Menu reads as follows: Assorted Pizza, Tossed Salad and Fresh Apples.
What they got:
Need I say more?
No, but I will! The more I look at this serving the more upset I get. The thing that infuriates me is that once again they (Chartwells) made the meal sound enticing with 'tossed salad' and 'fresh apples' but somehow those items never made it to the school, again! Instead the kids got dry pizza, milk and juice. Half the pizzas served where french bread pizza and the other half the flatbread kind. Some were burnt and some not, but luckily the lunch lady did not want to serve the burnt ones. I think I'll be sending pizza from home from now on.
Chocolate milk is thankfully not allowed everyday, but I think on Pizza Fridays they let them drink it. A quick look at the labeling reveals that it contains 28g of sugar for a half-pint serving! Official US Guidelines advise, for adults, a maximum of 40g refined sugar for every 2000 calories consumed. I could not find anything that refers to kids but i'll keep looking when I have more time and report back. According to the guideline for adults 28g seems like a lot for a child to consume in 236ml of milk, don't you think?
Since I am going to start obsessing about ingredients let me list some for the above milk as taken off the carton: lowfat milk, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), cream, cocoa processed with alkali, corn starch, cocoa, salt, carrageenan, vanillin (an artificial flavor), vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3.
These ingredients are not far off from an organic brand I buy, a few differences noted: 1. The use of HFCS in the above brand, whereas the organic brand used unrefined cane sugar and 2. The sugar content above was 28g vs the 22g in the organic brand and 3. The presence of vanillin, corn starch and cocoa processed with alkali in the milk served at school. I feel like the less ingredients the better!
I am not saying we need to serve organic milk but I really believe we need to re-think whether or not we even need to serve chocolate milk for school lunch. I almost wish they would encourage the kids to drink water instead.
This makes me so angry. What the heck is that - because that is not pizza by any definition of the word. How can they even try and pull this off as "food", leave alone something kids would actually want to eat to just fill their tummies. Appalling!
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to investigate and document this. I just had my son take a look at the "pizza Friday" serving. That's the one day a week they advertise something he'll eat willingly. For a while he said no because it looked gross but now he's been trying it. He confirmed that what he gets at Brandt school looks exactly like that. I always wondered how they could screw up pizza. - NZ
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