Pick your poison: sugar or meat
With ever increasing buzz around the idea of feeding kids real food at school, some local jurisdictions are actually taking steps in the right direction. Here in the District of Columbia, the food providor for public schools, Chartwells, a division of the international conglomerate Compass Group, plans to introduce fresh-made meals to replace the re-warmed airline food the kids are being served now. New York City, in an effort to remove empty calories and fight obesity in its schools, is banning most bake sales. Other schools are trying to introduce fresh produce from local farms into their menus.
Then there is Baltimore, a city with a long gardening tradition whose schools–though you may not be aware–have been on the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating food gardens into the routine. For some strange reason, Baltimore schools have implemented a “meatless Mondays” policy, wherein lunch is supposed to become healthier by making meals from scratch with vegetarian ingredients.
While we applaud the idea of making school meals from scratch (anyone have a few spare billions of dollars to donate to the cause?), it’s not clear how replacing “meat” with carbohydrates in the form of pasta noodles and other nutritionally inferior plant foods is going to lead to better health. Instead, how about replacing all that crappy government commodity meat with locally grown, grassfed product?
The pollanistas keep beating the drum for less “meat” as a way of reducing greenhouse emissions. But they never distinguish between industrial “meat” that relies on heavy inputs of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and naturally grown protein from animals that forage on grass that helps store carbon in the ground. Nor do they explain how substituting broccoli and apples for beef and chicken can provide children with the calories, protein and other essential nutrients they need. And when we refer to “meat,” what exactly do we mean? Beef? Venison? Bison? Pork? Chicken? Turkey? Lamb? Goat?
They can’t all be bad. Yet “meatless Monday” makes it sound as though they are. And we are dealing with impressionable children, after all.
Protein and fat are essential macronutrients (unlike carbohydrates). Healthy meat is extremely nutritious. For our hunter ancestors, meat was life. To replace the protein in an 8-ounce piece of elk, for instance, you would need to eat 13 heads of lettuce. Or 56 bananas. Or 261 apples. Or 33 slices of bread. To replace the methionine, an essential amino acid, in that same 8-ounce piece of meat, you would need to consume 22 heads of lettuce. Or 127 bananas. Or 550 apples. Or 46 slices of bread.
It’s no wonder humans like meat so much. Meat makes the job of staying healthy easy. It’s packed with everything our bodies need.
No, the dirty secret behind “meatless Monday” is that fruits and vegetables are not a substitute for meat. What you’ll see bulking up the calorie counts in those “meatless Monday” school meals is lots more carbohydrates in the form of grains (rice, pasta, bread) and legumes (beans). And isn’t it just a bit ironic that the public school solution to kids grown fat on too many carbs (sugary sodas, chips, French fries) is to feed them more carbs? News flash: they all turn into sugar (glucose) after you put them in your mouth.
On the radio this morning, I heard a report that at least one school in Baltimore will be kicking off its “meatless Monday” meals with a big, fat baked potato. Care to guess how many carbs are in a single, five-ounce baked potato? (51 grams, with skin, or about one-fourth–maybe more–of all the carbs a child would need for the entire day, according to government recommendations). On the glycemic index, a measure of how acutely certain foods raise blood sugar levels, baked potato scores an 85, or 22 points higher than table sugar.
This is healthy? I’ll take the hamburger (without the bun, please).
No, conflating voodoo nutrition with half-baked environmentalism is neither healthful, nor educational. New York City has the right idea. If you’re going to attack childhood obesity and bad nutrition in the schools, get rid of the most obvious villain: junk food. Banning sugary foods and drinks makes perfect sense. Striking “meat” from the menu makes absolutely none. In fact, it just makes matters worse.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
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