are fighting against changes. They don't want to spend the money required to actually provide healthy, good food. They have too many relations with contractors that dump pre-packaged garbage foods onto our school menus. They never made a real commitment to healthy, fresh food.

Rich places have healthy meals. Poor places cant afford them. Processed food is a lot less expensive.

they had a kitchen and some staff that actually made the meals. If I recall correctly, it tended towards "plain" food, like boiled or steamed corn on the side, but it was okay tasting.

Some of us would have enjoyed working in that kitchen in liew of sitting in class. Some of us actually went on to work in kitchens, but no, we couldn't "work in the kitchen" in elementary school as preparation for those careers we might later have.

They should be de-emphasized regardless of whether whole or refined.

Young metabolisms can handle them better than older ones, but apart from metabolic impact (i.e., elevated blood sugar and insulin hyperproduction leading to fat deposition), eating a grain-oriented diet while young creates emotional associations and distorted appetite signals that stubbornly persist into later decades. Ask any 40-year-old who tries to give up bread, pasta, cereal, etc., how powerful the urges are.

Grains were not available during more than 99% of human evolution, and our bodies are ill-equipped to handle having them be a substantial part of our diet. To maintain health, our weight and inflammation regulating systems require the type of diet humans ate for the million years before the invention of civilization and grain agriculture. That's what's written in our DNA.

Poor people do not deserve healthy food. They are lazy. (:sarcasm

Schools have to have a ketchup dispenser at the end of the line - no extra charge.

The kids don't eat them. I have more kids after lunch hungry because they can't find enough that they'll eat, or they get tired of the few things they will eat. The trash cans fill up a lot more with uneaten food that some bureaucrat somewhere is patting himself (or herself) on the back over--how much better students are eating, since surely they wouldn't waste the food. (Yes, they would. They would waste the food ... surely, not hesitantly. Gleefully, even.)

It's led to a lot more kids trying to skip out during lunch to find off-campus food.

I like salads. But I have a desk drawer at school filling up with salt-free whole-wheat crackers. The whole-wheat croutons are bad enough. And the pseudo-Chinese food on brown rice ...

Somewhere between junk-food junkie and a macrobiotic diet is where I eat. And it's where most of the kids would be comfortable enough.