A Food Revolution
April 23, 2010
Filed under News, Top Stories
By: Clarrissa Burton
Seconds after the lunch bell rings, the cafeteria is filled with eager students ready for lunch, and they are immediately reminded that they only have four options. They can go through the Italian food line, where there is choice of pizza, pasta alfredo, marinara pasta, or caesar salad. They can choose the American food line where there is a choice of, chicken, burgers, chicken, fries, chicken, and more chicken! There is also the Mexican food line, where you have a choice of burritos, taco salad, or quesadillas and of course the regular lunch line, where there is a mixture of different things.
According to calorieking.com, the average person should take in 400-500 calories per meal, but this isn’t happening in most school cafeterias, and because of this Jamie Oliver has started the “Jamie Oliver Revolution”.
“The food revolution is about trying to get the public angry, as they should be, about the terrible food problems in cafeterias. The children of America in 2010, are going to live a shorter life than their parents, this revolution is for the kids,” founder of the food revolution, Jamie Oliver said.
On the first episode of the Jamie Oliver Revolution he went to Huntingdon, VA which is the unhealthiest town in America. As he walked through the cafeteria, he saw that they were serving pizza for breakfast and chicken nuggets for lunch. This sounded really familiar. Our cafeteria serves the same thing! That would make us as unhealthy as them and no one seems to care.
“I care because everybody always wants to talk about how everything we eat is unhealthy, but we only eat what is put in front of us. We don’t have off campus lunch so we don’t have the option of leaving school to maybe get a healthier choice,” freshman Leah Smith said.
Smith usual has a cheese burger and fries for lunch. The average cheese burger has 510 calories and small fries have about 231 calories. That’s 214 calories over the average amount we’re supposed to take in per meal.
“I eat in the reduced line every day. I choose whatever in the line looks best that day. Do I think the line is healthy? No, but I think it’s healthier then the other lines. I would appreciate it a lot if they were to serve healthier food and more variety,” senior Andrea Forero said.
With the percentage of obese and overweight teenagers rapidly on the rise, school cafeterias don’t seem to be helping. Cafeteria food is not solely to blame, but they are definitely a contribution. Small changes in the cafeteria could be made to make it healthier, but in the end it is up to us to make healthier choices. Our cafeteria might not be able to do something others might consider extraordinary, but the little things we can do would count.
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