Is Junior Eating Right in School?

Is it better for schoolchildren to bring baon or just eat in the cafeteria?

By Mike Gomez

Even as our culinary environment becomes more and more diverse and filled with unhealthy and less sensible food items, today's parents have more access to correct nutritional information and are acquiring greater awareness and motivation to ensure that their children eat properly.

    However, young children spend a greater part of their daylight hours in school where they are beyond the direct control of their parents or guardians, and are subject to the whims and guile of the "real world."

    Fearing that their children would not eat properly in school, many parents send their kids off with bulky and elaborate lunch kits, snack packs, beverage containers, and other paraphernalia.

    While these "baon-carrying" schoolchildren may be more privileged than some of their classmates, they often feel deprived of the more exciting prospect of buying their own food at the school cafeteria. It just isn't "cool" to sit down and open a lunch assembled by mom while the rest of the guys are horsing around with their trays at the cafeteria queue with the power to choose from the day's menu.

    Thus, many schoolchildren end up eating food sold at their school cafeterias. In some institutions, particularly some public schools, schoolchildren have no choice because the daily lunch is part of a school-imposed feeding program.

    Indeed, the issue of what food schoolchildren have access to and prefer is of grave concern to parents and school officials. Considering that they go to school five days a week for several years, the food they eat while at school has a significant bearing on their nutritional status.

    Safety and quality are two important concerns involving the food schoolchildren consume.

    Safety is the responsibility of the local government units whose sanitary inspectors impose standards for facilities and food handlers to reduce the risk of microbial contamination of food items. An old safety adage goes "cook it, peel it, or don't eat it." In a realistic setting, however, it is not always possible to abide by such policy.

    Quality is much more complicated, and is among the many responsibilities placed on the Health and Nutrition Center of the Department of Education (DepEd). Parents entrust their children to schools for extended periods every weekday. During these hours, the DepEd is tasked to ensure that these children are not only learning something, but are safe and healthy and eating properly.

Government Policies

    A 1995 DepEd memorandum issued by then Secretary Ricardo Gloria seeks to revitalize the supplementary feeding program to address undernutrition among over half of schoolchildren examined at the time.

    Acknowledging a positive correlation between learning capacities of children and their state of nutrition, the memorandum tasks public schools with rehabilitative nutrition intervention for these children.

    The weightier attachment to this memorandum, however, is a document referred to as Enclosure No. 1 or Guidelines on School Feeding and Canteen Operations. The contents of this document are quite surprising, considering what school canteens and cafeterias all over the country are getting away with.

    The memo spells out what the main objective of the school canteen should be--to improve the nutritional status of school children by making available to them safe and cheap but nutritious foods. But this seems so far removed from what one actually observes at some of the school canteens in Metro Manila.

    The dominant impression one would get is that the canteens are there to make money. Some canteens where elementary and high school students buy lunch and recess look like in-house counterparts of the commercial malls the kids frequent on weekends. A number of schools have allowed concessionaires and popular fast food chains to set up shop within the canteen area.

    Other schools do not welcome such commercialism, but still offer a wide variety of popular food items, apart from the rice-toppings and carinderia-type food cooked daily. The following is a list of food items available at the grade school canteen of a private school with an elementary population (Kinder, Prep, and Grades 1 to 7) of around 1,000 children:

• arroz caldo

• baked macaroni

• barbecue

• beef, pork, and chicken crunch

• cakes (butterscotch, chocolate, sans rival)

• caramel popcorn

• cheese sticks

• Chocolait

• chocolate chip cookies

• chocolate crinkles

• choco mallows

• crackers

• cream puffs

• doughnuts

• egg balls

• empanada

• ensaymada

• hamburgers

• hotdogs and cheesedogs

• ice cream products (all kinds)

• juices

• Kit Kat (candy bar)

• Kropek

• macaroni soup

• mocha java

• nachos

• palabok

• pastillas

• peanuts

• pop corn

• quail eggs

• sandwiches (chicken, tuna, cheese)

• siomai, siopao

• soft drinks

• spaghetti (carbonara, meat sauce)

• yema

    Plus, a vending machine sells canned soft drinks and some popular commercial snacks like Cubee, pretzels, bread sticks, and crackers. While the choices are diverse, it is noteworthy that this particular school has ceased selling the hardcore "junk foods" such as the highly seasoned air-filled chips, puffs, and cracklings, which provide satiety with little nutritional value. Hard candy is also not available at the canteen, although some chocolate bars could be bought.

    In some Metro Manila private schools though, parents are becoming more concerned with the opposite end of the malnutrition spectrum, which is obesity.

