The South Carolina Department of Education ruled that schools in South Carolina will be allowed to continue selling unhealthy food for school fundraiser. The only change to this policy is that instead of 90 days for fundraising, schools are allowed to have these fundraisers for no mor than 60 days (Hollemane). Through the use of these school fundraisers, students are being encouraged to eat unhealthy food. These unhealthy trends are repeated in school lunches and school lunch policy. Very few of these foods actually meet the health guidelines that are established by the government. The school lunch problem is not just local to South Carolina but also is a national problem.

In 2013, First Lady Michelle Obama began traveling across the United States to raise awareness of childhood obesity as well as encouraged children to get active and eat healthy (Steinhauer). Even though Michelle Obama has set up a model of the food pyramid, schools do not meet all the food group requirements: protein, dairy, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Many students receive most of their daily meals. It is not only the school lunches that are problematic, but also what is being put in the vending machines in elementary schools. Sugary drinks, candy bars, chips, and other junk food fill the vending machines at schools instead of having healthy options like juice and granola bars available for students to purchase. 

Opposition arises from whether if it is the schools duty to control what students eat and how teachers should allot their time for subjects. Some say parents have more influence in their children's eating habits than schools; that parents should get to decide. Parent tech the values of healthy eating while schools teach students the knowledge about food. Education on living healthy lives by getting active and eating healthy has been neglected in schools. The issue stems from the time that teachers have to spend on health. Teachers focus on teaching subjects such as math, science, social studies, and English. These subjects are a part of standardized test which determine district and school funding, teacher's job and promotion, and health is not a subject that is tested. It could be argued that children receive enough activity at school as well as education about being healthy through physical education (P.E.) and recess. However, in reality by the time the P.E. instructor has explained what the students are going to be doing in class or the students are allowed to have recess, the children are only allowed a couple of minutes of actually doing physical activity. Healthy choices that children make now will affect what happens to themselves in the future such as having diet related diseases. Diet related diseases can be prevented through the choices people make early in their lives. The biggest concern regarding school lunches is where the schools are supposed to get the money for the more expensive healthy food.

In the past children were faced with under-nutrition where today's children are faced with overweight and obesity but still malnourished. Schools are not doing enough to help combat the problem of malnourishment and giving children proper meals. Even though providing healthy school lunches to elementary schools can be costly, schools should make an effort to provide students with healthier lunches. Doing this would help decrease childhood obesity as well as decrease diet related diseases that can occur from the food choices people make early in their lives. The government needs to help schools with funding and schools need to model proper eating habits as well as provide students with health education.

In recent years, schools have switched from facing the nutrition problem of under-nutrition to overweight and obesity in America (Borges, viii).  The Standard American Diet has had an impact on the switch from under-nutrition to overweight and obesity. Processed foods as well as fast food have become a common part of the American diet instead of home cooked meals. Even schools have turned away from cooking food to reheating food and slopping it on a plate for students to eat. In his essay about the farm and food policies in America, Wendell Berry argues that "the passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been process, dyed, breaded ...  prettified, and sanitized beyond any resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived" (536). Fast food advertisements have caused the American diet to change and encourage children to eat unhealthy. Schools have fallen into the trap of food advertisement. Students want food that they prefer such as French fries, fried chicken and chicken sandwiches which fast food restaurants promote and cause children to ignore fruits and vegetables.

 Childhood obesity is a serious disease that affects children. Childhood obesity is where a child is above the normal weight for their age and height. A major cause of children being overweight and obese comes from the Standard American Diet. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is the food that a normal American eats daily. Today's SAD does not contain all the nutrients that a body needs to be healthy. Most meals come from fast food restaurants or are processed foods full of artificial ingredients and chemicals that are not a part of a healthy diet. Schools struggle with food programs because the government creates unfunded mandates that schools have to follow. An unfunded mandate is a regulation that requires the local government or state to enact a certain action without the aid of money. Unfunded mandates can be taxing on a state or local government since budgets can be tight and local governments are forced to enact policies that they have no control over. 

