While sitting in their rancid cafeteria, many student have pondered about what goes into school lunches. Not just from interests and curiosity, but from the fact that many of their fellow peers are experiencing diarrhea, stomach pains, and vomit. Are school lunches really worth it? After some surveying within Cooper Middle School, less than half of the students have experienced food borne illnesses due to school lunches. Out of all those students, half have experienced diarrhea. Why is this happening? It all starts from the bottom, how the food is produced. Ever since 1946, schools have been providing lunches to students under the National School Lunch Act. Since then, there have been over 300 foodborne illness outbreaks across America influencing the learning of over 16,000 students. Many of these illnesses start from from processing plants that deliver meat to schools. Anonymous inspections reveal several chickens having yellow sores, a sign of infection and even hazardous fecal matter. Furthermore, inspectors also display machines that box and process chicken. They were dripping with filth and fat. To top things off, documents expose the plant of selling meat infected with salmonella. Even after testing and demands for improvement, the food plant still sold the meat (“How Safe Are School Lunches” np). Many …show more content…
To start, chickens from the plant are grinded into a pink paste. Every part of the chicken is included in the meat. The bones, the eyes, the brain, is all processed into a pink paste used for meat. Because the paste will be crawling with bacteria, it is flushed and soaked with ammonia (Mikkelson np). Ammonia is used to kill bacteria, and is found in everyday household cleaners. Since the food will taste abominable, it is artificially flavored. Next it is dyed to get rid of it 's pink color (Mikkelson np). That right there, is how the meat is precooked before getting sent to schools around the