School Lunch Daze

Wendy Griffiths packs healthy foods like applesauce and yogurt in the lunchboxes of her daughters, Eleri, 8, and Lili, 6. She often adds her own invention, "shish kebob fruit stick," which involves piercing melons, grapes, strawberries and apple pieces with toothpicks. She thought "it might make it more of a cool way to eat fruit." My oldest daughter, who sits next to Eleri at lunch, certainly thinks so. That's why I now find myself skewering chunks of fruit with toothpicks at 5 a.m.

That may seem extreme, but lunch is a big deal to parents, kids, the government-and corporate America. More children than ever are getting school-made meals or bringing pre-packaged lunches rather than brown-bagging it with homemade food. This year a typical U.S. 6- to 12-year-old will carry 41 lunches from home-down from 69 a decade ago, according to the NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based market research firm. And every day 54 million U.S. school children eat lunch. About 29 million of them participate in the National School Lunch Program, which costs the U.S. government $6 billion a year. (Of the 29 million kids, 14 million receive their lunch free and 3 million get it at a reduced price; the remaining 12 million pay for it.)

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Source - MSNBC