I read a couple of interesting foodservice-related articles over the weekend. One was titled, “Are healthy school lunches driving your kids to junk?,” and the other was “Hospitals serving children’s meals packed with saturated fat.”
The first article talked about how a survey of school cafeterias found that revenues have dropped since districts tightened their rules regarding levels of fat, sugar and sodium in their meals. Management companies operating school cafeterias are reporting revenue losses of 10% to 30% over the last couple of years, causing firms to drop some of their school accounts.
The point of the article was that, now that school foods has become healthier, students are shying away from it in favor of meals from local fast food joints.
In the second piece, a survey of children’s meals served in hospitals nationwide, conducted by a group calling itself the Consensus Action on Salt and Health discovered that “out of a total of 451 items of food, 132 of them . . . would be classified as ‘red’ for saturated fat or salt.”
The survey compared items served in hospitals with the same food prepared in school cafeterias and showed, for example, that some of the hospital foods contained as much as 14 times more salt than a similar item in a school.
Prof. Graham MacGregor, the chairman of CASH, was quoted as saying, “When such progress has been made on what pupils are eating in school it is shocking that children in hospitals are being ignored.” The article closed with a call for national nutrition standards for hospitals.
Of course, articles such as these have become fairly commonplace in our newspapers and magazines as the fat against childhood obesity has intensified. However, the news stories I read last weekend didn’t come from American publications. The school foodservice article came from the Globe and Mail, a nationally distributed newspaper in Canada. The healthcare article came from the Boots WebMD Web site, which is based in the United Kingdom.
I don’t know whether noncommercial foodservice operators in the U.S. should take solace in the fact that they are not alone in this fight, or be saddened by the fact that obesity is becoming an international epidemic. In either case, both items are proof that it is indeed a small world we inhabit.