South Carolina elementary schools are not exempt from the reheated food trap and childhood obesity. School lunch programs in South Carolina are controlled by the state through the South Carolina Department of Education. The Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 banned unhealthy fundraisers in schools though exemptions are possible (Holleman). A recent ruling made in 2015 from the South Carolina Department of Education allows schools to continue to sell chick-fil-a chicken biscuits for school fundraisers (Holleman). Schools are supporting fast food establishments by having unhealthy fundraisers which encourage children to buy unhealthy food so that the school can make money. Holleman points out in his newspaper article that South Carolina has a high childhood obesity rate, South Carolina is ranked third in the United States, that health advocates cited to the Board before the ruling was decided. Schools are faced with the challenge of paying for school lunch programs since lunch programs are unfunded mandates. As a solution, schools have fundraisers to raise money for programs such as school lunches and after school activities, which the federal government will not fund.

America's youth has the highest obesity rate to date. Since children spend over half of the year, 180 days, attending school a large part of children's diet is consumed at school. Accompanying that, each student is given the option to eat breakfast and lunch which is provided by the school. This amounts to 360 meals a year that children consume from the school. For some students, school meals are the only nutrients they receive all day. With this in mind, schools need to provide their students with nutritious meals so that students can develop properly as well as develop healthy eating habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. Perera et al. explain that "poor choices in childhood are core contributors to obesity and chronic diseases during adolescence and adulthood." Schools should help combat this problem since children spend a majority of their time in school. Doing this would help decrease the copious diseases that are associated with diet.

Even healthy foods have become threatened by these policies. Adding sugar and flavoring and dyes has become a modern-day problem. It appears nothing has escaped this problem, not even milk. Students are offered milk with their lunch, their options include: white, chocolate, and strawberry. This helps students receive their daily intake of diary but the thing is that it is full of sugar. Jamie Oliver explains in his TED Talk that in every carton of milk "is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite fizzy pops, and they are having two a day." Oliver has a wheel barrel full of sugar brought onto stage where he shows how much sugar a child consumes a day, week, month, and five years from just milk alone. People do not think about the additives that go into food so that it will "taste better" and encourage more people to consume it. It is a problem that is going to be hard to fix, one that is hard to come back from but not impossible. Additives in school lunches contribute to the obesity problem with which South Carolina faces.

Americans do not realize that the diet that they consume has a major impact on their health. Obesity and diet related diseases are the number one cause of death in America beating out homicide (Oliver). People are literally eating themselves into extinction. Ann Cooper argues in her TED Talk "we're really going to become extinct, because we're feeding our children to death." Fast food restaurants, processed foods, school lunches, even meals from home are causing health problems later on in life which can be fatal. Nobody wants to feed their child into oblivion but that is exactly what is happening when children are not educated on how to eat healthy foods. 

Education is important to help expose children to healthy eating habits not only at school but also at home. Parents work all day and would rather pick up something fast and cheap on the way home from work than prepare a meal. Children want to consume meals that resemble fast food or sugary food that "tastes better" than healthy food. Oliver conducted a test to see what children knew about healthy food. Oliver brought fruits and vegetables in to an elementary school and found shocking results. Most children could not identify what the fruits and vegetables were such as tomatoes, cauliflower, radishes, mushrooms, eggplant, and potatoes. Children are not being taught at school or at home what fruits and vegetables are and what healthy eating is. Health education is a subject that teachers would rather ignore than teach. Children are not exposed to healthy eating so they have no idea what it looks like or even have a model to go off of to help them prepare a nutritious meal.

Opposers bring up two key points to the controversy. First, how are schools suppose to get the money to fund healthy lunch programs. School lunches will be more costly and ultimately leave school districts "footing the bill for costly food going down the garbage disposal" (Wolfgang). People see healthy school lunches as a waste of money because they believe that students are just going to throw the healthy food away. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive than processed foods and let's face it; students are more likely to eat the foods that have additives that taste better. Mark Bittman argues that junk food should be taxed and with the taxes collected should then be used to create a subsidy for fruits and vegetables (583). Doing this would make it easier for schools to gain access to fruits and vegetables which could end up being cheaper if the tax is implemented. Secondly, it is argued that teachers should not focus on health education but instead spend a small amount of time on it or to just ignore it completely so that teachers can focus on subjects such as math, science, and English. Perera et al. conducted a survey that revealed a majority of teachers (52%) said competing academic expectations was a barrier for nutrition education as well as lack of time (48%), lack of suitable curriculum (36%), and a food environment at school and home that does not reinforce what is being taught in school. Math, English, and science are core classes and are thought to be more important because people believe that those subjects are what students need to be successful in the future. Health is just as important as core classes because it teaches students how to eat healthy and live healthy lives so that they do not develop health related disease or obesity. Backing up what children are learning is a major part of encouraging students to eat healthier. Reinforcement would solve the problem of children just throwing away fruits and vegetables and help students pick healthy meals outside of school.

