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Catered school lunches deliver wrong value?
August 23, 2007

My 5-year old started her first day in kindergarten yesterday. It means that from now on, I need to prepare her lunch everyday or order hot lunches from a school-contracted caterer. The vendor came to the school yesterday to showcase their healthy lunches. “Organic whenever possible,” they said. Great, I thought. This can certainly be a good alternative every so often when my daughter is sick of having sandwich and mini-carrots for two weeks straight. Unfortunately much to my dismay, the healthy, organic whenever possible, lunches come in small plastic containers, one for meat, one for vegetable, one for bread or rice. Remember airplane meals? Yeah, kinda like that, but with more containers. In addition, there is a half-sized bottle of water. I asked if they recycled the containers, which seemed sturdy and perfectly re-usable. “No, recycling is not a part of our business,” they answered. I wanted to pursue the conversation further but realized that the demo people weren’t the right ones to speak with. I did some math in my head. So for a week, my child will throw away 15 plastic containers and 5 water bottles. The kinder program has 30 kids. That would mean 22,500 plastic containers and 7,500 water bottles tossed away annually in the landfill. And that is all from a tiny kinder program. In the US alone, we have more than 50 million school-aged children. Even if only 5% of the kids are getting boxed lunches from caterers, it will result in 2.5 billion thrown away plastic containers and water bottles every year.

Ummm, thank you very much, I am not interested in the catered lunch. Kids learn from what they do everyday. A lot of my habits and values were taught when I was a school-aged child, eagerly absorbing everything. I certainly do not want my daughter to learn not to think twice about tossing things in the trash, after all it would be a trash-laden world she and her peers would inherit.

So I am back to packing her lunch everyday and learn to be more creative.

CindyW at Organicpicks

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