Argument Analysis: The Pleasures Of Eating

Alexis
Mrs. Ault
AP 11
16 March 2014
Final Draft
When parents send their kids to school, they assume that their children will be given a healthy nutritious lunch. There seems to be a lot that we don’t know about what kids are given to eat now or days. This is something that the school boards need to look into and put a stop to it because of how unhealthy school foods really are.
Wendell Berry was right when he said “And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold…” in The Pleasures of Eating. Most students have no idea what is in their school lunch and where their food has came from. When schools purchase food they aren’t concerned about how healthy it is but how much they can get for the lowest cost. Which goes
There have been reports such as one in USA Today written by Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison, and Anthony DeBarros that said “school lunch meat is so bad that not even fast food restaurants such as
McDonald’s or Jack­in­the­Box will purchase the same meat that schools do.” If school lunch is so bad that it doesn’t even meet the requirements of fast food restaurants whose food already isn’t that great when are we going to change it?
In an article entitled “Quality of School Lunches Questioned,” Amy Buffenbarger explains how schools do not care about the quality of what they are serving:
The standards for meat sent to schools and retailers are so disparate that ground beef from a

plant with a salmonella outbreak this past August was recalled by retailers, but ground beef from the same plant produced during that outbreak was still shipped to schools.
Have schools really gotten so desperate that no matter what, they will still get food that is cheap enough for them to buy it?
As much as it is our job to know more about our food, it is the school boards job and
The schools also need to make sure that their cafeterias are getting inspected as needed because according to the article “Quality of School Lunches Questioned,” Amy Buffenbarger stated that the inspection of school cafeteria’s is not of high importance:
The USDA is responsible for inspecting every school cafeteria twice a year, but the requirement is difficult to enforce. For starters, the USDA requires that states simply provide the number of schools that have been inspected, but don’t keep record of school names. Also, these cafeteria inspections are not free and the money is not automatically provided to meet the mandate. With resources for schools scares across the country, cafeteria needs are not often a top priority.
School’s might say that buying healthy food is not in their budget, but it doesn’t mean that we have to settle for less. Kids are more vulnerable to foodborne illnesses so school’s should be more concerned about what they are serving. Not all healthy foods are ridiculously expensive, but buying

meats that were exposed to diseases and still serve it in school is never