Currently there is not much being done about the school lunches that schools are allowed to serve to children. The policies that are in place are not effective or exceptions are allowed. For example, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows exemptions for schools to continue to provide students with unhealthy fast food (Holleman).  Another problem is that there is no one to enforce these policies in schools. Further, since they are unfunded mandates schools do not have the money to pay for these policies so often healthy food policies are often ignore. It is obvious that something needs to be done to help children become healthy and live long lives. The government needs to make more of an effort to help schools and schools need to be more active in health education.

The government is not doing everything that it can do to help create reform about the school lunches and childhood obesity. People need to speak out and become political active since children's voices are not heard. Elementary aged children need people to advocate for their health so that children can receive the nutrition that they need. A good way to advocate for children would be advocating for having the government tax junk food. Bittman argues that the government can help lower the price of healthy food, which cost more than junk food, by creating a tax on junk food and using that tax money to create a subsidy for healthy food (583). Doing this would decrease the price of healthy food which would make it not only more accessible to schools but also to families so that students have access to fruits and vegetables at home as well. Instead of advocating for the nationwide tax that Bittman calls for, people can push for a local tax or state tax that still helps make healthy food more accessible to everyone, even families with low socioeconomic status.

Even if you fix the funding problem does not mean that children will eat this healthy food. Kids are going to pick the foods they desire to eat. Redden et al. conducted a study to find a way around the problem of children turning away from fruits and vegetables. They concluded that the best way to combat this problem would be to serve fruits and vegetables in isolation to children because presenting food in isolation, whether healthy or unhealthy, increases intake (Redden et al.). This is an excellent model for schools to base their programs off of to help students eat healthier. School lunch cafeterias would have to get rid of al la carte lines which allow students to purchase pizza, chips, sugary drinks, and unhealthy food choices as well as unhealthy food in other lunch lines as well. Slowly, schools should being to introduce fruits and vegetables by themselves to students so that students will begin to pick healthy food over junk food.

Health education is key for the movement of healthy eating in schools to be successful. Students need to be educated on how to live healthy lives and the consequences of unhealthy choices. Perera et al. suggest that health education should be incorporated into subjects such as math, science, and English to help overcome the problem of teachers not having enough time to teach health education. They do not talk much about how this can be done, but I am majoring in elementary education and have a few ideas on how this could be done. During snack time, encourage kids to bring healthy snacks like apples, oranges, bananas, etc. instead of chips and sugary snacks. Incorporate books during read aloud time that deal with getting active and eating healthy. Children relate to books that they read and would be more inclined to do something they have constant exposure to. In math, incorporate word problems that deal with fruits and vegetables. Also, if teachers want to provide students with a hands on approach, for example a teacher is trying to teach children how to count, have students do calorie counting. It will help students learn how to count and also give students a healthy snack. A good science experiment would be to have different fruits and vegetables set out over a certain amount of time along with processed foods. Allow the students to observe the change and decomposition of the food. They will physically be able to see how processed food is preserved and takes a long amount of time to go bad while the fruits and vegetables would be rotting. Education is important for students to have healthy lives and eat healthy and have a model that they can base their meals off of.

The effect of changing the content of school lunches to meals that contain healthier food will be astronomical. Since children consume two meals a day from school and those two meals would contain healthy foods, obesity which would decrease among the children's population in South Carolina. Also, diet related diseases would decrease as well from this change. Additionally, what children eat is important to brain development. Elisabeth Townsend conducted an interview with primatologist Richard Wrangham where Wrangham explains that the food humans consume plays an important role in brain development (527). During childhood is when brain development is at its highest. Children need to eat healthy food so that their brains develop properly.

Diet related diseases are the number one killer in America. These diseases begin during childhood with the food choices people make. These choices can cause childhood obesity which is a major problem in South Carolina. Schools are a major problem with encouraging students to eat unhealthy food which is why there needs to be reform in school lunch programs. Health education needs to be taught and schools and school lunches need to follow what is being taught in health education so that children will learn how to live healthier lives.

