School lunches are still unappetizing. Once upon a time, the Milwaukee Public Schools must have had a creative writer on the payroll, to make mystery meat on a stick sound good. In the menu published in the Thursday Milwaukee Journal, it would be mock chicken leg with a savory gravy, and it might be accompanied by golden glow salad on crisp lettuce -- that being a concoction of orange jello with carrot shavings.I wrote that ten years ago, concluding,
A lot has changed in fifty years. The Thursday newspaper might on occasion mention Italian pizza with sausage and cheese and a tossed salad. That's what everybody got, and if it was assembled out of government surplus ingredients, all we could do was joke about it.Perhaps not just joke, you might have heard of s*** on a stick, right?
Let's see if the current crop of students has more success.
For a year, high school students across Milwaukee have been advocating for better meals at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).I remember the Hamilton of years ago, when it was not yet a poverty pocket, in which an awful lot of fresh apples were discarded uneaten at lunch. Those might have been locally sourced. Back then, the school lunches were sensitive to cultural and religious needs: fish stick Fridays. Probably frozen.
On Thursday, students took that fight to MPS’ school board meeting as the board voted on a resolution to implement a “School Lunch Justice Task Force.”
That task force is aimed at allowing students a seat at the table when it comes to decisions and implementation of changes for school meals.
Eliza Palacios is a junior at Alexander Hamilton High school and a part of Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES), a student-led organization at the forefront of the fight for better school meals.
“I have a lot of friends that don't have a lot of food at home, and they depend on the school lunches,” shared Palacios. “And sometimes they won't even eat the school lunches, so they'll just go home hungry.”
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