Travails of Enforcers

    The memorandum prohibits the sale of what it refers to as "convenient empty calorie foods." This definition covers not only chips and the like, but also the very popular soft drinks or soda pops. It also prohibits the sale of "artificially colored water sugar-based ice candies."

    Ms. Paz Buenviaje, who heads the Nutrition Division of the Department's Health and Nutrition Center, admitted that it has been difficult to prohibit the sale of soft drinks despite the explicit provision in the memo. She recalled that when the memorandum was issued in 1995, the Beverage Association of the Philippines contested the policy.

    "This made it difficult for the department because the association helps the schools by giving computers, and other things," Ms. Buenviaje disclosed. After the powerful soft drink lobbyists had done their work, top officials at the department, then under Brother Andrew Gonzales, chose to just "be quiet about it." Eventually, the memorandum was amended; its position vis-à-vis soft drinks sale softened sans obvious reference to any ban, Ms. Buenviaje said.

    Anyone who has frequented school fairs would recall that most of the booths are fashioned from prefabricated shed-like modules loaned by top soft drink companies. Consumption of soft drinks during such events is understandably higher than usual for the attending schoolchildren.

    Anyone who has frequented school fairs would recall that most of the booths are fashioned from one or two prefabricated shed-like modules loaned by top soft drink companies. Consumption of soft drinks during such events is understandably higher than usual for the attending schoolchildren.

    Nutritionist-dietitian Magdalene Cariaga of the Health and Nutrition Center has a different story to tell. In her five years with the department, she has never seen soft drinks on sale during monitoring and inspection visits to elementary schools. However, she is certain that soft drinks are being sold at these canteens, and were just being hidden from view during her visit.

    For some bizarre reason, education officials are not allowed to make unannounced or surprise inspection visits to schools. When they do, complaints reach the regional superintendents about harassment or display of distrust.

    It is obvious to inspectors though that adjustments are made in preparation for their arrival. Monitoring visits seem then to be a waste of human resource and bureaucratic energy since no one is really fooling anyone even as certifications are renewed and business goes on as usual.

    The bright side of it though is that some schools have chosen to comply with this regulation and removed soft drinks from their canteens. Others have removed junk food. The more astute school officials even enforce the ban in the immediate vicinity of the school premises, driving away hawkers and vendors of street food who await children as they step out of school grounds.

    While there is no association or junk food bloc or lobby group for these products, many schools persist in selling them because it is profitable for the canteen operators, Ms. Buenviaje observed.

    Ms. Cariaga noted from her monitoring sorties that violations are more rampant in Metro Manila than in the provinces where school canteen operators make less profits.

Golden Rule?

    The mother of all documents for ensuring proper nutrition of school children just celebrated its golden anniversary several months ago. DepEd Bulletin No. 6 dated February 1, 1952 instructs division superintendents to establish school lunch programs in all public schools.

    The aim was to help overcome nutritional deficiency among these children by providing them with this supplementary meal and by instilling in them correct eating habits. It also aimed to strengthen the nutrition program of the schools and serve as a character and good conduct educational exercise for the schoolchildren.

    School lunches were to be funded by the school's Parent-Teacher Association, the local government, civic organizations, or any person or entity willing to provide resources for the program.

    The bulletin specifies the types of food included based on their nutritive and aesthetic value, citing UNICEF's own school lunch program that provided a balanced 250-calorie "matching meal" for eight to ten centavos in 1949 to 1950.

    Spearheading a school's lunch program is the principal, with the assistance of the home economics faculty and the designated cafeteria teachers.

    The bulletin also lists prohibited food items deemed expensive, of poor nutritive value, or harmful to schoolchildren. While soft drinks were already prohibited, there was still no mention of popular "junk foods" principally because they had not been developed back in 1952.

    Ms. Buenviaje said that the 50-year-old bulletin remains in effect, even if it had neither been updated nor amended.

    Several recent innovations, however, have been ventured into. Among these is the school breakfast program in public schools, normally carried out in shifts for lack of space. The children who are in school early in the morning for the first shift are provided with a nutritious breakfast usually noodles.

    Another innovation, the milk-feeding program, is no more than a pilot effort despite the undue attention the media gave the unfortunate incident several months ago when a good number of first graders at a Pampanga school had fallen ill after drinking the milk.

    The national milk feeding program, as in many other countries, is excellent in principle. What makes it ineffectual in the Philippines is lack of funding.

    A measly PhP30 million was allotted for the entire program this year, with only PhP24 million to be released due to government budgetary problems. This will provide a daily milk dose to only 35,000 of the two million first graders in the country. That amounts to only 1.75-percent coverage.

    It is evident that attempts are being made by government to ensure schoolchildren get proper nutrition in school. But the fact that nutritional surveys still find atrociously high levels of undernutrition among these young citizens indicates that all is not well.