Food Theory: DON'T TRUST Your School Lunch!

quick question what was the best thing that your school lunch ever served seriously write your answer down in the comments below i'm just really fascinated by this topic because at my school when i was growing up the cream of the crop was known as cheesy dippers they were literally just breadsticks with a bunch of cheese melted on them and meat sauce to dip them in any other schools out there have those or something similar to that cause kids went crazy for these things they showed up on the menu like every other wednesday and the line was out the door for them and it always confused me because you know they're just breadsticks and sauce but little did tot pat realize at the time that those cheesy dippers as well as all the other hot dogs pizzas and mystery meats that lunch lady brenda was slopping down onto my plate were part of a grand conspiracy a cascade of lies and back talk so eat up while you can my friends after today's episode you'll never look at lunchtime the same way again hello internet welcome to food theory class is now in session that's right friendos it's back to school season and with it comes the return of lunch time the time when clicks are formed that can make or break your school reputation or you know you could always be like me and reject the entire social hierarchy instead forcing yourself to sit at each individual lunch table one at a time as part of a grand social experiment to see which social cliques respond most angrily to an outsider encroaching on their territory true story that was my eighth grade science fair project the self-classified sporty girls wound up being the worst they threw food at me and they physically tried to lift me out of my seat for the entire hour in an attempt to get me to move but science moves for no one i locked my legs under the bench and held on for dear life and you know what it was worth it them throwing food resulted in me getting some free fries that day and eventually i got myself a blue ribbon at the ohio state science fair so get dunked on there mallory courtney bethany catherine with a k and other bethany today though we're not here to talk about the social politics of the lunchroom we're talking about the food politics of the lunchroom you see school lunches have been in the news a lot over the last few years the usda recently increased funding for school meals some states like maine and california are now permanently offering free school lunches for everyone and of course the ever-present topic of whether school lunches are healthy enough for kids might seem like an odd topic to be a hotbed of controversy but school lunches and their nutrition are actually one of those issues that have a direct influence on how the next generation grows up and while i think everyone would agree that healthier is better the history of school lunches shows just how many competing interests exist in the competition over what little jimmy is cramming into his pie hole come noon 30 sometime between phys ed and algebra case in point this a tomato it's a fruit right i think that's pretty well established by now but for decades when i was growing up people were confused about that constantly thinking that it was a vegetable and their confusion was entirely justified because you know what it was so was ketchup so was pizza vegetable vegetable vegetables so how was pizza possibly considered a vegetable well it all began here in the school cafeteria so line up and hold out your tray i'm about to serve up some tasty history so you can start to understand the conspiracy behind the slop that students get served you see the origin of america's nationwide school lunch program actually dates back to 1946 when it was considered to be a matter of national defense no joke well it's true that some schools in the u.s did offer their students food as early as 1894. it didn't become something that public schools were legally required to do until the passage of the national school lunch act this was right after world war ii and during the war they found that a large number of enlistees who could have otherwise been eligible for service ended up being disqualified due to their poor nutrition yeah apparently the thing that got the government to stand up and make feeding kids a priority was realizing that emaciated americans wouldn't be able to die for their country so instead they decided to feed them up and then ship them out but regardless of the reasons that actually got the thing to start people immediately drew a liking to it parents across the nation were more than happy to take a break from slapping together some pb js so school lunch programs got bigger throughout the rest of the 50s 60s and 70s there was the school breakfast program the child and adult food care program the special milk program you know what i'm just going to come out and say there's something i inherently don't trust about the phrase special milk but not only did the parents like it the government did too because it solved another problem that they had namely that the u.s had itself a surplus of domestic produce and didn't exactly know what to do with it all i've actually talked about this in a previous theory about america's secret supply of underground cheese which if you haven't watched make sure you check out that episode after this one but basically school lunches were one place that they could offload a bunch of that extra cheddar feed kids while also using up your surplus cheese two birds with one swiss and cheese was hardly the only example of this i mean i don't wanna say that the school lunch program was just a convenient dumping ground for all the extra unsold food that nobody wanted to actually buy i don't wanna say it but you know a lot of times throughout the history of the school lunch program it kinda ended up being true for instance when the usda the u.s department of agriculture was faced with that dairy surplus they initially bought the cheese right and put it into the caves and eventually became part of my cheesy dippers fine but then they had a realization hey those cows that keep producing so much milk that we can't figure out what to do with oh yeah they're also beef suspicious look over at the cows and thus the whole herd buyout program of the 1980s was born school lunches suddenly took the form of burgers and pizza and anything that could make use of beef and or cheese so where then does the school lunch conspiracy come in nutrition you see even though surplus was certainly