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Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act Argumentative Essay

843 Words4 Pages

Saralyn Doyle
English 3
December 16, 2015

Benefits and Drawbacks to Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act: Does One Outweigh the Other?

According to an article on the Mother Jones website, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, signed by president Obama in 2010, is “aimed at curbing the nations obesity rate” by cutting back on the amounts of unhealthy ingredients served in schools. School lunches also aim at providing healthy lunch choices to kids who can’t afford to eat that way at home. However, if “75% of vegetables and 40% of fruits” (Harvard School of Public Health) served in public schools are ending up wasted in the trash cans, is the good outweighing the bad? Since students skip meals and eat junk food all day and multitudes of fruits and vegetables …show more content…

The article specifically states that “A total of 1,086,000 students stopped buying school lunch, after participation had increased steadily for nearly a decade.” Now, I’m no scientist but it seems those numbers are way higher than they should be. Instead of making more kids want to eat healthy, we are just seeing more kids unhappy and eating chips or drinking Gatorades instead. In fact, many kids will go out of their way to call their parents to bring McDonalds or Subway just so they don’t go hungry during lunch. What about those kids? Do we just not care that they aren’t eating healthy? Does no one see that they are eating unhealthy because of school lunches? Another thing the article mentions is that “The standards forced some schools to stop serving peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” What’s wrong with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They are plenty healthy for kids. Peanut butter is protein. Sure some kids are allergic to peanut butter and it can be deadly to some kids. Many kids bring candy to school containing peanut butter in it and those kids who bring their own lunch to school may pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The kids who are allergic are not being harmed because they aren’t eating or touching it. PB and jelly sandwiches would be a good alternative to offer to kids who don’t want to eat the other lunch choices that

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