School Lunch Programs Quotes

Growing up, I had a lot of family members who worked in the Dallas Independent School District, and they shared stories firsthand with me about kids stepping into the cafeteria hungry before practice, or waiting for the school building to open the next morning just so they could get a meal.

The federal government spends about $2.51 per child per day to feed them lunch. Out of that, you have to pay for labor, facilities, and administrative costs, leaving about a dollar for food. Imagine trying to feed yourself a nutritious meal every day with only a dollar. Very difficult.

Parents are working more than ever before and unable to monitor what kids are eating at home, and schools are selling astronomical amounts of junk food in order to supplement shrinking budgets. It's a ticking time bomb, and America's children are exploding.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

A kid cannot learn with an empty stomach.

We need social and emotional learning in our schools. I think we also need to get good food in the schools. We can't be feeding our kids Pop-Tarts and chocolate milk.

I'm a mum and I hate the thought of any child going a whole day at school without a healthy meal.

Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children in schools and improving school meals, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down.

Our kids didn't do this to themselves. They don't decide the sugar content in soda or the advertising content of a television show. Kids don't choose what's served to them for lunch at school, and shouldn't be deciding what's served to them for dinner at home. And they don't decide whether there's time in the day or room in the budget to learn about healthy eating or to spend time playing outside.

In 2020, no child should go hungry, and yet, in South Carolina 1-in-5 children do.

I'm a chairperson for 'No Kid Hungry', a campaign for poor American children.

When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day.

A vacation from school should not mean hunger for our children.

Mr. Speaker, less than 10 percent of our Nation's children walk or ride their bicycles to school, and too many schools continue to invite fast-food vendors into their cafeterias.

They make documentaries like 'Fast Food Nation.' The food our kids are eating in schools, the vending machines kids go to a lot, the portions of food that American restaurants are serving that are bigger than anywhere else in the world - it's kind of crazy.

It was surprising how many kids don't have lunches. If we all get behind this cause, it'll help a lot of the kids out there who don't really get enough food.

We need to reform our school lunch programs. We need to get healthy items into the vending machines.

I was every other kid in elementary school. I was eating packaged burritos for lunch... and pizzas - it's not the worst, but not the best.

The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.

As a chef and as a father, I am very upset by what's on the menu at most schools: chicken nuggets and tater tots and ketchup and pizza.

We're adults. We're the ones who should teach the kids what's good to eat. I don't think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we're feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I'd rather feed them better food.

Educators and school personnel work on the front lines of childhood obesity, but every day they face the challenges of budget cuts, mandated tests, rushed lunch periods, and a decrease in time for physical activity.

One in four kids in the U.S. faces hunger.

Agribusinesses should never dictate the quality of school meals.