Students hostile to school lunch, new federal nutrition standards

Students in multiple American states are protesting changes made to school lunches through internet media and by refusing to buy the lunches themselves.

Students and teachers in western Kansas produced a YouTube protest video that’s making its rounds on the internet. The video “We are hungry” parodies the hit song “We Are Young” by fun. to protest that the new federal school lunch guidelines widely promoted by First Lady Michelle Obama and implemented this school year.

The Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010, passed in 2010, directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to update school nutrition standards. It was the first update to the standards in 15 years.

Under the law, students in kindergarten through 5th grade are allotted 650 calories at lunchtime. Sixth- to 8th-grade students are allowed 700 calories and high school students are allotted 850 calories for lunch. The allotment was based on a study that found students ate roughly 787 calories of the 857 they were offered on a daily basis.

Brenda Kirkham, an art and publications teacher at Wallace County High School in Sharon Springs, Kan., came up with the idea for the video, according to a report in USA Today. She partnered with students and with fellow teacher Linda O’Connor – the person who wrote the lyrics for the video – to produce the clip.

O’Connor has not been quiet in her disapproval of the cafeteria’s new rules. She told USA Today students have been complaining for most of the year about the lunches.

“Most of our kids are active in physical education and sports, and they work on farms. That two ounces of meat daily wasn’t enough,” she said.

O’Connor also told USNews.com, “I have been a teacher for 20 years, and this is the worst that it’s ever been. Our kids eat at 12:06 p.m., and they are hungry by 1:30 p.m. This is not meant to be a political statement. We just wanted to let people know what is going on in the schools.”

“There’s just not enough,” Callahan Grund, a football player at Wallace County High, told the Bellingham Herald. “When you have chores in the morning and football practice after school, you need energy. … This doesn’t cut it.”

Meanwhile, in Mukwonago, Wisc., high school senior Nick Blohm, also a high school althlete, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel his body is out of fuel by the time the bell rings and he heads to football practice.

“A lot of us are starting to get hungry even before the practice begins,” Blohm told the paper. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

In an act of defiance against the new federal regulations, Blohm and many of his fellow students led a boycott against the cafeteria, opting instead to bring their own lunches from home. According to the Journal-Sentinel, 70 percent of the 830 students participated.

Two weeks prior to the protest in Wisconsin, protesting students in Plum Borough School District in Pennsylvania propagated their own anti-cafeteria movement through twitter. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the twitter hashtag #BrownBagginIt was trending in the Pittsburgh area in late August, a reference to a movement to abandon the $2.50 lunches and bring their own lunches in brown bags.

@Matthews1_will tweeted, “everybody in plum who is in elementary to high school start #BrownBagginit to protest against the district high prices and low quality food.”

Related: Twitchy.com roundup, “Hungry kids rebel against #MichelleOsSchoolLunchMenu”

Government officials and representatives have been silent on this issue. Kansas representative Tim Huelskamp told CBS News, “I think this is a great product of some small-town students and their teachers. I think decisions about the lunchrooms should be made there, should be made with the parents and the school district, not some bureaucrat in Washington.”

Huelskamp and Iowa representative Steve King have spearheaded an effort to repeal the age-aligned calorie limits imposed by the law, according to The Hill’s Floor Action blog.

Nutrition experts, on the other hand, told USA Today there’s not a lot of substance to teachers’ and students’ protests.

“Not all students are linebackers,” Margo Wooten, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told USA today, “and we shouldn’t feed them like we are.”

What do you think about this? Was changing the school lunch standards the best way to discourage childhood obesity, or is the law, in effect, starving America’s students? Is this a problem Washington should even deal with? What does your family do to promote a healthy lifestyle?

Landon Hemsley is the project lead for FamilyNews.com and a web producer for Deseret Digital Media. He is a graduate of Utah State University, is married to a wonderful woman, and has lived in the Intermountain West for the last 5 years.