Posted on 06/23/2014 5:32:11 AM PDT by reaganaut1
One by one, the children at Public School 30 on Staten Island dumped their uneaten bananas into a bin in the back of their raucous cafeteria, each greenish-yellow missile landing with a thud. Thud. Thud.
John Sullivan, 9, a fourth grader, said bananas “make my stomach hurt.” Julianna Delloso, 6, a first grader, said “they taste funny.” And Joseph Incardone, 7, also in first grade, was almost gleeful as he explained why he, too, had chucked his unpeeled banana. “I didn’t like it,” he said.
The sad voyage of fruits and vegetables from lunch lady to landfill has frustrated parents, nutritionists and environmentalists for decades. Children are still as picky and wasteful as ever, but at least there is now a happier ending — that banana-filled bin is a composting container, part of a growing effort to shrink the mountains of perfectly good food being hauled away to trash heaps every year
New York City’s school composting program, kicked off just two years ago by parents on the Upper West Side, is now in 230 school buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and is expected to more than double in size and reach all five boroughs in the fall, with an ultimate goal of encompassing all 1,300-plus school buildings.
Depending on where the school is, the uneaten and half-eaten leftovers are sent to a compost heap at a former Staten Island landfill or to upstate New York or Delaware, where the slop is churned into nutrient-enriched dirt that farmers or landscape architects can buy. Eventually, the city will send some scraps to a wastewater treatment plant in Brooklyn, where “digesters” turn garbage into usable gas.
“There’s a lot of carbon in that banana that’s going to end up growing something else in your garden at home,”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Michelle Obama will pat herself on the back for requiring healthier lunches to be served, but how many of them are being eaten?
I have four dogs that “recycle” any leftovers I may have.
Amen. Hungry kids aren't real picky.
You took your empty tray to the lunch ladies to exchange it for dessert.
A lot of us learned the little trick of stuffing unwanted leftover into our empty milk carton, but enough of the lunch ladies were on to that gig it didn't always work.
I learned that once when one fished my milk carton out of the trash can, emptied it on my tray and asked if dessert was worth finishing it.
I opted to skip dessert that time.
Wouldn’t a homeless shelter enjoy unpeeled bananas ?
>> Michelle Obama will pat herself on the back for requiring healthier lunches to be served, but how many of them are being eaten?
Michelle’s not done yet. With her husband’s iPad and a phone call, there will soon be an executive order authorizing sedation and force-feeding of pureed vegetables and fruits to school children.
It’s for their own good.
unripened bananas do taste funny. Yellow green is unripened. Most kids love bananas if they are ripe. Epic fail.
This is such a classic example of liberal spin.
You don’t notice it unless you are looking for it and know the NYT is a master at it. What could be more innocuous than a story about how wasted school food is composted?
But it’s all part of making people feel that even though the forcefeeding of kids through Michelle O’s programs is a failure, and waste is incredible, the foolishness rampant, that’s ok, because good is coming of it - it’s being used for compost!
Libs leave the story without ever having their curiousity picqued as to reach into the heart of the matter - the important questions are never asked, the problems are smoothed over. The subtler modes of bias.
From the description of the bananas in the story it seems that the food service is serving unripened fruit .
If they gave me an unripened banana,I would also throw it away.They’re flavorless.They may as well feed those kids cardboard.
In order to prevent the “waste” of the taxpayers money an
“executive order” will mandate that—
1. Fully eaten meals will continue to be free.
2. Students “wasting good and healthy” food will be required to re-imburse the school for the value of their anti-social behavior.
Or allowing them to simply leave the fruit on the food line so someone else can have it.
The story should not be about what the kids are doing with what they won’t eat.
it should be about the fact that they are forced to take the food in the first place.
Not agreeing with the method of changing school lunches, but I think it is true that the traditional cafeteria food in elementary schools has not been very nutritional. For children in the inner cities, this IS a real serious problem as the food in school is the only proper food they eat in a day. The error of the Obama administration is to treat all American children as if they were inner city children.
Children will eat what they are trained to eat. BUT you cannot train kids to eat new foods unless they TASTE GOOD. Green bananas are NOT in this category, as any adult can testify, too! If the school had planned them to be eaten several days after their purchase, I think the children would not have protested as much.
Just a note about hungry children eating (I’ve lived in Nepal) - even starving children cannot tolerate good food because their systems have been so compromised. Many inner city children do eat starvation diets (soda pop and potato chips for dinner) and therefore in order to get them to eat better foods, it has to be done carefully. Again, an unripe banana will cause stomach problems in a child who hasn’t eaten other good foods. Common sense (of which the government is devoid) tells you can’t just change diets overnight or even in a one term and expect the change to be accepted. Dictating from on high is not the right method to achieve the goal the administration desires.
Again, just to be clear. I do not think planning school lunches should be a policy of the federal government. Local schools should be given the freedom to manage their own food budgets and plan menus acceptable to local tastes.
"Look! There's an upside to this mess!
What? The kids are still going hungry?
Well, at least we tried ! (Cuz we're liberals and we care, even if it doesn't work)"
That rumbling coming from the belly of your child is the sound of Mrs. Obama feeling smug.
This is what I tell people about those ugly wind generators that despoil the landscape -
the number one thing those devices generate is liberal self-righteousness.
Most of the fruit I see served in NYC Bored of Ed schools is third-rate. Undersized, scarred, etc. The bananas may not be ripe, I haven’t seen them up close, but they ARE smaller than any I see in my local supermarkets. Someone’s brother-in-law in the fruit biz is making a mint.
Sounds like my boys.
They never grab. They just sit patiently... their frozen stare... drip drip mouth watering.
My brother has a mastif that sits like that staring at someone eating. That in itself is not a problem but every time he sits like that his firetruck pokes out. Surely nobody wants to see that.
Yes. Unripened bananas WILL give you a stomach ache.
Way back when, they would have the kids dump their leftovers (being careful not to dump the utensils) and then would give the leftovers to the local pig farmers to use as slop.
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