School Lunches

The topic of school lunches tends to come and go when they appear in the news, usually caused by reactions of students and concerned parents who may witness viral videos on social media of expired milk or moldy bread that goes unnoticed but ends up landing on students plates. This causes widespread anxiety among parents to the point where it lands itself on many news outlets, who then question if appropriate tax money is being put towards feeding healthy and safe food for the young students who attend schools five days a week. For a while now, Michelle Obama had been the face of school lunches since she had altered the food pyramid after taking part in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act back in the 2010, which up to this day still carries very mixed emotions.

First Source

Rhetorical Situation

This peer reviewed journal stemmed from the very debatable yet fully understood topic of our nations school lunch. It analyzes to the core the many aspects that get taken into consideration when perspectives towards school lunches begin to form such as the student’s family’s opinions towards school lunches, along with data gathered such as different races and regions in the nation, but also the active participation in eating school lunch.

Purpose

The article is geared towards collecting all possible factors and data that can play into the student’s perception of what they deem as healthy. Multiple academics took part in putting this journal in efforts to “increase understanding about the healthfulness of school lunch and participation” (Tsai, Ritchie, Ohri-Vachaspati, Au). 

Audience

The audience for this article seemed to be a mix of researchers but also high-ranking school administrations that oversaw the school lunch programs being administered throughout schools. Throughout the beginning of the article, the authors brought up many establishments and government acts that would normally be unknown to an ordinary citizen which ruled out that this research paper could be directed towards the general public. It stated in the article “The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA) updated the US Department of Agriculture nutrition standards for reimbursable school meals to better reflect the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Although some aspects of the HHFKA were delayed, most standards for reimbursable school lunches were implemented in 2013” (Tsai, Ritchie, Ohri-Vachaspati, Au). This portion of the article showed decent extent of complex language enough to be understood by some people but also researchers who were diving into the topic of school lunches.

Genre

The genre of this source is a scientific academic journal because of all the different variable’s that were looked into and investigated to create this article. The authors made sure to use specific statistics which were shown in the form of tables but also label the constraints that could have affected the results in the end. The journal stated, “Multilevel models were used for a secondary analysis of data from the Healthy Communities Study, a 2013–2015 observational study of schools (n = 423) and children (n = 5,106) from 130 US communities” (Tsai, Ritchie, Ohri-Vachaspati, Au).

Stance

The journals position towards school lunches were that they believed most of the current methods within the school lunch system had been working because the student’s participation in school lunch meant that parents would follow on and have a positive mindset towards the school lunch. Research from the article also stated, “Studies conducted after implementation of the HHFKA found that eating school meals was associated with healthier dietary intake compared with eating meals brought from home” (Tsai, Ritchie, Ohri-Vachaspati, Au). This quote supported the journals stance that nutritional intakes in most school lunches were in fact more beneficial than lunches brought from home. Towards the end of the journal it brought up a constraint the authors weren’t able to get around which were “Students with positive perceptions of healthfulness were more likely to participate than were students with less favorable perceptions. However, an objective measure of the healthfulness of school lunch was not associated with perception or participation, which suggests that students may employ characteristics unrelated to nutrition to assess healthfulness” (Tsai, Ritchie, Ohri-Vachaspati, Au). This sounded as if students who already had a pre-existing understanding of what healthy food was chose to make the decision to eat healthy school lunches.

Second Source

Rhetorical Situation

The newspaper article challenged the disputed belief whether Michelle Obama had actually struck a positive change for the school lunch system when she had signed and executed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 which brought many changes to portion distributions of the food classifications such as meat and grain in the school lunch system that was being used then but still today. The newspaper article gathers quotes from researchers within the field of school lunches but also gathering information to form statistics on the nutritional value that is seen after the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act was placed.

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to compare the nutritional values in school lunches by addressing the data collection used to come to the terms that school lunch has improved significantly than what it had been like before, it stated in the artice “Looking at the nutrition value of 1.7 million meals selected by 7,200 students in three middle and three high schools in an urban school district in Washington state, the scientists compared data collected in the 16 months before the standards were carried out with data collected in the 15 months after implementation. They found that there was an increase in six nutrients: calcium, vitamin C, vitamin A, iron, fiber, and protein” (Chen). 

Audience

The audience from this article is inferred to be the general public meaning people who have a broad knowledge of school lunches and who may just be curios to the changes that have been affecting students school lunches. When looking into the publisher which was The Christian Science Publishing Science, I noticed a lot of the research that was done under science was corresponding to Christian beliefs and texts written in Bibles. But when I looked into where the author Cathaleen Chen worked from which was the Christian Science Monitor, I noticed that most of the articles on that site weren’t aligning with Christian beliefs but were just general news articles that gave brief summaries on current events in the science world today.

Genre

The genre for the newspaper article is that it is an investigative study on improvements on school lunches because of the different sources that were brought together and nearly all support current nutritional values in school lunches. Yet it also holds an opinion towards school lunches seen since the beginning of the article supporting the improvement’s on school lunches unlike the previous source which was a peer reviewed journal. It states, “Measuring empirical values by using the meals’ mean adequacy ratio (MAR), they calculated that nutritional quality increased by nearly 30 percent, from a MAR of 58.7 before the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act to 75.6 after implementation” (Chen). This quote supports the investigate side seen in the article because of its use of measured data to support the increase in school lunch nutritional value.

