I’ve been fairly anti-school lunch for a while, ever since the year when I finally let my son eat them through the fall and winter and in April he came down with Type I diabetes. I was suspicious of them before, of course, because I had eaten them once or twice as a kid, they tasted horrible then, and I couldn’t imagine they had gotten better since. What concerned me when my kids went to public school was that they seemed to think the cafeteria lunch was something you might want.

My feeling of malaise culminated as I was substitute teaching last Friday, when an entire class of 5^th graders elected to take the hot lunch and one of them said “Yeah! Free hamburgers!”

They are not “free,” kids, they are supposedly provided to the needy. School lunch comes out of the Great Depression’s milk programs, when children who were underweight were allowed to have a free milk at lunch during the school year because they were in danger of malnutrition. Parents who were struggling to feed their families welcomed this help with gratitude  because they really needed it.

The program expanded to include full lunches and then moved on to include breakfast. At some point, the nutritional quality of the lunches may have fallen, or the quality of the ingredients dropped. The scandal during the Reagan years regarding ketchup being counted as a vegetable was memorable, but unfortunately, I can’t see any signs, from the school lunches I’ve observed or the one I ate last month, that the overall quality has dramatically changed since I was a kid.

Effort after effort to wake up country to the need to provide better food in our schools have not yet been successful. And perhaps that’s because ultimately this is the parents’ responsibility. I want to enter a call to parents everywhere: if you can, try to make your kid a sack lunch. If you do:

1. You, not the school, will get his or her gratitude and loyalty, because you, and not the school, will be feeding him.

2. Your child will have better health if you simply refrain from packing food laden with trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup.

3, Your child will feel a sense of independence and the pride of not needing the school’s help.

How do I know this last? I guess I believe it because I always felt that way when I was in school. I was  safer, somehow, because my parents sent me a lunch to take to school, a kind of benediction on my school day.