent decades. Those standards can still be improved (and we are still talking about Cornogs, Mozzarella sticks and chicken offers), but they have led companies to sell some healthier versions of their food in schools. Research HAs shownOn average, school meals are now the healthiest things that children eat in one day.
In an e -mail, HHS press secretary Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano said that “although some of these products can technically meet outdated federal guidelines, they are still heavily designed, nutrition facts weak and designed for business profit, not for the health of our children.” Indeed, school lunch starts to look considerably less healthy if you explain the growing concern about ultra-processed foods. Many school lunches are made in factories with chemicals such as emulsifiers and flavor enhancers that you would not find in a home kitchen. Eating many ultra-processed foods is associated with a series of ailments, including type 2 diabetes and heart conditions, although nutritionists are deeply distributed about how much we should worry about these industrial ingredients.
To a certain extent, or school pizza should be avoided because it is ultra-processed, is next to the point. By letting Domino’s in school cafetarias, the government also in essence also gives the company Carte Blanche to advertise its pizza. Serve Smart Slice from a typical Domino’s Box gives ‘the false impression for children and parents that the less healthy products that are served in their restaurants are healthy choices,’ said Jennifer Harris, an expert in the field of food marketing, in an e-mail.
Kennedy has called on to serve schools to serve ‘real food, entire foods, farm paint food’, instead of everything that is ultra-processed. It would of course be better for school cafetarias to exchange the pepperoni pizza with salad and chicken fillet. But for many children, school lunch can be subsidized by the government their only real meals of the day. At ChannelView, where such a large proportion of students are eligible for public help that everyone eats for free, is just food in Kids’ Bellies. “I can make a chic small sweet-potato black-bear, but I don’t think my children will eat it,” Tanya Edwards said. “Instead, they go home hungry, and I don’t really know what they have at home.”
The care is not theoretical. Proof shows that when school meals are too healthy, a considerable part of children will just get rid of the lunch line. In the early years 2010, when the Los Angeles Unified School District revised his lunch offer – an effort with removing pizza from the menu – Schools reported that huge amounts of food landed in the trash. (The district later brought pizza back and Pepperoni Pizza is now the most popular item of the district, said a spokesperson.) Food waste is a multi -year problem in school meal programs. A study by agriculture of more than 100 schools showed that on average 31 percent of the vegetables were wasted on observed school lunch boxes. Pizza, however, was one of the least wasted food, along with breaded and fried chicken pies and gold clogs.
Even proponents of healthier school meals admit that there is a limit to how many students will tolerate healthier offers. “We have absolute school food to inform children about healthy eating, but I don’t think that doesn’t mean pizza,” Janet Poppetendieck, a professor Emerita, told Hunter College who wrote a book about repairing school meals, me. “We have to record healthy versions of children’s favorite food; otherwise I don’t think they will eat.” Partly to ensure that children actually have lunch, many school districts seem to have pizza day at least once a week. A spokesperson for the public schools of Florida in Hillsborough County, the seventh largest district in the country, told me that the first, second, fifth and seventh most popular starters are all in the Pizza family (no. 5 is Mini Calzones; no. 7 is Pizza-Sticks). All in all, the district has distributed nearly 3 million portions this school year.
If wanted, the Trump administration could easily force children to suck it up and literally eat their vegetables. From a technical point of view, the responsibility to supervise the school meal program for the USDA Die is not under Kennedy’s Purview is the secretary of Agricultural Brooke Rollins that she is on board with Maha-Ining School Lunch. However, any attempt to make a ban would probably invite a considerable recoil. In 2023, when the federal government drove the idea of banning the sale of sugar -like chocolate milk in elementary and secondary schools, many parents flooded the government with complaints. Some students did that: Ben, a fourth class that only left his first name, wrote in an official comment to the USDA that it should leave the proposal “because students are super crazy”. Members of the congress also exercise the supervisors to stop the reform. The USDA later left the ban on Chocolatez milk. In 2011, after the Obama government had released its new guidelines for school lunch, Republicans tried to fight back in the congress against healthier pizza through Classifying the dish like a vegetable.
It is no wonder why Maha has a problem with school pizza. Kennedy has pointed to business malfeasance as a leading source of America’s diet problems. You don’t have to be a fan of him to feel uncomfortable that Domino’s, a fast food company that sells Philly-Cheese-Steak-Laaden Tater-Pots, participates in a program funded by the taxpayer to feed nutritious meals. But Kennedy’s favorite approach to food and, well, everything – big proposals and dramatic overhaul – is not well suited for school meals. The health secretary can dream of children who eat from a salad bar with sperm-free connections five days a week, but the end of school pizzaday will not let that happen automatically. Telling children what to eat is one thing; It is another to let them eat.
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