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School lunches are the bane of my existence. My middle schooler and I are always in a constant tug of war over whether or not he should buy lunch at school (ick, I say) or make his own at home (yuck, he says). And once I have wrangled him into making his lunch at home, we argue about what is acceptable for packing. Needless to say, I end up with the task of making the lunch because doing the right thing nutritionally for lunch every day is hard.
Experts are telling us that what our kids are consuming in their lunches aren’t always good for them—too many processed foods, too much sugar, too little nutrients. So we try harder to make the lunches fresher, more natural and nutrient packed. The truly ambitious attempt to make them environmentally friendly, with less packaging and waste. But in doing so, our kid’s lunch sacks might be harboring another kind of menace--- harmful bacteria.
According to HealthDay News, a new study of preschool lunches found that more than 90 percent of homemade lunches were at an unsafe temperature long before children consumed them for their mid-day meal.
This means that long before children even begin to eat their lunches, their meals become ideal conditions for bacteria to grow at very rapid rates. So by the time they eat their lunches, the chances that they will consume enough foodborne pathogens to become ill are high.
These research findings are a big red flag for parents trying to do the right thing, especially for young children. According to HealthDay News, kids five and under are more susceptible to foodborne pathogens. But encounters with illness–causing microorganisms are a risk to every age. As Fawaz Almansour, a doctoral candidate and member of the University of Texas research team points out, when your child comes home ill—with a stomach ache or vomiting-- you are likely to assume that he contracted some kind of virus from a fellow student. The possibility that he is sick from his own lunch is not usually the first thought that comes to mind. Well, now it should be, unless you take some precautions. But effective precautionary steps, as it turns out, are not so easy.
[Click here to see the most common foodborne pathogens and how much they impact our health]
The USDA recommends that cold food be kept at less than 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and that no food be kept at room temperature for more than two hours. The UT researchers tested the temperature of individual perishable food items from 705 lunches 1.5 hours before the kids' scheduled lunch time. They chose to test at the 1.5 hour mark because children are often allowed to start snacking on their food prior to lunch. They discovered that more than 88 percent of the lunches were at room temperature and that only 1.6 percent of perishable items were kept below the USDA’s recommended 40 degrees.
You might think that this temperature challenge could be solved with an insulated lunch container and an ice pack. But no such luck. Forty-five percent of the lunches had one ice pack. And according to the study, even in lunches that contained multiple ice packs, food items did not maintain a safe temperature. In light of this, one might resort to leaving food in refrigerators, where available. Surely, this would help, right? Nope! The researchers found that even refrigeration didn’t solve the problem. They surmise that lunches put into refrigerators while still within in insulated containers, were effectively insulated from the refrigeration and thereby did not reap the benefits of being there. And for lunches placed in busy refrigerators, like in a day-care kitchen or a pre-school frig that is shared by many classes, the traffic and frequency of openings make the results spotty since those refrigerators often cannot maintain adequate temperatures.
The researchers did not study whether or not any illness resulted from the unsafe temperatures they discovered in their sample group. And so they cannot speak to the full implications of the study. This means we parents are left to figure it out. And with school right around the corner, we had better pow-wow over some options fast! Surely our best alternative is not to resort to only packaged and processed foods. This would be a nutritional travesty for those of us committed to sending our kids to school with a homemade lunch.
Camilla Saulisbury, The Enlightened Cook, offers an impressive list of healthy
