First Lady, Michelle Obama wants to fight obesity in America. Honorable challenge. However, in my opinion, at the cost of 8 billion $$, I believe a healthier school system and society can be achieved at a much lower cost to Americans.
School districts can hire nutritionists. By hiring a nutritionist for a school district and not one for every school, the salary for the nutritionist could be shared and overall school district costs kept low. If school districts are too large for one nutritionist, school boards could separate districts accordingly and hire one nutritionist for each division still keeping overall monthly costs low.
Nutritionists would need to take into consideration the foods grown in each area, what seasonal foods would be available and the ethnic foods of said area. A good nutritionist can create menus that all ethnicities would enjoy, which would help resolve a foreseen issue of parents complaining about their children not getting food fit for their ethnicity.
If parents complained to schools about the menus, the nutritionist could take into consideration the food parents would like to see on the menu and respond either by implementing it into the menus or by sharing with the parents why that dish or food would not be listed. If parents still don’t like the menus, the principal would then back the nutritionist by telling them they can choose to send their child to school with food from home in lunch boxes or send their child to another school.
Sure fighting obesity in schools is a little more complex than this, but it doesn’t have to be.
Nutritionists would create the menus, order the food for each school and hand down their menus to the school cooks. The school cooks and cafeteria workers, as long as they can read, follow recipe directions and make the food and then serve it. If anyone complained that doing new recipes would be too difficult, they would be replaced. How many women and men around the world cook new dishes by following recipe directions?
So many people would benefit from all this. The students would eat healthy and learn better eating habits and thus lose weight. The cafeteria workers would gain knowledge in creating new healthy dishes and also lose weight as most cafeteria workers eat what they cook and many suffer from obesity.
Can you see the forward possibilities?
If school students and cafeteria workers benefitted, so would teachers and other school staff, parents and America. It would be a domino effect.
All this could be the foundation behind a healthier America, and I believe a much cheaper way in fighting obesity in America.
How much did it cost me to write this blog? It took 30 minutes of my time. Pay me $250,000, enough to buy a house, and spread the word. I bet America would be healthier in a year’s time without having to tax $8,000,000,000 out of Americans.
NOTE: Here are some pictures I pulled off the Internet showing American school lunches and lunches elsewhere around the world. Look at the difference in school lunches in America and compare them to school lunches around the globe. While some countries don’t have healthy eating habits, most do. And amazingly, Americans have access to these foods at much lower prices than the countries that serve these healthy meals, yet serve cheap, greasy, unhealthy meals. Come on America, wake up!
KByte