School Lunches: They’re Worse Than Ever!

    We all know how gross school lunches can be. There are TV shows, movies, and books that all mention the torture of eating lunch at school. Obviously, media exaggerates to make the entertainment funnier, but recently school lunches have met up with the media standards of a gross “school lunch”. They added something in the meat known as Pink Slime, or in other words, ground disinfected beef guts.

Pink Slime

           Right when the words “Pink Slime” and “lunch” are used in the same sentence, you know you must be hearing wrong. Sadly, that is not the case. The U.S. is buying more than 7 million pounds worth of Pink Slime to use as filler in the meat served at school. But the school lunches aren’t where the Pink Slime showed up first. McDonalds and other fast food restaurants recently announced that they were no longer using the Pink Slime in their burgers. That’s when the U.S. found out that these disinfected beef guts just met the standards for food safety, so they decided that it was okay to use it as filler in the meat products served at school

Gerald Zirnstein, a former microbiologist who invented the term “pink slime,” says that the purchase of ammonium hydroxide-treated beef cuts for school lunches doesn’t make any sense. Zirnstein came up with the term “pink slime” when he toured a Beef Products Inc. production facility in 2002. When the animal by product is mixed with ammonia, it has a pink appearance.

          

          I asked Madison Giovanni, a 7th grader attending Stoller Middle School, why she doesn't eat lunch from school:

gross school lunch meat

“I don’t eat lunch from school because the pizza is greasy and disgusting, and when you pick it up, the grease drips off of it. The noodles are hard, and I question if the meat they serve is even real. Half the stuff in the salad bar isn’t even thawed!”

           

       I asked Alexis, another 7th grader also attending Stoller Middle School, why she thought the food served at school wasn’t actually “healthy”: “They advertise it to be healthy, but it’s not. They add things in the food to make it look normal”.

       Clearly, kids that eat lunch from school aren’t getting the nutrition they need. Without getting these vitamins and nutrients, students will perform badly academically and behavior wise during school, which affects their whole future.

By: Anjali Panikar

Word Count: 398