Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
- This Raised My PulseHey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]
- Time for a Turnaround
- Edgy Veggie
I have seen the future, and it is salad
I believe in the power of salad.
This week, I had lunch with my sixth-grader at Broomfield Heights Middle School.
As I dished up my own lunch of fresh, local greens, peppers, celery and carrots, middle schoolers were lining up at the salad bar, piling salad in paper bowls and grabbing apples and peaches. The creamy, garlicky dressing I chose was cleverly packaged in a squeeze bottle with a small opening, making it impossible to get ladles full of dressing without spending a couple of precious lunch period minutes squeezing.
My husband and I sat down with our son and three other sixth-grade boys, all of whom had side salads and all of whom were eating them. A glance around the lunchroom revealed that sixth-graders eating salad is now the norm at this Boulder Valley school.
The norm.
Parents, need I say this is something of an earth-shattering development? Those of you who have been donating to Boulder’s new school lunch program and seeing your tax dollars pay for a portion of it, should take some time to appreciate what a big shift it is to have fresh food in a school lunch every day.
Salad is the norm.
Before this year, a typical menu might be processed chicken patties and canned fruit. Sometimes there were carrot sticks. School lunches certainly met federal guidelines, and staff did the best they could. But, like virtually every school system in the country, ours had let convenience and the high fructose corn syrup middle man come between our children and real food.
Yes, that food was a lot cheaper. But our decision to choose real food means that we teach our children an important lesson about what we value: food that when possible comes right out of the dirt here in Boulder County or from some well-tended dirt elsewhere, and most importantly, our kids’ health. It also shows what we don’t value: chemically formulated, focus-grouped “products,” kept “fresh with preservatives and dumbed down with salt, sweeteners and artificial flavorings. Everyone knows that’s the only kind of food  kids will eat anyway, right?
Tell that to the sixth graders I saw.
Experts say a child may need as many as 20 exposures to a new food to try it and like it. If  fruit and salad greens are something you’ve had trouble pushing at home, wrap your minds around this: From first through eighth grades — when students can’t get another lunch unless they bring it — your child will have by conservative estimate, 1,200 opportunities to eat fresh greens and fruit. That’s also 1,200 bites at the non-apple supplied by food processors that your child won’t have.
As the lunch monitor came to the table to tell us it was three minutes until the lunch period was over, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing 11-year-old boys hurriedly shoveling salad into their mouths.
Now that’s change I can believe in. It’s also a change I’d like to see in communites less affluent than Boulder is.  Boulder Valley administrators say they hope our program can be a model for the nation. It hasn’t been cheap. Local folks have opened their wallets to make it happen. As our kids thrive on better food, let us look for ways to reach out to other communities with fewer resources than ours — adopting a school cafeteria, perhaps, or offering expertise. You shouldn’t have to be well off to eat lettuce.
Salad Days: Can salad save the Earth?  No, but it’s a way to look at the ways that food and environment intersect. I’m eating a salad as main meal every day for a year and writing about it. Here’s to green eating  – often literally.
Tip Jar
Like what we're doing? Got a spare sawbuck? Help us pay for site maintenance and reporting and we'll think happy thoughts about you sometimes. $100 gets you a personal, paperless thank-you video from Dave and Laura! $500 gets you... five personal, paperless thank-you videos from Dave and Laura and a tote bag!Leave a Reply
