I have very fond memories of school lunches, going all the way back to first grade with a way cool Disney school bus lunchbox with a Thermos my mom would fill with hot soup. Yum. If we got to buy lunch (a special rare treat) my mom rested assured it was cooked, mostly from scratch, by other moms. The menu included familiar items, things we ate for lunch or dinner at home, like casseroles and sloppy joes and spaghetti. There were two choices of a veggie, a fruit, bread and awesome desserts like cobblers and pies.  And brownies. And cake.

Can you tell I spent my mornings watching the clock in grade school?

These were the joys of a private school in the '70s. Nowadays, school lunches are made off campus, shrink wrapped (each piece!) and sent to the school to be heated up. There’s no mixing, measuring or serving going on by an arsenal of hair-netted ladies. There are one (sometimes two) workers who set the bins out for kids to grab stuff out of. The waste from each child’s lunch (paper, Styrofoam, plastic) is phenomenal.

And the food is no better.

A U.S. researcher has recently proven a link between federal school lunches and childhood obesity. Duh. We’re feeding our kids nachos and pizza for lunch, counting the corn chips and pizza sauce as a vegetable, and calling it a day? Milk-a-what?

The study, by Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies in Atlanta’s Rusty Tchernis, cited children participating in the National School Lunch Program to have an increased likelihood of being overweight. It looked at the relationship between the federally funded school meal programs and obesity using data on more than 13,500 primary school students. Students were interviewed in kindergarten, first and third grades, and then again in later grades. And guess what? Those who eat these lunches are more overweight and have an increase in childhood diabetes.

I’m glad to see the media jumping on this bandwagon. Yesterday Rachel Ray lobbied for better school lunches and an increase in schools’ lunch reimbursement rates of 70 cents per child. The current Child Nutrition Act is only asking for a 6 cent increase.

And I was ecstatic when Jamie Oliver launched his Food Revolution. With a goal of changing America’s health by changing how we eat, the movement is more than a TV show; it’s a platform for change.

I’m lucky. I had a great experience with school lunch and my daughter’s school has the most amazing culinary arts program. But the kids I work with are eating junk, and I, for one, would like to see this change, pronto. We’ve all heard by now that our kids are the first generation predicted to have a shorter life span than previous generations. Let’s change that. Join the cause with me.

By Sharon Linde, Education Blogger for SmartParenting