one driving factor dictating what was and wasn't getting served as a part of school lunches the other was nutrition school lunches had to at least be nutritious and because meal regulations still stated that kids had to be served two full servings of vegetables with their school lunch everything was just hunky-dory right right well if you've been watching this channel for a while you know that those who set the definitions around food don't always do so in an impartial way i mean our vision of a healthy diet used to look like this with the grains being the foundation of a healthy balanced meal conveniently it was also the cheapest type of food to serve up i mean i've already done a whole video about the various competing forces that got the food pyramid to look the way that it did but suffice it to say for a long time the guiding principle was eat more carbs come to think of it the food pyramid was created by the usda the same usda that was responsible for the school lunch program in the first place so the same organization that comes up with the lunches also gets to come up with the nutrition rubric that those lunches need to be graded on surely no potential for bias or conflict of interest there right well in 1979 usda guidelines were loosened to the point that nutrition standards for school lunch items only had to meet the minimum requirements rather than the stricter requirements of being quote unquote officially healthy so how minimum is a minimum standard well one usda official is said to have explained it as follows quote if a candy bar has only one nut in it we feel it is above our minimum nutrient standards in other words things ain't looking too great but at the very least they still had that two vegetable rule right that ensured that even though a peanutty baby ruth might have gotten served up as a side next to your mac and cheese you at least have some green beans and carrots on the plate to balance it all out well let's pull up what i said a few seconds ago quote kids have to be served two full servings of vegetables with their school lunch ladies and gentlemen it's time for us to play a game you see that's what the regulation said except it presents a problem produce it's expensive it's expensive to store at the correct temperatures it doesn't keep for very long periods of time it takes varying times to prepare and it needs to be shipped under proper conditions usually within specific seasons remember we're talking about technology from the late 70s and early 80s to get all this done as if that wasn't bad enough surveys of school lunch waste repeatedly show that vegetables are the item that kids leave unused and throw out the most often so in essence what you're dealing with is the food item that's generating the highest cost and also has itself the lowest return it's only there because parents expect healthy vegetables to be offered to their kids by the school it has to be on the menu the regulations say it then again words can be open to some creative interpretation so if you're a government agency in the 80s whose funding has just been slashed 30 by the president you're looking to save money on school lunches while still technically meeting the letter of the law where in this sentence do you think there might be some wiggle room that my friends is the game we're playing today i'll give all your budding politicians a second to think it over and while you're taking that second to come up with an answer make sure you subscribe to food theory no one else is serving up the bitter truth about the lies in your food subscribing is free and as we all know brain food is best food it's also zero calories all right you got your responses ready great solution number one the word right here vegetable vegetable already has itself a nebulous definition which is an episode to itself on another day but suffice it to say that the administration at the time was eager to use that murkiness to their own advantage in an attempt to meet the letter of the law and technicality but not necessarily in spirit the usda tried to list the ingredients of condiments to help boost up the number of vegetables that were being served to the kiddos in school ketchup well if you read the label it says tomato right there that's a vegetable right count it pizza well that's not just any sauce my friend that is tomato sauce count it pack it's a relish that right there friends is a serving of cucumber and that is the story of how ketchup almost became a vegetable almost if it seems to you like this school lunch program strategy was a wee bit on the cheaty side you're not alone it became a national debate that culminated in pennsylvania senator henry j heintz iii yep heinz is in the heinz brand ketchup dynasty apparently the family moved into politics go figure delivered a speech from the u.s senate floor saying quote ketchup is a condiment this is one of the most ridiculous regulations i ever heard of and i suppose i need not add that i do know something about ketchup and relish or did it one time the new york times described the whole thing as the emperor's new condiments and eventually the usda withdrew what would come to be known as the ketchup proposal except we're still playing this game and we haven't solved the problem we still gotta cut costs while meeting the letter of the law so let's look again at our sentence kids have to be served two full servings of vegetables with their school lunch if you can't change a condiment into a vegetable why not try swapping the labels on something else and that's when they found their new loophole this word right here serve the usda adopted new guidelines still largely in use today based around the offer versus serve model which is exactly what it sounds like instead of being required to serve a certain helping of vegetables what if school lunch programs were only required to offer a certain helping of vegetables and since kids were making the choice they could be safely relied on to decline said offer the defense of that position is that serving vegetables to kids doesn't do much good if the kids are just gonna chuck those vegetables right into the trash and so this became a major cost cutting measure schools could suddenly keep a bare minimum of produce on hand and justify it in the name of reducing waste by listening to feedback so was that the end of our ketchup is a vegetable debate yeah at least it was until today you see this whole sorted history got me curious does ketchup actually have enough tomato in there to count as