Kids Cuisine

School lunches don’t have to be junky processed foods like pizza, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets. A University of Minnesota study has found that school lunch sales don’t decline when healthier meals are served, and that more nutritious lunches don’t necessarily cost schools more to produce, according to the Associated Press.

“The conventional wisdom that you can’t serve healthier meals because kids won’t eat them is false,” Benjamin Senauer, one of three economists who wrote the study, said in the article.

This is quite interesting. For decades, schools have served unhealthy lunches. Surely one of the arguments to justify this was that kids won’t eat healthy lunches, and another was that it would be too expensive to go healthy. This study shows that neither has to be true.

In fact, the study did show that there is more labor required to serve healthy meals, but that extra cost is offset by the savings in buying healthy fruits and vegetables instead of pricier processed foods.

It would be great to see more schools serving healthy lunches. In fact, it would be even better if more schools collaborated with farmers to serve locally grown produce. Maybe this study will help schools move farther away from fried and closer to fresh.

Photo of school lunch © Jared Richardson.