Weak rules allow ultra-processed foods like Lunchables on school menus (2023)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
- Parents pack lunch in a box for their children, typically 2 to 4 sandwiches with cheese/ham/peanut butter/chocolate paste, a piece of fruit and some water, though occasionally some lucky kid brings some reheated pasta, wraps or sushi.
- Lunch is eaten at the classroom table, with one or two externally hired supervisors (so that teachers get an afternoon break). Parents pay a contribution of €2-€3 per lunch for the supervision (not for food), with subsidies for low income households. Note that the price of the food that the parents are packing (sandwiches and fruit) is often less than the price of supervision.
- The alternative is to go home for lunch. In recent decades this is uncommon for the younger children (not many stay-at-home parents), but starting around age 10 more children can manage this. (Average distance to primary school is less than 1km, so most kids can walk or cycle on their own.)
I only learned much later in life that even in Europe this model is a bit of an outlier, and that most other countries have more extensive lunch facilities in schools. Elsewhere in Europe there is debate to what extent school lunches should be universally subsidized[1]. In the Netherlands there are no school lunches to subsidize in the first place.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/09/04/school-meals-in...
You also don’t need to use a napkin to eat the burger in one of those places.
And generally food in the US kind of sucks... :D
You really don't want to know that answer, and you really don't want to google that answer. If you do, you might find sites that report McDs is the largest purchaser of cow eyeballs and other less commonly desired parts and pieces. Whether that's being reported by anything in the ballpark of real is up to you. But the jokes have been around for a lot longer than the interweb.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/burgers.html
https://casetext.com/regulation/code-of-federal-regulations/...
Source? According to The Economist's big mac index data[1] the price of a big mac in the euro area and the US is within the same ballpark (~10% difference max) regardless of how you measure it. If anything big macs are cheaper in the euro area than in the US. True, France gets lumped in with "euro area", but even if you compare against neighboring countries (eg. Switzerland or Sweden) the difference is nowhere near 2x.
[1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/blob/master/out...
In Europe we only have food that has a company label, except for vegetables/fruit and, in some stores, self-service stuff that you pour into bags (rice, peanuts, ...)
which is a boldface lie if you've ever been anywhere.
You could fix every problem with healthcare and Americans would still die early. Eat crap from childhood and there’s nothing doctors can do. Preventative care starts in the cafeteria.
There is a culture of crisis management in the US when it comes to all health issues. This is the direct result, along with all the inefficiency you mention, of private for-profit health insurance.
Have you seen what grocery store are stocked with? There’s not even enough food for everybody to eat healthy at once if everybody simultaneously saw the light.
If we really wanted to solve the problem in a major way, we would literally do things like cap the amount of sugar and HFCS producers had to work with, to pre-empt this educational revolution surely causing people to throw out their fruit loops and simultaneously adopt healthy eating. Most of the food industry is controlled by a small number of conglomerates, it would be easy, but we won’t instead we let PepsiCo kill by the millions.
It's really not a useful designation, and I think it's unfortunate that the UN has adopted it as a battle-cry.
Both pasta and beet juice are group 1 unprocessed foods. Combining group 1 foods does not create a group 4 food.
WHERE IS ALL OF THIS COMING FROM? Is there some kind of food lobby front organization flooding social media with "your freshly baked bread is ultraprocessed according to GUBMINT NERDS" in order to defang the word?
Here is a good definition of ultra-processed:
>Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (flavor enhancers, colors, and several food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable). Manufacturing techniques include extrusion, moulding and preprocessing by frying. Beverages may be ultra-processed. Group 1 foods are a small proportion of, or are even absent from, ultra-processed products.
"The manufacturing processes for ultra-processed foods typically involve techniques such as extrusion"
"along with the addition of various cosmetic additives, including those for ... colour."
Under the NOVA classification system there are 4 groups of food, from 1 to 4, with 1 being unprocessed and 4 being ultra-processed.
https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78...
>As far as I can tell, that kind of home cooking matches the definition of "ultra-processed".
It does not, except for the brandy. Distillation is by definition ultra-processing. However, adding a minute amount of brandy, or even a generous amount, does not instantly turn something into an ultra-processed nightmare especially if the ethanol evaporates and all you're left with are flavorings.