Stance

The newspaper article is aimed at standing with the changes to nutritional values in school lunches that all resulted from the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act that Michelle Obama signed. It mentions right from the start in the newspaper article “When healthier food standards were implemented in 2012, skeptics voiced concern that fewer students would be eating lunch at school. But now a new study has not only dismantled that notion but also found meals at school have indeed become more nutritionally wholesome” (Chen), deeper into the article it continues to say “ ‘We found that the implementation of the new meal standards was associated with the improved nutritional quality of meals selected by students..” (Chen). These two quotes clearly highlight that the stance of this article is backing up the change Michelle Obama had implemented towards the school lunch pyramid based on the supporting evidence.

Third Source

Rhetorical Situation

The publisher issued a response to the concerns of parents and other official who kept an eye out for nutritional values of school lunches by introducing and discussing the new bills and the changes they would bring by allowing “more flexible portions of proteins and grains in federal school meal programs while leaving in place the rest of the regulation, including the total calorie cap and its emphasis on fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nonfat dairy selections”.

Purpose

The purpose of this magazine article is highlight to parents and other concerned officials the changes to the school lunch regarding portion size that were all in results of a bill released by members of congress. As stated in the magazine article “Reps. Rick Crawford (R., Ark.), Tim Griffin (R, Ark.), Steve Womack (R., Ark.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) introduced a new bill, the Sensible School Lunch Act, in the House to make permanent the flexibility the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided schools in implementing its new school lunch rule when it comes to meeting grain and protein requirements”.

Audience

The directed audience was easily noticed because of the short length of this article when the author refers to what the representative said, “Crawford said the bill addresses concerns he heard from school administrators, parents, nutritionists and teachers last fall when he hosted a Nutrition Summit and gives individual school districts the flexibility they need to feed students”. This points out that this article along with the creation of the bill was from the demands of parents, nutritionists and teachers.

Genre

The genre of this magazine article is very educative on recent topics on relation to the impacts it has on school lunches. When looking into this article, there was a struggle to put an author to this article since the article was just out and about so I looked into their publisher which was Miller Publishing Company. A source I ran across claimed this publishing company no longer had an online presence such as a website, which led me to the conclusion that their articles were only presented in an online format by using other platforms to post the articles.

Stance

The magazine article doesn’t claim a direct stance towards school lunches either claiming that it was positive nor negative, yet it continues on and on to state quotes from representatives that all the support the recent changed to school lunches. The quote towards the end points this out “‘As we’ve seen time and time again, a national, one-size-fits-all strategy is not the answer when it comes to our school children, and their nutrition is no different,’ Cotton said. ‘This legislation empowers local officials to interpret national school lunch and breakfast nutrition guidelines according to their students’ needs’”.

Fourth Source

Rhetorical Situation

The author felt the reason to right this article but also pull snap shots from twitter was to address the responses students had towards the large changes to their school lunches that were in result of Michelle Obama’s changes. The author got more closer responses by looking through platforms such as twitter where younger students posted pictures and attached short little texts where they said their feeling but also criticized the meals in front of them.

Purpose

The purpose of this web site was to hear firsthand what the opinions of students were instead of delving into the common topic of nutritional changes in school lunches and the responses of parents and school officials. “School kids around the country are tweeting rather unfortunate pictures of the meals they’re being served at lunchtime” (Ferdman). These tweets included a photograph based on whatever the photograph was, a stance towards the school lunches could be inferred.

Audience

The audience for this site seems to be students but also a younger population who have an interest towards school lunches due to the reason that the artice was composed mostly of tweets which is something not as many older people might be familiar with. It stated in the beginning “The tweets, which have carried the not-so-subtle #ThanksMichelleObama hashtag, were being sent out at a rate of 40 per minute late last week, but started to gain momentum some 10 days back and are still continuing to be posted as of this morning” (Ferdman).

Genre

The genre of this site is a humorous yet educating article on school lunches because the author leans towards joking around with school lunches by also commenting on certain pictures of confusing looking food but also pointing out recent investigations later in the web site to discuss what actual changed were being made to the school lunch system. The Washington Post was the publisher for this web site article which told me this was a site that gave general up to date news, but it also pointed out that most of their articles were only shown electronically and could be quickly accessed on a phone or computer. 

Stance

There isn’t a general stance for this website since the author states research that I would normally say supports the schoo lunch system but also relates to students when sharing his confusion with students for not being able to identify what certain foods served were. For example he states his description to a picture of a meal by saying “In some cases, the sarcastic tweets have poked fun at the strange juxtaposition of healthy foods, such as fruit, and peculiar ones, like whatever this mealy substance is: Or this ball of — it’s unclear” (Ferdman) but then later saying “A recent study in Virginia found that school children were eating significantly healthier meals when the food was chosen by their school, rather than their parents” (Ferdman). This shows multiple perspectives that the author makes aware but also different stances that one would say.

Works Cited

Cathaleen Chen. “Is the Michelle Obama-approved School Lunch Initiative Working?” The Christian Science Monitor2016: The Christian Science Monitor, Jan 5, 2016. Web.

Ferdman, Roberto. “School Kids Are Blaming Michelle Obama for Their ‘Gross’ School 

Lunches.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 Apr. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/24/students-are-blaming-michelle-obama-for-their-gross-school-lunches/.

“Sensible School Lunch Act introduced.” Feedstuffs 25 Mar. 2013: 2. Business Insights: Global. Web. 2 Oct. 2019.

Tsai, Marisa, Lorrene D Ritchie, Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, and Lauren E Au. “Student Perception of Healthfulness, School Lunch Healthfulness, and Participation in School Lunch: The Healthy Communities Study.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 51.5 (2019): 623-628. Web.