School food in elementary

[Anonymous]

We’ll be starting at a MCPS elementary next year. Do most parents pack lunch or do the kids buy form the cafeteria? I’ve seen the menus and they look okay but not great. How is the food? Do the kids eat it?

[Anonymous]

My kids happily eat it.

That being said, there are a lot of kids at our MCPS school who have picked up some attitudes about it, since it's not seaweed chips from Whole Foods or low carb or whatever.

But I think it's fine and healthy enough, I have told my own children never to say anything snobby about it since some kids at their school have no choice.

[Anonymous]

My kid was ok with the food but not ok with the wait to get food so we pack lunch.

[Anonymous]

We pack 4 days a week and let DD get pizza on Fridays. It’s not great, if you have time go in and have lunch with your kid a few times, our school allows this. You’ll see what kids are eating firsthand. The menu is misleading btw. Menu, yogurt with blueberries. Reality, Trix artificially flavored sugary yogurt.

[Anonymous]

Definitely pack at first. At the beginning of the year, kids don't really get how the cafeteria works, and it takes so long to get through the line, that your kid may not actually have time to eat!

If later, they say they want to buy, show them the menu, and allow them to pick one or two days per week to buy. For my kids it was one kind of pizza (they didn't like the other), and then one liked some kind of nuggets and the other blueberry waffles or muffins.

It's not the best of food, so there's no way I would allow them to buy every day. Too much salt and sugar and fat

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We’ll be starting at a MCPS elementary next year. Do most parents pack lunch or do the kids buy form the cafeteria? I’ve seen the menus and they look okay but not great. How is the food? Do the kids eat it?

We pack a lunch. The lunches available for sale at the school do not accommodate special dietary requirements like gluten free, and they contain terrible ingredients like industrial seed oils.

[Anonymous]

Most kids hate it. I don't know how MCPS lunches got this bad but the kids turn their noses up at it at all grade levels.

[Anonymous]

I pack my kids lunch. I work in the schools and what they eat is crap…

[Anonymous]

My kids are not willling to wait on line. Pizza day is usually the most popular. It is at least once a week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most kids hate it. I don't know how MCPS lunches got this bad but the kids turn their noses up at it at all grade levels.

It’s bad because they have to offer a high number of free meals and the food has to be cheap and easy. That’s just how things work. There are high numbers of kids who rely on free breakfast and lunch. And not enough kids who buy lunch to subsidize those meals. Also because Michelle Obama really pushed for ‘healthier’ lunches, which ended up not working out very well taste-wise (again, because they have to be low cost).

Even the pizza is crap now. Used to be edible!

My kids tried the school lunch a few times and now just pack lunch daily.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most kids hate it. I don't know how MCPS lunches got this bad but the kids turn their noses up at it at all grade levels.

+1 many of my students would rather not eat at lunch

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids happily eat it.

That being said, there are a lot of kids at our MCPS school who have picked up some attitudes about it, since it's not seaweed chips from Whole Foods or low carb or whatever.

But I think it's fine and healthy enough, I have told my own children never to say anything snobby about it since some kids at their school have no choice.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has actually seen the lunches that MCPS provide would EVER describe it as “healthy enough”. My kids hate it, though it seems the middle school options may be slightly more palatable (or maybe more choice?) than elementary.

[Anonymous]

My daughter usually packs but my son usually buys. He actually seems to like most of it. He also likes the 3rd option-Uncrustables-so obviously he’s not picky.

[Anonymous]

Meh. Most days my picky 2st grader wants a packed lunch…but sometimes he’ll eat a waffle or something at school.

[Anonymous]

My kids all think it’s disgusting — and they are t that snobby, they will all happily eat McDonald’s. The lines are also really slow so often they don’t get their food until lunch is almost over. We pack lunch.

I have a friend who works in school admin and he is a liberal but was really unhappy with the Obama changes to the school lunch program — there are so many restrictions it’s incredibly difficult to find things kids will eat. At every school, the majority of it ends up in the trash. And he has kids that come from very low income families so he knows they need that food—but they still won’t eat it. Personally, I think vegetables are great—but feeding kids industrially processed and reheated vegetables is a great way to make kids hate veggies. I feel like that’s what happened to our parents that grew up eating canned peas and boiled cabbage.