“Nebo destrict battles with tastes for healthy food” |
| Nebo destrict battles with tastes for healthy food Posted: 17 Jan 2011 12:07 AM PST It is a fact of life for Bill Vest, Nebo School District child nutrition supervisor: If children don't like the taste of school meals, they will go hungry before they will eat them. "If it's not tasty, you're in trouble," Vest said. There are over 30,000 students in Nebo School District. The majority of them eat school lunch and many eat breakfast at school. Vest recently received the Agriculture Department's newly proposed school lunch guidelines. Those guidelines limit servings of starchy vegetables and require more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, nonfat flavored milk and less salt. It is also the first time calorie limits have been placed on school meals. Vest readily acknowledges the need for healthy eating habits and good nutrition. But he knows if children don't like what is being served at school they might bring a less nutritious lunch from home or skip eating all together. He recently tried serving fat free chocolate milk in the schools. He then visited lunchrooms and asked the children how they liked it. They hated it, he said. He tried the milk and agreed with them. Nebo SD went back to serving low fat chocolate milk. Children won't walk into school lunch tomorrow and find vegetable lasagna with whole-wheat pasta, broccoli florets and nonfat chocolate milk on their tray. "This is going to be a gradual transition to gauge the effects of the new guidelines and participation," Vest said. "The new standards could affect more than 32 million children and are crucial because children can consume as much as half of their daily calories in school," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stated. It could be several years before the USDA issues a final rule on the proposed standards, and schools are required to make changes. The new USDA guidelines would: • Establish the first calorie limits in school meals. • Gradually reduce the amount of sodium in the meals over 10 years, with the eventual goal of reducing sodium by more than half. • Ban most trans fats. • Require more servings of fruits and vegetables. • Require all milk served to be low-fat or nonfat, and require all flavored milks to be nonfat. • Incrementally increase the amount of whole grains required, eventually requiring all grains to be whole grains. • Improve school breakfasts by requiring schools to serve a grain and a protein, instead of one or the other. "Nebo District Food Services is committed to provide quality food served with warm hearts and happy faces," Vest wrote on the school district website. He sees it as part of his job to insure those happy faces are on both sides of the food service line. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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