In 2005, the California state legislature passed a bill for stricter nutritional guidelines on foods that could be sold at public schools. The new policy took effect during my sophomore year in high school, and I noticed an immediate difference in students reactions around my school.
Before the policy went into effect, a major income source for our student government was from the student store. There we could buy sodas, chips, crackers, and other snacks for rather cheap prices. Vending machines around campus were always properly stocked.
California has strict nutritional requirements about what schools can offer for lunch.
However when the new standards kicked in, snack bar sales plummeted. My old high school has an open campus lunch, and often vendors will come right up to the school boundaries to sell food to students during lunch time. Immediately, these vendors started selling all of the foods that the school no longer could. Students that couldn’t drive flocked to these like wildfire, and students that could drive went out to lunch more often.
Because the student government primarily used food sales to stay financially alive, they ended up in a massive debt when the sales dropped. School and class activities were cut down to bare-bones celebrations.
Twice a year, our school also held a food fair: all of the clubs would sell some sort of food. Of course, the clubs were held to the same state regulations. This greatly limited the types of foods that could be sold, meaning many foreign foods had to be substituted for healthy alternatives. So much for cultural awareness.
The biggest problem with the nutritional guidelines is that the only foods that can be sold rarely taste good. As a kid, taste is most important. If I’m eating a chicken sandwich, I want it to taste like chicken, not some healthy junk that tastes more like rubber. I didn’t receive discounted lunch, so my choice was simple:
Do I spend $2.25 and buy an awful school lunch, or do I go to Taco Bell and get a couple of burritos for the same price? It was really a no-brainer.
In the end, the stricter nutrition guidelines hurt much more than they helped. A lot of this was caused by our school having an open campus at lunch. What would have happened if we had a closed campus?
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