The bread may be ultra-processed if it includes high-fructose corn syrup or other mechanically/chemically-extracted ingredients, otherwise it is simply group 3 processed foods.
Kneading dough to make the gluten elastic looks to me like mechanical processing. And the use of microbes (yeasts and lactobacteria) to transform sugars and starches into simpler chemicals looks like chemical processing.
HFCS is made by what is essentially a single-step process: corn starch is treated with sulphuric acid to produce simple sugars. I don't happen to want to eat HFCS, but the stuff isn't so different from malt.
Part of my objection to this designation is the "ultra-" bit; "ultra-processed" means something like "beyond processed". The term is literally hype; "hyper-processed" would mean the same, but isn't used because it makes it obvious that something is being exaggerated.
Anything you can do with your hands isn’t extraction.
Can you separate fructose from corn kernels in your kitchen with your two bare hands and without molecular membranes, high pressure apparatus, and high temperature enzymes?
Be reasonable. People can and have made integrated circuits in their garage. REASONABLE persons do not consider it a common task performed by normal people.
But ultra-processed food is nothing new for school lunches, this doesn't really seem like news.
[1] - https://amp.firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/05/tacobell-beef-ingre...
* There's a grain of truth in it. Chemically designing food gives the opportunity to reduce costs by making it less healthy, and food producers should be held to account. We need better ways to quantify and assure the health value of food products. However-
* The term "UPF" is vague, making it not useful for the individual. This provides great opportunities for grifters to a) publish scary clickbait and b) set themselves up as an authority on what food or is not UPF
* It provides the perfect opportunity for status signalling, as wealthier people can invest money or time in artisanally produced or prepared food.
* It provides an opportunity for low efficiency producers to sell food as "less processed" at a high markup, irrespective of whether it is more healthy
The population is too large to rely on food produced or prepared artisanally, unless possibly they prepare it themselves out of raw ingredients. But giving up on economic specialism in the area of food preparation would be huge cost on society. Do we really believe that our economic system is incapable of enforcing the evaluation and optimization of the health value of food products? That would be a really basic failure.
but I agree. unless you're growing it yourself chances are all food is "processed", and while ultra processed foods is a nebulous title, it is also clear that there is definitely that some foods are debatably "meat" or "grain".
a lot of those Lunchables salamis, for example, have more in common with McDonald's chicken nuggets -- pink goo made from scraps, feet, necks, anuses, etc. -- that's shaped into something that resembles food, and then fried. on the other hand, that is real proteins we're throwing out -- an animal died for this -- and we should use every last scrap, esp. when living in a world where people still starve.
I guess I always assumed they weren't good for you but didn't think about it much. About a year ago I saw one in a supermarket and curiosity got the better of me. What was I missing out on? I was expecting it to be bad but was still shocked. The crackers are like sweet biscuits. What's with that? It's the same as McDonalds. Sweet everything. The other bits are just coloured protein-style matter.
But yet it appeals to children. A marketing department has sat together and designed something of no value except to be craved by children. And this is still available 25 years later?!
Food addiction is the cause of both obesity and diabetes type 2. Nobody wants to be fat and they know what causes it, but they can't stop eating. It's the textbook definition of addiction. And we're getting kids hooked, in their school lunch, no less. You might as well put some cigarettes in there too then wonder why everyone is addicted to cigarettes. It seems completely insane to me.
It makes me realise cigarettes probably didn't go away due to any kind public health campaign. They just went out of fashion. I can't believe they could make cigarettes go away but can't even get junk food out of schools.
It's a bit worse than that -- they were introduced in 1988-89, so they're still available 35 years later. I remember them from grade school at the time and they were (tasty) garbage even then.
I grew up on Lunchables and find myself picking it up once in a blue moon. Its not great but its those memories.
[1]:https://youtu.be/tyOQTzl2DcU?t=3316
That movie is 20 years old at this point. There have been a lot more efforts to improve things across the country but its been hit and miss. Naturally the blue states tend to care more about this stuff but even they are not having uniform results.
It may remove nutrients or make foods less "healthful", but there's no evidence that grinding oats into oat flour makes them suddenly harmful, or that adding that flour to a meat product makes it harmful.
