Argument Analysis: The Pleasures Of Eating

Alexis
Mrs. Ault
AP 11
16 March 2014
Final Draft
When parents send their kids to school, they assume that their children will be given a healthy nutritious lunch. There seems to be a lot that we don’t know about what kids are given to eat now or days. This is something that the school boards need to look into and put a stop to it because of how unhealthy school foods really are.
Wendell Berry was right when he said “And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold…” in The Pleasures of Eating. Most students have no idea what is in their school lunch and where their food has came from. When schools purchase food they aren’t concerned about how healthy it is but how much they can get for the lowest cost. Which goes
with what Berry is saying how people are ignoring the quality of food.
There have been reports such as one in USA Today written by Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison, and Anthony DeBarros that said “school lunch meat is so bad that not even fast food restaurants such as
McDonald’s or Jack­in­the­Box will purchase the same meat that schools do.” If school lunch is so bad that it doesn’t even meet the requirements of fast food restaurants whose food already isn’t that great when are we going to change it?
In an article entitled “Quality of School Lunches Questioned,” Amy Buffenbarger explains how schools do not care about the quality of what they are serving:
The standards for meat sent to schools and retailers are so disparate that ground beef from a

plant with a salmonella outbreak this past August was recalled by retailers, but ground beef from the same plant produced during that outbreak was still shipped to schools.
Have schools really gotten so desperate that no matter what, they will still get food that is cheap enough for them to buy it?
As much as it is our job to know more about our food, it is the school boards job and
food safety experts to make sure that what is given to students at school is not only safe to eat but healthy too. There needs to be a policy where only fresh meats from local places are used instead of getting meat and other food items shipped to us from different places. And every meat item that is shipped to a school is properly examined and makes sure that there was no diseases that could have contaminated the food item.
The schools also need to make sure that their cafeterias are getting inspected as needed because according to the article “Quality of School Lunches Questioned,” Amy Buffenbarger stated that the inspection of school cafeteria’s is not of high importance:
The USDA is responsible for inspecting every school cafeteria twice a year, but the requirement is difficult to enforce. For starters, the USDA requires that states simply provide the number of schools that have been inspected, but don’t keep record of school names. Also, these cafeteria inspections are not free and the money is not automatically provided to meet the mandate. With resources for schools scares across the country, cafeteria needs are not often a top priority.
School’s might say that buying healthy food is not in their budget, but it doesn’t mean that we have to settle for less. Kids are more vulnerable to foodborne illnesses so school’s should be more concerned about what they are serving. Not all healthy foods are ridiculously expensive, but buying

meats that were exposed to diseases and still serve it in school is never
okay.
As Wendell Berry says in The Pleasure of Eating that “ It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot…” it is true, because if parents knew what the school’s are giving their children I am pretty sure that something would have been done and the school’s would have been forced to change.
In the article “Fast­food standards for meat top those for school lunches” by Peter Eisler, Blake
Morrison and Anthony DeBarros in USA Today, they state that “... the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called
"spent hens" because they 're past their egg­laying prime…” Once again, this is what is being served to students now or days. When will there be a stop to it?
There needs to be a change where schools are buying top­notch kinds of meat, because you can never be too safe when it comes to meat. When buying cheap food, it is not always promised that the cafeteria cooks will correctly cook the meat to kill any and all bacteria within the meat product. So meat that is sure to not be contaminated with anything is what schools need to be buying instead of getting what everyone else doesn’t want.
It is understandable that healthy food is more expensive than the kinds of foods that schools are buying today, but there needs to be a line between buying somewhat unhealthy foods and just buying foods that not even fast food restaurants will serve to people. There is no need to buy meats that might have been contaminated and come from old animals that would either go into the trash or animal food.
Because school is the only time some kids eat, that should be the most healthiest and most nutritionist meal that they could have. The school board and others should make sure that what they are getting is

giving them the essential vitamins they need and is also healthy for them.
It is time that school lunches need to become more healthy and schools become more cautious about what they are serving to students.

Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. “The Pleasures of Eating” What Are People For? Essays. Print.

Eisler, Peter. Morrison, Blake. DeBarros, Anthony. “Fast­food standards for meat top those for school lunches.” USA Today. 2009. Web.
Buffenbarger, Amy. “Quality of School Lunches Questioned.” National Education Association. Web