ASFSA counters media claims that group is 'Flunking Lunch'

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 23, 2002

ALEXANDRIA, VA.--The American School Food Service Association has taken Time magazine to task for presenting what ASFSA felt was a "one-sided approach" to an article on school foodservice.

The article appeared in the Dec. 2 issue of Time. Called "FLUNKING LUNCH," the four-page piece focused on both the selling of high-fat fast food in elementary- and secondary-school cafeterias and the potential for outbreaks of food-borne illness in those same cafeterias.

In a letter to Time that ran on the ASFSA Web site, ASFSA president Gaye Lynn MacDonald said she felt the article was "a biased, negative portrayal of school meals that makes sweeping generalizations about the quality and nutrient content of food served in schools."

As of the Dec. 16 issue, Time had not published the letter.

According to ASFSA, the article was heavy on doom-and-gloom quotes, such as a comment from Kelly Brownell, director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Yale University, who said, "The school cafeteria is a toxic food environment."

And although the story also included such elements as a graphic that favorably compared one school lunch menu with a fast-food menu as well as vignettes about schools that are making an effort to provide healthful choices in their cafeterias, ASFSA officials said they were nonetheless upset.

"I was especially disappointed ... after I and other professionals spent several hours providing a Time magazine writer with information on the excellent record of school-foodservice programs," MacDonald wrote. "Instead of a fair assessment of the many challenges school-based child nutrition programs must face and balance, readers are left with the impression that most school foodservice authorities are bad."

MacDonald acknowledged that the article did take note of federal nutrition guidelines that schools participating in federally funded meal programs must follow and the challenge of providing healthful foods that kids actually will eat.

"The article's oversimplification of these important issues does a disservice to readers," she wrote. "And failure to acknowledge that meals served in schools are as safe as, if not safer than, meal service elsewhere is equally misrepresentative."

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