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Comment by jinpa_zangpo | Hacker News Reader

School meals are designed around the US dietary guidelines, so they are important.

Dear god... have people read the packages on food they feed kids at school?

I counted 120 grams of added sugar a day in the school lunch of my son. Non-fat chocolate milk and sugar laden starches. Juice counts as a serving of fruit (and our pediatrician didn’t see a problem with that)

But hey... they’ve got a bag of 4 carrots so that will balance it out right?

Have you tried intervening, together with some other similarly thinking parents?

The tomato paste on a pizza was recently ruled a vegetable too, depending on its volume. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/15/142360146/pi...

Pizza == Vegetable

This has been a running joke / outrage in our house.

That is outrageous. Of course it's not a vegetable, tomato is a fruit.

> The tomato paste on a pizza was recently ruled a vegetable too, depending on its volume.

This has been going on for just about 40 years now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

To be fair, in the specific case of tomatoes, the more it's cooked/reduced, the more bioavailable many of its nutrients are. Tomato paste is just tomatoes. Usually these kinds of pizzas have tons of sugar in the sauce, though.

It never dawned on me as a child, but a couple things jump out at me now as to what I was fed in elementary school.

1. Your drink choice was milk or chocolate milk. Both had artificial sweeteners. Apparently, we had no lactose intolerant kids in the whole school.

2. We were fed lots of bread and potatoes. Even the main dish was often pizza or similar, which contains bread.

3. Green vegetables were exceedingly rare.

4. A kid in Kindergarten and a 6th grader got the same lunch.

In retrospect my lunch diet was atrocious due to this as a kid. You don't need to feed kids sweetened crap all the time. It's especially hard to justify given that all the public schools had complete kitchens that were used every day.

Basically, public school was just state sponsored day care where I grew up. Not only that, it was awful quality day care.

My mother worked in school food service and used dietary guidelines to help implement salad bars at a number of schools. Your results obviously differ and you should address the issue since it brings you so much concern.

We had different lunches in the 70s. Cooking on site, no fast food boxes brought in.

I’m sure they were still too much carbs, but they had protein and real vegetables, though usually canned.

You might find this story from a couple of years ago interesting:

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/school-lunch...

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