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Competitive Foods and the School Lunch Program
With the start of another school year, the issue of what's being served in the way of school lunches again becomes an important one to nutrition-minded parents across the country. Increasingly, the traditional "Type A" lunch, the only kind for which the schools receive federal re-imbursement, is being superseded, or at the very least pushed aside by a variety of other innovations: lunches catered by an outside source, such as a local restaurateur or McDonald's; school stores, frequently run by students with profits going to help support athletic events; vending machines stocked with everything from Twinkies to trail mix; do-it-yourself salad bars, with the kids making their own salads and sometimes staffing the salad bars themselves; a la carte lines featuring hamburgers, hotdogs, potato chips, and other fast foods-junk foods; and a variety of other gimmicks. Other schools have solved the problems of mounting food costs, falling student participation, and heavy plate waste by in effect washing their hands of it: they lengthen the noon lunch period and adopt an open-campus policy which allows everybody to head for the nearest Pizza Hut ' as soon as the bell rings.