Maggie's Farm

Texan, while I always took that line with my own kids, I'm not always sure if it holds for everyone. If kids grow up on soda, chips and McD's, regular food can taste pretty flat and weird at first. Food habits are set at home, and can't be changed by fiat or schoolmarms (at least in elementary school).

Kids will change what they eat if the cool kids or their friends eat it, if they have dinner at a friend's family's house and it's different but yummy. Food is also tied up with class and parental aspirations, therefore the fighting....(the Obamas are successful strivers so are very strident about their dietary choices).

Personally, I believe in home cooking and mercilessly refuse pleas for fast food, and cruelly deprived my kids of bought school lunches. Parents CAN control what their kids eat until about first or second grade then the great lunchbox trading game begins. My kids brought lunch all through 12th grade because our culturally mixed up suburb provided such godawful greasy, low protein, hi starch junk lunches w no fruits or vegetables. The private schools had good food with salads and yogurt and freshly cooked meats, etc. but the public schools all serve mystery meat, all precooked nuggets, and frozen junk, heavy on the carbs and calories. They cooked to appeal to the tastes of the kids from the poor end of town (who liked fried and carb laden stuff).

My kids weren't especially fond of fruits or veggies, but I knew which ones they would tolerate, and built on those. Nevertheless, anyone who thinks they can control their kids has very deceptive kids....My kids used to come home and wax rhapsodical about the Oreos they had got in exchange for my homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. Or the white bread fluffernutters instead of my wholewheat hummus sandwiches...The main thing is that they get enough protein to stay alert in school. As long as they got eggs or porridge and a glass of milk in the morning and milk at lunch and something to fill in the cracks, they were okay.

But they did get all kinds of interesting home made goodies.

I would have been outraged if anyone had tried to say they HAD to buy lunch, as my lunches were always more nutritious than anything the school would have provided.

For me it was a small way to show love to them, so that when they opened their lunch they knew Mom was thinking of them. THey might grimace at the celery or the apple but they knew I wanted them healthy. But I never could do as fantastic a job as those Japanese Super Moms with their gorgeous bento boxes...

As far as school lunch programs go, it is sad but true that I in the grocery store I often see massively overweight moms on food stamps with scrawny hungry looking kids. I find myself suspecting that Mom eats up the food budget and that the kids actually DO go hungry a lot of the time. There are people who have kids so young, or without a partner to remind them of their duty to put the kids first, who will feed themselves first, not the hungry kids. I think it is actually these kids that school lunch programs are designed to reach. But we can't say so, because it would offend people. But the wish, I think, is to make sure that the kid at least gets a meal or two a day to fill up on, before going home somewhere where they just get the chips and dip the parent hasn't gobbled up.