Get It in Line

Good choices start with the right menu.

At some point in your life, everything beyond that certain moment when you took your final high school exam fades into a haze. What was it like then? Living in that cloud of experimental reason. Did you make the wiser choices?

I did not. At least not when it came to food at school. At the time, I had a mad crush on Mud Buns. Like everyone else. A Mud Bun is basically a sticky, fluffy marshmallow covered in chocolate and squeezed between the two halves of a simple wheat roll. My mother, of course, preferred that I eat apples and homemade sandwiches, but I ran with the wild bunch.

Truth be told, it was one of the cheapest meals you could get in the cafeteria or at the bakery truck on the edge of campus. Alternatives included ‘red-white’ fries (with mayonnaise and ketchup), hot sausage with potato salad, and a wide variety of rainbow-colored sweet stuff. We knew this was not good because eventually everyone has to find out the hard way: Studying on a full load of sugar or a deep-fried potato wedge will only get you so far when studying gets tough.

Of course, not being able to buy nutritious food at school is a relatively minor problem compared to the fact that many children around the world have to start and finish the school day on an empty stomach. Every day. It’s hard to imagine how anyone can learn and thrive in school without food.

International organizations have started to work on the problem, but it remains a huge quest. Offering good food to children at school is only one of the challenges. It has to be affordable – free would be best – safe (preparation and storage can also be a big problem) and accessible. Not only as a product, but also as a subject.

The best way to go about it, I learned, is to be completely transparent about the whole matter. That means getting everyone to participate, ‘from root to green’, so to speak. The school, the parents, the teachers, the local politicians, the citizens. And last but not least, the students. Because if you are going to suggest to someone that they make good choices and build their life on them, it should be obvious why: education, health, community and a good life for you and those around you. In school, you should be taught the equation correctly, with all the numbers, factors and operations, right?

By the way, things started to change at my school when the student council finally got involved. They demanded better food. Which made a lot of people think. Myself included.

… eventually everyone has to find out the hard way: Studying on a full load of sugar or a deep-fried potato wedge will only get you so far when studying gets tough.

Side Notes:

• One of the best examples I have found on how to put nutritional change on the menu at school is the guideline for healthy school canteens from the Dutch Voedingscentrum (Netherlands Nutrition Centre). And if you are interested in how young people view ‘their food’, you might want to take a look at the Australian project ‘Fix my Food’ by the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University and UNICEF. Details on both topics can be found on the [InfoByteSized] page under ‘E’ as in ‘Education’.