Image by chidorian via flickr

I have many fond memories of my school days. I remember my friends and some of the teachers I had that really made a difference in my life. I remember all of the awesome things that I got to experience at the arts focused high school that I went to. I remember how fun my senior prom was, and how thankful I was that my date for the evening had convinced me to go. I even remember how much I just enjoyed learning new things, but that may be a case of me looking back with rose-tinted glasses. If my grades were any indicator learning was the last thing on my mind in school.

What I do not have fond memories of, however, were the school lunches. In fact, I distinctly remember hating the cafeteria so much that I never set foot in it once after my Freshman year in high school.  (My friends and I would either brown bag it or go without and hang out in the theater or a sympathetic teacher’s classroom.) Not only was the threat of bullying higher in the loosely supervised cafeteria, but the food was horrible. Our school’s gastronomical oddities included strange, pinkish meat on rectangular slices of pizza, spaghetti with thick, rubbery noodles coated in disgustingly sweet sauce, and cheeseburgers made from some kind of textured vegetable protein that were often dotted with a slimy gray substance.

The school cafeteria was a pit of doom that smelled of death and sadness. It was my version of Hell, and a few years ago when I sent to my son’s school to have lunch with him I confirmed that nothing has changed. In fact, there were a few items there even more disturbing than I recalled.

What I didn’t know, though, was that the food being served in our schools was not just a threat to the emotional and physical well being of the poor children who actually have to eat it. The problem, it turns out, is far more acute than bad taste.

A group of retired military officers recently went on record stating that the Federal School Lunch Program in the United States could pose a threat to our National Security. Yes, you read that correctly. Forgot about terrorists or natural disasters. What you really need to be worry about is the Mystery Meat your children are downing every day in the cafeteria.

In all seriousness, though, the point that the military folks are trying to make is that childhood obesity has gotten out of hand in our country. So much so that we’re rapidly approaching a point where  it is becoming a challenge to find people who are in the proper physical shape to defend us from real threats. According to the group, obesity is currently the number one reason why armed forces applications are rejected, and the problem doesn’t end with recruitment. The military apparently spends “tens of millions” of taxpayer dollars every year replacing service men and women who are discharged due to weight related issues.

This isn’t the first time that the school lunch program has been brought up as being important to National Security, either. In fact, when the national school lunch program was enacted back in 1946 the original bill actually included language about the program being important “as a measure of national security.” At the time, though, the primary concern we had as a country was that our children weren’t eating enough.

There is currently a bill up for consideration in the Senate that would work to improve the nutritional value of school lunches and the snacks that are available for purchase in vending machines. It would also increase spending for nutrition programs over the next 10 years by $4.5 billion dollars. The U.S. Army is also working closely with schools to try and help students who wish to join the military to lose weight before they graduate from high school.

We all knew that obesity was a costly problem for our country, but it’s a bit sobering to see that it’s gotten to a point where we may soon run the risk of having a smaller fighting force because there aren’t enough fit people to do the job. And here I thought the most dangerous thing about school lunches was actually trying to eat them.

[Source]