Happy National School Lunch Week! Perhaps there are no holiday cards to honor this event, but in the world of Sodexo School Services and our thousands of clients and customers, this is a BIG deal and worthy of talking about. Each year, 5.2 billion school lunches are served in 99,000 schools. That makes about 31 million meals a day, and Sodexo serves more than 2.5 million of those nutritious meals each day to students and teachers across the country. Our customers have come to expect the best food, the best quality and the best choices in their school cafeterias. To us, providing breakfast, lunch, after school snacks and yes, sometimes even dinner to our customers is our mission as well as our job. There is no arguing the link between good nutrition and student achievement; the facts are in and it’s indisputable.

Are you feeling guilty about not packing a brownbag lunch for your child? Don’t! Here’s what school lunch can do for your child:

1. Lunch keeps kids powered up throughout the day. Because the average meal takes no more than about four to five hours to digest, skipping lunch can cause a student to suffer from afternoon sluggishness. Your brain and working muscles need quality fuel every four to five hours with a mixture of carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats in the right portions. The school lunch program is designed to help students get the right mix of foods and nutrients to keep them shining all day long.

2. Eating lunch helps with weight maintenance. Some students may think they will skip lunch to conserve calories and hopefully lose weight. This technique usually backfires for many reasons. One, students tend to be ravenous later and then overeat calories later in the day. Two, the body becomes more efficient at storing body fat because it perceives it is being starved. Three, both mental and physical energy can suffer. This could mean that performance on the big exam or during the big game could be seriously compromised by skipping meals. It’s not worth it to skip.

3. Lunch can be a fun time to unwind and be with friends leading to less student stress and stronger friendships.

4. Lunch ensures greater nutrient density versus calorie density. This essentially means that students get more “bang for the buck” or they consume more essential nutrients for health when they eat a complete meal versus just grabbing a snack high in fats or sugars. This type of snack – like potato chips or a cupcake -- is referred to as calorie-dense, which means it’s laden with calories but minimal nutrition. You may get the same calories in a school lunch as a single-serve snack, but the nutrition that comes with the school lunch far exceeds typical single-serving snacks. In fact, school lunches provide a third of the Recommended Dietary Allowances of protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, calcium and calories.

For us, school lunch is about student wellbeing, looking at the whole student and addressing nutrition, activity, community, achievement and environment.

An integral part of any school day is in the cafeteria.Not only is it a very social time for students, but for us and our school administration partners,  it’s about helping students make the right choices in foods. Our part in this is to provide the healthiest options, choices that students want and can afford. 

What do you do during your work day? Do you skip lunch or do you make sure you take a break? Are you a brown bagger, or do you buy your lunch? We’d love to hear from you.