“It’s LUNCHTIME!…” the school kids moaned…

People ask us why we’re almost militant about gardening as part of a “truly effective sustainable strategy”.

Well, it’s because if WE don’t insure that our children eat good food, they won’t grow up to be strong and healthy.

And that means that when it’s time to kick the “boogeyman” off the porch, they will fail to answer the call.

Lots of my neighbors actually try to conserve cashflow by cutting back on the quality of the foods they bring into the house.

These parents reassure me that the kids eat far better than the adults actually do, because they get “school lunches”.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Author and journalist Michael Pollan just took a hard look at school lunch programs. The results… were frightening.

I do not want my child eating in one of those “dumping grounds”…

In fact, I didn’t weant to believe it, so I called a friend who has been a “lunch lady” in the public school system for three decades.

“The school lunch program is by and large a disposal system for agricultural commodities. The farmers grow too much of various things, the government buys it from them to support their prices and their welfare and then dumps it on schools.” Michael explains.

This is exactly why you find a predominance of highly processed, fatty, terrible quality food in schools across the entire United States of America.

My source reassured me that what I’d been hearing about the quality of school lunch programs was in fact, correct.

Then, she gave me names of other people to speak with about it.

She said that she’d offer to bring me in and show me around, but she’d recently been forced into early retirement for speaking out against the lunch program.

Of course, they claimed it was just “simple economics and budgetary cutbacks”…

Michael says:

“It’s worse than you think: there are rules the require the school lunch program to buy food from the lowest bidder. Imagine if you were forced to only buy and eat the absolute cheapest food available to you. This is what’s for lunch for most of an American kids’ childhood. No whole, local or organic foods enter the picture in this system. They can’t compete.”

Furthermore, Michael revealed that the schools no longer even have kitchens – the closest thing they have to an oven is a bank of large microwave ovens!

My own sources verified this, across several school districts across the South. 

The workers there are completely dependent on pre-packaged, bargain basement packaged  food they couldn’t cook a balanced meal, if their lives depended on it.

And, they’re feeding a “captive audience” that eats what they put in front of them, while you and I are “in the field” trying to slay the rest of the dragons…

Look, if children are the future of this nation, and their meals maintain  them (for good or bad – depending on profit apparently) as they grow up, this is just a crime.

School Officials are gambling with the health of your CHILD.

This is more than just wrong, it’s disgraceful. 

And, it’s not going to get changed unless we speak out for the rights of our kids.

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