Growing up, I had a lot of family members who worked in the Dallas Independent School District, and they shared stories firsthand with me about kids stepping into the cafeteria hungry before practice, or waiting for the school building to open the next morning just so they could get a meal.
Most schools have only a microwave or deep fryer, hardly the tools needed to feed our children real, fresh food.
Imagine a world where children were fed tasty and nutritious, real food at school from the age of 4 to 18. A world where every child was educated about how amazing food is, where it comes from, how it affects the body and how it can save their lives.
I'm a mum and I hate the thought of any child going a whole day at school without a healthy meal.
Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down.
That first responsibility as a school board member - meals for latch-key children - was absolutely critical in my understanding of the extraordinary problems of poverty.
Kids who participate in school meal programs get roughly half of their calories each day at school. ... This is an extraordinary responsibility. But it's also an opportunity. And it's why one of the single most important things we can do to fight childhood obesity is to make those meals at school as healthy and nutritious as possible.
My obsession with eating out partly comes from having spent 10 long years at English boarding schools in the 1980s, where food was pretty low on the list.
Remember, one in every five people in America goes hungry and there are certainly a whole lot of folks who are getting three meals a day who do know where their next week's food is coming from who are very sensitive to this issue who would like everybody to be fed. Add to that the number parents who have children in schools who would like their children to be eating healthy, wholesome food and don't want sugary sodas or chocolate milk to be chuggable at any moment of the day by their kids.
It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.
At school, I was brought up on revolting food - sausages, sausages and Spam - but at home, I had the most wonderful sponge puddings, which I don't indulge in very often now.
The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.
So you can say, 'Get Big Government out of here, and don't tell me what to eat,' but when kids are going to school, and they're being fed junk, we're pretty much telling them what to eat, and we're telling them junk is OK.
For the British working class, the restrictions of conflict actually improved their diet. Under Lord Woolton, the minister for food, a programme of free school meals was introduced. Priority supplies of milk were provided for pregnant women and nursing mothers, while orange juice, milk and cod liver oil were given to the under-fives.
I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread.
Pizza certainly has its place in school meals, but equating it with broccoli, carrots and celery seriously undermines this nation's efforts to support children's health and their ability to learn because of better school nutrition.
I really am at a place where I think we need to feed every child at school for free and feed them a real school lunch that's sustainable and nutritious and delicious. It needs to be part of the curriculum of the school in the same way that physical education was part of the curriculum, and all children participated.
Given the choice, I'm sure the majority of children would rather have a packed lunch than school meals.
Don't most of us agree that providing school meals to kids who need them is an overwhelmingly good thing? After all, nutrition is essential to proper cognitive development.
I would serve the food for the students in my school and in return I will get some more upma. At times, I would even take the food home.
I hope I live long enough to see every hungry school child in the world being fed under the so-called McGovern-Dole program.
Fish sticks and beef stew that millions of children love to hate.
Our children's health and well-being are dependent on our commitment to promoting food access and good eating habits at home, at school and in the community.
Agribusinesses should never dictate the quality of school meals.
You won't believe what our kids are eating in the public schools. It's just nuts.
