How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid’s Lunch

Here's the case of penny wise, or so the schools thought, and pounds (literally) foolish.  Schools going the privatization route in providing cafeteria food and service are not seeing the health and education performance results they were expecting with supposedly healthy food in the schools.  Our children's health and education performance are suffering accordingly.

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits...The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that “many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium.” A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”  [The New York Times]