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Show School lunch still a bargain If you think you're saving money by having your children take their lunches from home rather than buying them at school, think again. According to food service officials around the country, it may be cheaper to buy lunch at school and more nutritious to boot. Officials with the Fairfax County, Virginia, school system compared the cost of two bag lunches at home with two identical "super sack" lunches purchased at school. One lunch consisted of a turkey sandwich on a roil, carrot and celery sticks, fresh fruit and milk. The cost of making this lunch at home and buying milk at school was $1.05, while the cost of buying it was 75 cents in elementary and 85 cents in secondary schools. The second lunch consisted of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, sand-wich, raisins, fresh fruit and milk. The cost of making this lunch at home and buying milk at school was 94 cents compared to a purchase price of 75 cents in elementary and 85 cents in secondary schools. In addition, for the same cost, the school added a one-ounce cheese slice to supplement the child's protein intake. Utah state child nutrition director Hank Winawer also compared average costs of similar school and home-parepared home-parepared sack lunches. In his study, school lunches were an even better buy. School lunch prices in Utah average 72 cents in elementary grades and 82 cents in secondary schools. It cost $1.10 to prepare a comparable lunch at home. As Carolyn Klein, lunch program manager says, "Most people don't have a clear idea of the price tags on sack lunches because they buy items for these meals along with the rest of their family groceries." A school lunch director became concerned con-cerned about the nutritional value of meals students eat after doing her survey of fast food places. "One of the fast food chicken lunches," lun-ches," she said, "contains no vitamin C, very little vitamin A. and much less calcium and iron than the lunches lun-ches we serve at school." Mrs. Styer also believes that some brown bag lunches from home are nutritionaly suspect. "Many parents make bologna sandwiches sand-wiches with just one slice of meat. We use 2 ounces. Some parents complain about sugar in our meals andthenstick a cream-filled cake in the lunch bag I" A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study of some 7,000 families throughout the United States revealed that students participating in the school lunch program get higher percentages of their daily nutritional needs than those who do not. Study results also indicated in-dicated that students who ate lunch at school got higher percentages of six out of 12 important nutrients (protein, vitamin A, riboflavin, vitamin B6, calcium, and phosphorous) than students who didn't eat lunch at school. In addition to the expense and time involved in-volved in packing sack lunches and the nutritional deficiencies of some of these lunches, lun-ches, monotony can be a real problem. "One of the biggest problems with sack lunches is lack of variety," says lunch manager Klein. "Brown bag meals can get to be really boring in a hurry! But people are sometimes willing to accept the monotony because they think they're saving money." School lunches, on the other hand, offer a . variety of hot as well as cold meals. |