Customer Reviews

Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children

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This book goes far beyond good ideas for kid's lunches' recipes. The author calls for parents to become active in the school system, to prevent waste, to educate children about food and proper nutrition. This is a no-hype, no-false-promises book. It educates and calls for action. I respect the author for doing that.

Lunch Lessons points out a major flaw in the approach that many parents take to delivering the good life for their children: After buying an expensive house in a good school district, purchasing the latest SUV to drive the kids safely around, reading to them in the womb and before bed, and carefully providing nutritious food at home, many parents heedlessly buy hot lunches at school that are essentially garbage in terms of nutrition value. Between classes, those same cosseted kids can use their allowances to buy fast food, soft drinks, and junk snacks at school. Is it any wonder that the kids have trouble concentrating and learning?

In addition, there are other lurking health hazards. Pick the wrong lunch box, and the plastics in it may leak toxins into your child's food. Try to save a little money on food, and deadly pesticides and metals may be building up in your child.

For some reason, school lunches are usually bad . . . and bad for you. I remember living on maple bars (a form of doughnut) for lunch every day during junior high school. I'm sure my parents never knew what I was spending my money on. And I didn't know any better.

In Lunch Lessons, Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes share what they've learned about what can be accomplished by pushing for better school lunch programs. If you are prepared to be an activist in this area, you'll get the information and encouragement you need to take the right actions. I found nothing to second guess in that part of the book.

My main complaint came in the recipes. The authors seem to be insensitive to glycemic issues, even though they quote a lot of warnings about children being at risk for future diabetes. A typical recipe will feature "all-purpose flour" rather than whole wheat flour. The pasta is also not specified to be whole wheat. They go for 1% milk when nonfat milk would be healthier (let the kids get their good fats from healthy sources instead like cod, olive oil, avocados, cashews, and so forth). They also use sugar as an ingredient rather than some natural sweetener that isn't burned up so quickly by the body. I could go on, but the recipes didn't match up with the messages in the rest of the book. I graded the book down accordingly.

Why do you have to reform the school lunch program? Well, if junk is available at school, your kids are going to eat it. I know I did.

Think also where you may be shortchanging your children's futures by not considering the influences that they connect with. What are they watching on those Internet videos?