Good for you

by Joan Herlong

Ever since my first shift at my teens’ high school “school store” nine years ago, I’ve had a hard time with selling.

I don’t have a problem with sales, per se, but I can’t “sell ice cubes to Eskimos.” Eskimos don’t need ice cubes. It would be a crime to convince Eskimos that they need any frozen confections.

Question: What if someone convinced Eskimos, a long, long time ago, that they wouldn’t be happy unless they buy ice cubes? Lots of them.

Would it be OK then to sell ice cubes to Eskimos?

What if selling marked-up ice cubes to Eskimos was part of a fund-raiser to improve Eskimo schools? Would it be OK then?

The conventional wisdom says yeah, if the ice cubes fund a cool cause.

I’m still not sold.          

The Eskimos are my kids and their fellow high school students. The ice cubes are myriad – more names, shapes and flavors of nasty candy and junk food than I can keep up with. There’s a new brand every time I clock in at the school store.

I work the breakfast shift once a month, mostly because I get to catch up on chat with my friend Donna.

You would not believe the drek kids buy for, or in lieu of, breakfast.

I remind kids wearing braces that they should not be eating Gummy Bears. They buy ’em anyway.

I suggest bottled water as a healthy breakfast alternative to Starbursts or Rice Krispie Treats. The kids glance at me for a second, and then order a bag of chips as a chaser.

The only items that come close to being “breakfast food” are Pop Tarts and muffins. Pop Tarts are flat, frosted junk food. The muffins are not whole grain, but processed, loaded with fat and sugar.

I worry that because kids are buying this junk from someone’s mother, the sale is stamped with an implicit seal of mother approval.

I have been reminded, politely, that I’m a volunteer, not a nutritionist. I have also been reminded that the store is a fund-raiser, and the “kids are going to buy it anyway, so it might as well be for a good cause.”

I don’t buy that.

Where, exactly, are students going to buy junk food at school unless the adults who run the place provide them with opportunities to buy it?

Instead, we should take the opportunity to serve the best interests of our captive student audience by serving them an entirely new alternative: fresh, healthy food.

 Based on empirical evidence from my own kitchen, if you provide fresh fruits, cheese, yogurt, milk and 100 percent fruit juices for snacking (and nothing else) kids will actually consume it.

We’re dealing with an obesity epidemic, and yet we’re selling fat and sugar to mostly overweight kids. There is something truly fatheaded about this picture.

You know that funny TV ad where a guy orders a double chin, some love handles and a side of blubber at a fast food restaurant? How is school store junk food any different or better?

We’re selling low self-esteem on a stick, pastel-colored premature puberty, heart-shaped early heart disease, sprinkled cellulite, frosted future eating disorders, and marshmallow-flavored man boobs. When we’re talking about our kids, and today we’re talking about so many overweight kids that it’s not even funny.

My own kids are skinny, but they won’t be thin forever if I don’t teach them proper eating habits now. And skinny is not an antidote to high cholesterol.

Skinny allowed me to think I didn’t need to pay attention. When I quizzed my ninth-grader about what she bought for lunch every day, she insisted it was “something healthy” from the school store. “Healthy” was a PB & J, a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of candy.

GROSS.

The bread resembles real whole grain bread in color only. The sandwich is really a smear of fat, sugar and salt between two squares of fat, sugar and starch.

 Gatorade is not “good for you” unless you’ve just run five miles and your electrolytes need recharging. It’s loaded with sugar and salt. The bag of candy was the only item on her menu not masquerading as something healthy.

I broke with my longstanding tradition and MADE LUNCH FOR HER. (I wish John Wooden wrote parenting books – “The worst thing you can do to someone is to do something for them that they can do for themselves.” But I made lunch anyway.)

Her cronies were stunned when she brought a bagged lunch. It was healthy: two hard-boiled eggs, a real bagel, a clementine, and 100 percent apple juice to drink. They were aghast when she said her MOM made it.

Worried, Mary Pat asked, “Is your mother… ill?”

I’m perfectly healthy, thank you, but what my kids have been eating is anything but. Whether our own kids are skinny, fat, or something in between, it’s time for us all to wake up, smell the toffee and throw it out.

Giving junk food to our kids is bad parenting. Selling it to kids, even as a fund-raiser, is bad policy. If you can raise a lot of money to support any school, I say good for you. But it’s high time we devise a fund-raiser that’s good for school and good for you, too. 

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