Healthy Vending Machines

Healthy Vending Machines

By: Graham Smith

Sentry Staff Reporter

Finally, the Arlington School System has made a step towards providing healthy food to students, but they have gone far from all-out. Likely the response to parents who have been arguing for more healthy alternatives to greasy pizza and sub-par meat, a healthy vending machine is now tucked into the corner of the cafeteria. It seems like more of an excuse for not serving actual healthy meals out of the kitchen, because we all know that if we are making a trip to the vending machines, it sure is not for a cardboard flavored nutrigrain bar or a bag of caramelized onions.

As it stands now, your healthy option if you eat from the school cafeteria is a salad, but if you want a substantial meal, you are out of luck in multiple respects. Not only are the meal portions hardly large enough to sustain the life of a mouse, they are also made of ingredients hardly intended to sustain life. The meat tastes like it might not actually be meat, but on the bright side, there is not much more for you to eat because there were only a few spoonfuls for you to eat in the first place.

The vending machine, if anything, was a cop-out. Schools are responsible for teaching students academically, so why avoid teaching good nutritional habits? While it may be more expensive to serve food of decent quality, the payoff makes sense. Instead of bringing in frozen meat filled with antibiotics and fillers, find meat that is locally raised and treated well, something surprisingly common in Virginia. On that same note, healthier vegetables are not hard to come by.  We have made a good step by starting to serve vegetables grown by our own club, Roots and Shoots, but we have stopped there.

Do not be misled by the random health-associated words plastered across the machine like “fitness,” “energy” and “positive.” Shockingly enough, you will find none of these things within the dismal food dispenser. To build up the fitness and positivity in the world’s next generation, and to work alongside the new vending machines in that quest, the county could establish a new requirement for students to take four years of physical education, a rumor that has recently been circulating.

If caramelized onions and weird chips are not enough to whip us into shape, maybe some extra years of gym will. The sacrifice of an actual class would be made so that we can get that extra 45 minutes of physical exercise in every day. Once you subtract the ten minutes it takes to change, the five minutes it takes to call roll, the twenty minutes we all (except for those two or three dudes in every class that love to show off their volleyball skills) spend on the bleachers, we are left with ten minutes of exercise. This would be as successful a plan for combating childhood obesity as the inspiring words on the vending machine.

Next time you try to bring healthy food into our lives, APS, bring your A-game, because this is not going to cut it. Students will rarely buy expensive bottled water when, less than two feet away, there is a water fountain. The ice cream trucks will have to be kicked much farther away for the new sandpapery chips to seem like an enticing option. Even then, however, we will still likely make the trek down the street for some decent snacks, doubling the exercise we get in PE.

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