Summary Of What's Wrong With School Lunches

The American society has little to no control over the school lunch program. America’s legislature has created a social injustice by letting a few large corporations control how children are fed throughout the school system. Average schools spend five-hundred dollars per student for their lunch for the year. The average amount spent per prisoner on their meals is over thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Ann Cooper disagrees with the current way the government is handling the student lunch program. Cooper’s hands-on experience with the school lunch program, statistical knowledge on government influence, and her research and development on sustainable foods all make her argument very persuasive in “What’s Wrong with School Lunches?”.

Cooper’s

As she unveils the health concerns behind most of the food that is prepared, the results are anything but healthy. One of the most staggering statistics that she has found is that U.S. Agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides on our food supply. Roughly, five pounds of pesticide is consumed by the average American a year. Antibiotics are one of the main reasons for E. coli in beef products. Today, seventy percent of all antibiotics come from the beef industry. The USDA and CDC regulate what Americans consume and decide if the food Americans eat is healthy for their bodies. The truth is, the government is pushed by large corporations so that they can continue their unhealthy and unsafe sales of food. The result of this happening is unhealthy citizens that will have long term health problems. Most Americans eat more red meat than vegetables, which leads to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart problems, and back pain. These problems that Americans have encountered from eating unhealthy food, can lead to the thing we fear most, death. Not all hope is lost, because there is a solution to this food

Cooper’s goal is to teach the younger generation what they need to do to be a healthy generation. The three main goals of her program are to grow, prepare, and taste. By growing food, children have a hands-on experience by witnessing food being grown and the process that is taken. After the food has been grown, she shows students how to cook these foods into a meal. This will allow students to have pride in their hard work and be able to create something great tasting. The most important key to Cooper’s program that can change students’ mindsets on food is to taste the food they create. If the students truly love the food, it will create a new mindset that this is the best way to go about our food service. American citizens must change their mindset on food for there to be change in our diet and food