One day, while sitting in the cafeteria
at the casino where I used to work, I happened to overhear an argument between
two coworkers that made me laugh fit to bursting. Joe, a dyed in the wool
Republican who could have given Dick Cheney lessons in far right conservatism,
and Frank, a man whose liberal leanings ran somewhere to the left of Lenin,
were sitting at a table, loudly debating whether Ronald Reagan was, “the best
dang president this country has ever had the brains to elect” or, as Frank
would opine, “a senile old fascist who increased military spending at the expense
of public school funding and whose administration tried to classify ketchup as a vegetable to keep
the costs of school lunches down.” Frank went on to blame Reagan for the sorry
state of affairs that is our nation’s public school system including its
“nutritional and physical decline”.
“We’ve
raised a nation full of fatties thanks to that buffoon,” Frank stated adamantly,
“and it gets worse with every generation.”
It was
this latter assertion that had given me a case of the chuckles. Not because I
didn’t believe a politician or government organization could do something as
stupid as classify a condiment a vegetable. Live in southern Louisiana long
enough and you’ll get an education in bureaucratic ineptitude. Nor did I
disagree with him over the fact that children are less physically fit today than
they were when I was in elementary school. According to the National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), obesity prevalence among children and
adolescents has almost tripled since 1980. No, what had amused me was the
belief that nutrition was something that can be learned in a public school
setting, and the idea that a healthy diet could be legislated. Personal
experience has taught me that a well-balanced diet is not something that can be
picked up in an academic setting along with reading, writing, and arithmetic—at
least, not by that alone. Healthy eating habits start at home.
I grew
up eating my elementary school lunches during the Reagan administration. Back then, according to the laws set up by the USDA, a well-rounded school meal was
supposed to consist of at least one meat or protein—usually Salisbury steak or
soy burger, one milk—whole or chocolate—one bread, and two servings of fruit or
vegetables. “Fruit” was usually a tiny cup of fruit cocktail and “vegetables”
was almost always spinach or steamed carrots. I detested both. This was back in
the day when they served you what they had whether you liked it or not, as
opposed to choosing what you wanted. I remember sitting in the cafeteria,
stuffing my spinach into my empty milk carton, hoping the eagle eyed lunch lady
didn’t spot me. I’ll be the first to admit this diet of mystery meat, chocolate
milk, and fruit drenched in sugar wasn’t exactly a meal built for champions, but
even sans spinach, my school lunch was better than what I ate at home.
A
typical breakfast in the Griffin household consisted of a bowl of some sugar
coated cereal drowned in whole milk and a cup of coffee—I’ve been drinking
coffee since the age of five—with at least six teaspoons of sugar. If my mother
could be bothered to cook, it was either a plate stacked with syrup drenched
pancakes or greasy cheese omelets, fatty bacon, and a big bowl of grits mixed
with huge pats of butter. When mom was in diet mode, she ate oatmeal topped with cinnamon with wheat
toast on the side, but she never forced that stuff on
me or my sisters. If we ran out of cereal and all else failed, there was
usually some left over pizza from the night before.
Did I mention my family was big
into ordering take-out? Our drug of choice was pizza covered in pepperoni and
enough cheese to choke an elephant. We ordered Chinese if we wanted to be
fancy. We went to McDonalds if we just wanted something quick and convenient.
There were also one or two restaurants nearby that had “call-in ordering” and “curb-side
take away” when I was a kid. I’m sure there are more now what with the fact
that Americans today spend 48 percent of their food budget on restaurant food,
according to the National Restaurant Association, compared to the 23 percent
spent in the 1950’s.
And, of course, there were the
snacks. Our cupboards were filled with boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes,
cartons of cookies—Chips Ahoy! Chocolate Chip was one of my all-time favorites—and
huge family-sized bags of potato chips. These food items were never regulated by
my parents. My sisters and I could eat them whenever the mood struck. It was more
like grazing than snacking. The American Academy of Pediatrics Handbook, suggests
school age children eat three meals a day with at least one snack in the afternoon.
This varies depending on the time between meals. Also, these snacks should be
rich in nutrients, not full of empty calories like the snacks of my youth. My
parents hadn’t read that book, apparently.
Some will take a look at this list
of diet no-no’s and blame the food and beverage industry for my appalling lack
of childhood nutrition. Some will go further, suggesting that we should be less
concerned about legislating school meals and more worried about regulating the
guys in charge of making and selling our food. It’s easy to see why. The industry
has been using faulty health claims (makers of POM and their claims that their
product can prevent cancer, heart disease, and erectile dysfunction) and misleading
marketing lingo (Low-fat, all natural) to confuse shoppers for years. And while
I’ll agree they can be a sneaky bunch, the food and beverage industry didn’t do
my parents’ shopping and I’m pretty sure they didn’t tell them it was okay for
me to eat pizza for breakfast either.
And I can’t entirely blame the USDA
or those in charge of public school nutritional guidelines and education. Even
with the problems of a dwindling budget, I can’t say they didn’t try. I
remember the day my second grade teacher, Mrs. Guidry, took it upon herself to
teach her students the importance of a well-balanced meal. She showed us
pictures of all the food groups and explained the necessity for moderation and smaller
portion sizes. Puppets were used as a teaching aid in the hopes of drawing in
our impressionable young minds and oh so short attention spans. It was a lost
cause for me. By then, I had already learned how to reach the snack cupboard by
climbing on top of one of the kitchen chairs. The first time I was caught doing
this by my dad, he asked me to get him some Oreos while I was up there.
I am now a grown woman with control
over my own shopping list, and I am literally trying to unlearn years of bad
behavior to keep myself from ending up dead of a heart attack by age forty like
my father, or stricken with a chronic, life threatening disease like type 2
diabetes, a disease my mother is currently struggling with. It’s a daily
battle, one I am slowly, grudgingly beginning to win with hard work, patience,
and a twelve-step-program mentality.
Looking back, I knew I was eating
the wrong things. I didn’t need Mrs. Guidry’s puppet show to tell me that. The
fact that I was growing wider faster than I was growing taller told me all I
needed to know, and my parent’s own declining health showed me what I had to
look forward to in the future. No, I didn’t need puppets or pictures of the
food groups. What I needed were parents who cared enough about my health and
their own to step up to the plate—pardon the pun—and tell me, “No more cookies!”
I didn’t need the school board to increase its budget and install a salad bar
in the cafeteria. I needed boundaries on what I could eat, how much I could
eat, and how often by the people in my family in charge of the grocery
shopping. It is the responsibility of every parent to instill healthy eating habits
into their own children. Without the parents acting as the gatekeepers to the
kitchen pantry, the school board, the USDA, this entire generation of
“fatties”, are all fighting a losing battle, and the nation’s children will be
the casualties.
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