Keep it classy Denver Public Schools...

Honor MLK Jr. Day with fried chicken and collard greens.

all I'm thinking is that the lunch on the 20th would be a much better fit.

i'm not sure i see what's wrong with serving soul food on MLKJr Day. aside from the cholesterol, i guess.

no watermellon or grape soda?

Unlike the KFC post in on the GIFs page, this is fairly innocuous, imho. King was raised in Georgia and worked throughout the South as a pastor . Being from NC and having relatives in SC and Georgia, I relate to the food above as Southern, rather than exclusively "soul food" or black. I can see if the school added something like, as tadzi said, watermelon and grape soda.

I do agree with wingsie-the lunch on the 20th would have been a better choice and been less stereotypical due to existing caricatures that have used things like the food above (fried chicken, etc). Someone might have told whoever was in charge of planning lunches that the selection might be taken the wrong way. I hope it was an innocent "let's have Southern food" decision rather than a selection based on a stereotype.

Ah...it's good to see white people getting offended on behalf of our African-American friends.

don't they always? yet another way of saying, we know better than you....

^^^ Don't forget the cornbread!

I'm appalled by the lack of nutritional value of all days listed. Do they not have nutritionists on staff at Denver's Schools?

But ketchup counts as a serving of vegetables!!!

Seems a whole lot healthier than when I was in grade school. I don't remember having turkey wraps and chef salads.

Even better is that children have a myriad of alternatives to their unhealthy lunches provided by the vending machines scattered around their schools.

B-BAM! Thread over.

Care to point me in the direction of some of this criticism? All I can find on school lunches is that while the standards need to be updated, they're not completely nutritionally unsound, and there are a whole host of regulations schools have to comply with in order to meet the USDA requirements; menu designers would either need the help of nutritionists at some stage, or use the pre-made menus.

I'd have to agree with Sick on this one. My high school had a pretty damn good salad bar, which was my usual lunch fare. Also, I'm willing to bet that school lunches as a whole have improved from what we had, for the reasons he listed above.

-TM

My High School had damn good food, a lot of which was made to order. As for the shit served in middle and elementary school, I can recall the days of bouncing chicken nuggets off the floor to see who's bounced highest. The veggies were rubber and meats barely resembled meats. Closest thing to being edible was sloppy joe and well we all remember those things... Don't forget the half cooked sugar cookies or chocolate chip cookies! w00t!

Hey, what do you want for a dollar a day? Maybe it was $1.20 when I was in elementary school. I think it's about $2.30 now.

Still, school lunches went a long way toward keeping away hunger when I was a kid.

A lot of the problem now, I think, may be that while schools prepare the lunches that meet USDA nutritional guidelines, the kids don't have to eat them. They can choose to eat pizza, burgers, candy bars from the vending machines, or whatever every day if they want.

I'd say that's still sort of the same problem. If you don't serve edible food, of COURSE they're going to eat the burgers if they have the option.

Shit, I thought I had it good back in the late 90's.This menu makes the private school kids look like inner city kids these days (kidding). I could have an eat attack around the entire student center now!

At my middle school-freshness was a problem-I remember the mass vomiting scandal that the salad bar induced.

You're right about what ids are choosing to eat-I in my hs we scanned our IDs for lunch (deducted from an account), I knew a few people who would just throw the food away-so to their parents it looked liked they were eating at the cafeteria/healthy food.

A teacher blogs about school lunches.

Fair enough.