Assignment 2.2: Changes to Lunch and Breakfast Menus
Jerrell Cook
Professor Michelle James
English Composition 115
5/19/14

Changes are underway in your child’s school with the Breakfast and Lunch menus. The number of students who don’t eat healthy meals and we are going to change that. I understand that parents will wonder how these changes are going to affect their children as far as getting breakfast and lunch. We can gladly say that prices on lunch and breakfast will go up, which means kids will be able to eat a healthy meal in the morning and a lunch and kids will benefit from eating healthier.
We want to let our parents should know that they will not have to pay more money for breakfast and lunch. The prices will still be the same as they were before the healthy food change. Joanne Guthrie says in her article, that “For school year 2013-14, USDA will pay schools $2.93 per lunch served free and $2.53 per lunch served at a reduced price to low-income students and $0.28 for full-price lunches.” (Newman, 2013). This means that the Department of Agriculture is going to pay more money for the new foods that will be on the menu. Figure 1 below explains the change in costs of foods is healthier than foods that are good below. (Newman, 2013)

We understand that everyone eats a certain way at home. We just want to stop the growing crisis with our kids being obese. A recent study done by the Reader’s Digest, says that, “Children who regularly ate school lunches were 29 percent more likely to be obese than their peers who brought lunch from home.” (Reader’s Digest Editors, 2013, p. 1) This means that almost thirty percent of children who eat lunch at school are more obese that kids who bring food from home. An example of how your kids eat in a typical week according to Reader’s Digest is, “elementary school menus typically include chicken tenders, cheeseburgers, and ‘Pizza Fridays,’ with sides of cheesy rotini, mozzarella sticks or French fries. A healthy meal can be hard for students to come by in a public school cafeteria, and is especially challenging for school systems to provide.” (Reader’s Digest Editors. Pgh. 3) All these choices are good for cravings, but not good for your overall health. We just want to inform you of the foods that are prepared in school and why we need to change the menus.
We will start change the menus by going city by city to explain the changes and hopefully every school menu will be changed by the start of the next school year. We first ask our parents to talk to their children about what child obesity is and tell them why it is very dangerous and what they should be eating. The picture below shows what healthy eating is.

Figure 2: This picture explains what a healthy diet looks like (Willet, 2001)
This will give the students an understanding as to why they won’t see their favorite dish on a certain day. The first items we will change would be items such as fried chicken, hamburgers, and pizza. We start cooking more baked items and serve more fruits and vegetables such as apples, oranges, sweet potatoes, and carrots. These are things that some things that a lot of adults don’t eat. We want to reemphasize that these changes are for our children. These changes will consult with the United States Department of Agriculture to see whether or not they meet the guidelines.
Changing the meals has a number of good benefits. Some of them