In general, whenever someone uses the phrase “school lunch”, it causes people to shudder. These meals often taste horrible, and are less than nutritious. It has been revealed that the infamous pink slime is actually being added to the ground beef served at schools. No one knows which schools have it.
Parents who choose to homeschool have many valid reasons for doing so. Maybe you want your kids to be raised in a culture that matches your faith. You can probably provide a better learning environment for your children that what is offered at many public schools.
Homeschooling means that your kids eat healthy food for lunch, that you have selected for them, instead of the dreaded school lunch. When you made the decision to homeschool, the school lunch probably was not at the top of your list of reasons for making that choice. However, now that some of the ingredients have been revealed, avoiding the school lunch could be included in an argument for homeschooling.
Have you heard of a substance called “pink slime”? It has been in the news lately because McDonalds, (and other fast food chains), have decided to remove the substance from their food. This means that foods served by McDonalds (and others) had at least a little of the pink slime in it. That’s a bit disturbing.
Pink slime is a phrase that was coined by Gerald Zirnstein, who is a microbiologist. Pink slime is made up small scraps of “meat” (mostly muscle and connective tissue), that has been salvaged from the floors of slaughterhouses.
It gets treated with a pink colored chemical that contains ammonia hydroxide, to kill pathogens (like salmonella and E. coli). After that, pink slime gets blended into ground beef and hamburger patties. The substance is regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which considers it to be “generally recognized as safe”.
School cafeterias, all across the country, receive pink slime in part of the ground beef that they serve to students. There is no way to know which districts are receiving it. The meat is not labeled to show which has the pink slime, and which does not, so there isn’t any way to tell. The USDA says that “no more than 15%” of each serving of the beef that kids are eating at school is made of pink slime.
Parents of kids who attend public schools are not being informed that the school lunch contains an ammonia treated product that had been scraped off the floor of a slaughterhouse. It seems that parents can no longer assume that the school lunch that is being served to their child is healthy, or contains actual food. Parents that homeschool won’t have to worry about what their kids are eating for lunch.
Image by Ben+Sam on Flickr