Fast Food Meats Higher Quality Than School Lunches

For so many American kids, a substantial number of their meals come from fast-food restaurant chains and the school lunchroom.  We've become indoctrinated to the questionable quality of fast food meats and other dishes but most people assume school lunches meet more rigorous standards.  According to a recently released study, they don't.  In fact, some fast food chains required higher quality meats than what is served in school.

Meat donations stock the larders at school pantries across the nation, thanks to the National School Lunch Program and meat donated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).  USDA regulations call for school meat to pass higher quality standards than retail meats sold directly to consumers and that it meet or exceed standards applied to commercial-grade meats.  Investigative reporters for USA Today find this isn't exactly the case.

The USDA requires beef served in schools to be tested for bacteria and other potentially dangerous microbes at least once during a typical day of production.  Retailers such as CostCo, Burger King, and McDonald's test their meat products five to ten times a day.

Raw meat without bacterial presence is an impossibility but the meat can still be safely consumed if these bacteria are kept in check.  Those checks vary significantly, however, between the school standards and fast food retailers.  Jack in the Box, for one, sets their safety level for bacterial presence 10 times higher, meaning 10 times fewer germs, than the USDA does for school lunches.

School kids eat the meat of spent hens, those old birds past their prime egg-laying years.  Spent hens that don't make it onto the plates of our school children end up in pet food and compost.  Colonel Sanders won't have them; KFC never buys spent hens and Campbell Soup says they quit using them ten years ago because of quality considerations.  Even without relying on these old, tough chickens our school kids eat, Campbell's third-quarter profits were higher than expected.  That bigger bottom line was attributed to lower costs for raw products - but not these old chickens - and higher prices at the supermarket.

Parents alarmed by this news of lax standards in school lunches can take heart.  A recent poll of family meal habits shows 60% of all American families enjoying dinner together at home five out of seven evenings and most of these family meals are cooked at home, where parents are free to set levels of quality themselves.  We can't always know what we might confront out there in the world but we can know that the better we take care of ourselves in the home, the better we'll be able to fend off any ill effects of the great unknown.

Enjoy a Healthy Movie

The current economic meltdown has many families opting out of a trip to Disneyland and in to the nearest movie theater where the Disney thrill can be enjoyed in relatively inexpensive, two-hour local jaunts.  Dismal headlines may make such a family outing seem like a fiscally healthy thing to do but health comes in many flavors.  A recent study seems to say movie-goers need to beware for nutritional health, too.

According to the study, conducted by the non-profit consumer awareness group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), popcorn doesn't deserve the healthy reputation it often carries, especially when it's popcorn bought at the movie theater's food kiosk.  True, popcorn is a healthy snack, loaded with all the desirable nutritional value of whole grain corn, but that's the stuff made straight from the dried kernels you pop at home in your air-popper, not the sticky, gooey, bright yellow stuff you find at most movie-house food counters.

The CSPI study ran laboratory analyses of popcorn samples taken from the nation's three largest movie theater chains - Regal, AMC, and Cinemark.  Samples were purchased at movie theaters in Illinois, Maryland, Texas, and Washington, DC.

What did they find?

You would have to eat three Quarter Pounder hamburgers from McDonald's, along with 12 pats of butter (that's 3/4 of a stick), to get the same number of calories as you'd get from eating a medium popcorn and soda at the movies.  Or three sticks of butter.  At Regal, where the popcorn packs the most calories, that's 1,610 calories and 60 grams of saturated fat.  The average adult American only needs about 2,000 calories each day so that leaves just 400 calories to dine on the remaining 22 hours of the day to avoid excess caloric intake.  Those 60 grams of saturated fat equal about three days worth of optimum fat supply for a healthy diet.

The CSPI study also suggests being leery of the calorie counts posted at your local movie theater, too.  Regal says its medium popcorn, before adding any buttery topping, contains 720 calories, or only about 44% the number of calories revealed in the CSPI lab analyses.

And that soda?  If you must have one, make it sugar-free.  The average medium fountain drink from these movie theaters supplied between 300 and 400 calories each.  That's enough, along with the medium popcorn, to satisfy the entire 2,000 calories per day needed by an adult.  Chugging Regal's largest container of soda is the same as sucking down about 33 teaspoons of sugar (500 calories).  That's almost 3/4 a cup of sugar in every large sugar-sweetened beverage.

Nutritional health isn't the only health that suffers here.  The CSPI study says you pay a whopping $12 for that medium popcorn-and-soda combo whereas it takes only a handful of pennies to purchase the raw ingredients that go into making it.

How do you enjoy that movie without risking fiscal and nutritional disaster?  Enjoy a delicious, nutritious family lunch or dinner BEFORE buying those movie tickets.  Then sit back and enjoy the show!