There has to be some sort of concern at some point? I mean, the stomach might get a too easy job with the food almost predigested?
But mainly, "processed food" is probably just an indirect measure of a bad diet, lots of sugar etc
But again, that doesn't mean processing does harm - it's just your responsibility to include "whole" foods for maximum healthfulness.
Certainly grinding oats into oats flour does not make them dangerous for the body just because of the grinding process.
But it is probably that when they are ground, you use more of X to keep them together, and X is not good for the body. Not a poison but something that makes your body suffer when eaten in too much quantity (say, sugar).
So all in all the processed food brings to your body stuff that it should not in such quantities.
This is like a beer once in a while, which is fine, but two daily will eventually make you sick.
I can't never tell if comments like this are genuine confusion from overly-literal people with poor language skills, trolls, FUD from manufacturers or what.
Food is complex. A healthy diet is going to be a multi-variable equation including different fats (omega-3, omega-6, omega-9, etc), proteins (9 different essential amino acids needed in varying quantities), carbohydrates (with varying insulin and other metabolic impact by chain length), vitamins, minerals, fiber (soluble & insoluble). As well as uniquely modern things like artificial colors, emulsifiers, anti-caking agents, anti-microbial preservatives, etc. And then overall calories tailored to an individuals size and level of activity.
It's too many variables to include detailed, nuanced descriptions, so we need to use terms like "ultraprocessed" as a shorthand approximation to capture the diverse set of food products which cause obesity, diabetes, GI issues, cognitive issues, etc.
(Eg if you replace 150 calories of the closest unprocessed equivalent with 150 of this ultra-processed version)
They (probably) put more money into it and have the cultural attitudes to do all of the above.
Meal prices are quite competitive, kids usually eat at the canteen or at home, they don’t usually bring their own food
The food served at the canteens needs to be traceable, to avoid/mitigate food poisoning related issues. Once you start bringing external food into the system, you can no longer guarantee the safety of the other canteen goers, even if, theoretically, they will not be sharing their meals.
You're right that it essentially boils down to the dietary preferences of the parents. If the parents are ok with such lunch as described in the article, there isn't much a regulation can do.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. (It also doesn't meet the criteria for ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term, so it's a bit off topic here). The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.
Some chips are re-hydrated mechanically digested potato flakes with a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers, and most budget fish sticks are half miscellaneous whitefish scrap and half breading made from stripped grain and a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers.
So mileage does vary a little on that.
And when I buy chips, the ingredients list lists exactly two things: potatoes and sunflower oil.
The fishsticks that I buy ("iglo", the procter & gamble brand, and I get the gluten-free ones) list a specific species of fish, then rice flour, chickpea flour, salt, corn flour, canola oil, water, potato starch, starches from peas. Plus MSC certification. That doesn't really sound objectionable to me.
So now what?
The UK also has (or recently had, I no longer follow news from there) a significant poverty rate such that lunch was some school kids' first meal of the day, and free school meals was a significant political issue.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/01/number-of-uk...
The problem is that if kids don't eat lunch and go hungry that will negatively affect their ability to learn. As such offering less healthy food that they actually eat might very well be better than healthy food that they don't eat.
If the only meal is literal dog food, hungry kids will eat it direct from the container — a fact I know thanks to a real-life experience of an ex-girlfriend who was trying to be helpful and charitable but had a fit of middle-class naïveté after finding a puppy in a school in Kawangware.
There is a lot of "assuming the worst" going on in this thread and surrounding the topic of "processed foods" in general.
My concern is that turning our backs on industrial food processing is a luxury that many of us simply can't afford, either financially, or in terms of the practicalities of making our lives work.
There may be a lot of things that frequently happen in the processing of foods that lead to bad health outcomes, and the consumption of a diet rich in processed foods may strongly correlate with bad health outcomes, but saying "processed foods are bad for you" is doing a lousy job of identifying in a causative sense what exactly it is that's bad for you, and it's also a "luxury belief" in the sense that Rob Henderson has been talking about [1].
As an adult: it's bland by itself, needs sauce, or at least black pepper and olive oil.
Yup. I favour Mornay Sauce (a.k.a. cheese sauce). I have no idea why hating broccoli is a meme; broccoli-cheese with french fries is a nutritious and tasty meal.