a serving of vegetables like sure we're all fine to laugh at how stupid this whole thing was and acknowledge that it was a bit shady as far as cost cutting measures are concerned then again i've seen the heinz commercials they squeeze more than 25 whole red ripe tomatoes into a bottle so i reached into the fridge and pulled out my bottle of oh come on the uh heinz tomato ketchup to do some math based on info from eat4health.gov a single vegetable serving is 75 grams or one medium sized tomato now the ad here says that there are 25 tomatoes in a 40 ounce bottle of ketchup so you would assume that a whole bottle of ketchup is going to be served in 25 vegetables right not so much we don't know how big those tomatoes are they could just be 25 whole red ripe cherry tomatoes in 2015 heinz was actually sued in israel by local ketchup producer osem on the grounds that they utilize too much high fructose corn syrup in their products thereby not qualifying for the name ketchup under israeli nutritional standards reports from the case estimated that the amount of tomato in this tomato-based product was between 17 and 39 depending on the lab that was doing the testing luckily the nutrition label for heinz is much more helpful than the label for something like pink sauce it tells us that there are 148 grams worth of tomato to make a hundred grams of ketchup and yeah that might seem weird to have more tomato for less ketchup but remember that things lose mass as they're cooked anyway if you had a whole 40 ounce bottle of ketchup that would be about 15 servings of vegetables it would also be nearly 1500 calories to get those vegetables considering all the extra sugar and stuff in there we're also not accounting for bioavailability and all that so take the estimate with a grain of salt anyway a vegetable is a vegetable right so in theory in food theory by the numbers you could argue that by grabbing a bottle of ketchup and chugging away you were potentially satisfying at least the raw materials quotient of getting some vegetables then again remember when it came to school lunches the lawmakers were talking about ketchup packets so how many packets would the typical student need to eat in order to get a single serving of vegetables based on the usda proposal at minimum you're looking at nine eight in the third if we're being precise hope you brought some tater tots for that huge pool of ketchup pizza meanwhile yep still considered to be a vegetable actually if there's enough sauce on it in 2012 the obama administration unsuccessfully attempted to raise the minimum veggie requirements back up for the first time in like forever under guidelines first proposed in 2010 aimed at curbing childhood obesity frozen pizzas of the type typically served by the slice in school lunches could retain their serving of vegetables title if the sauce quotient was bumped up to half a cup of sauce as opposed to just two tablespoons except yet again people have problems with that conagra which supplies an estimated 75 of frozen pizza to us schools argued that over saucing their product would make the kids not want to eat it and then they spent 6 million dollars lobbying the government to convince lawmakers of that exact fact and thus school pizza remained the dry bready square that it's been for decades or conagra you could just go the route that my elementary school did and rebrand the whole thing as cheesy dippers no sauce required boom just saved you six million dollars in lobbying the government in the end the point of all of this is to show you how tricky school lunches really are there's always this tough back and forth happening between what parents want their kids to eat what kids actually want to eat how much schools and governments want to spend to make those sorts of choices possible and the companies who are involved that turn a profit over whatever the outcome is so in the end just remember this one thing the next time your mom tells you you need to eat your vegetables you say back i need to eat more of this pizza to get enough tomato paste so it adds up to a full serving if you manage to get away with that one you're gonna have yourself a great career in politics but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit or you know you could just not worry about any of that using the help of today's sponsor ritual i gotta be honest with you my diet is bad it's not quite cheesy dipper's every day bad but it's pretty darn close a lot of times i'm just grabbing whatever i can on the go with health and nutrition taking a solid back seat to speed and convenience that's why i choose to supplement my diet using ritual the obsessively researched and transparently made multivitamin and when i say transparent i mean every definition of the word each shipment comes with info on the way that their nutrients are sourced they're also transparent because you know the capsules are transparent ritual capsules are also delayed release which makes them gentle even when you're taking them on an empty stomach but again i appreciate because i tend to skip way too many meals personally i use their essential for min vitamin which contains 10 high quality nutrients like vitamin a d omega-3 and zinc but they also have themselves a multivitamin for women anyone over 50 heck there's even one specifically built for teens so you don't have to worry about getting your nutrients sucking down hundreds of ketchup packets also and this is just a small detail that i'm throwing in here but i appreciate it the capsules have a little mint flavor to them which i like because normally i hate just the taste of dry capsule in my mouth and if you're worried about cost well it's only a dollar a day to have 10 high quality nutrients delivered straight to your door every month no strings attached so fill in the gaps in your diet and your daily 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Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 7,663,567

Keywords: school lunch, school lunches, school lunch menu, kid lunches for school, lunch recipes, back to school, school, back to school recipes, gross school lunches, best school lunches, nasty school lunch, healthy breakfast ideas, michelle obama school lunch, texas school lunch, healthy school lunch, school lunch around the world, lunch box recipes, food, food theorists, food theory, game theory, film theory, eat the menu, binging with babish, delish, food tik tok, tik tok food

Id: 2yFAeKcR20c

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 10 2022