Friday, November 6, 2009

All We Can Eat - The freakonomics of school lunch


All We Can Eat - The freakonomics of school lunch:

"The easy answer to why it’s hard to improve school lunch is money. The hard answer is, of course, much more complicated.

Yes, schools need more money to buy more fruits and vegetables and to pay staff to replace processed foods with meals made from scratch. But they also need students to want to eat more healthful foods. After all, if a school invests in fresh foods and the kids all head to McDonald's, nobody wins. (Well, except McDonald's.)

A new paper published in Choices Magazine, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, demonstrates how a close study of behavioral economics could improve what students eat. Better, it won’t cost most school districts a penny."