Schools-get a better breakfast: The Final Blow S1E8.

Schools- get better breakfast. We already have to wake up insanely early to go through a terrible system. The least you could do is have a better breakfast.

We all love a good breakfast- it’s the most important meal of the day. And if you fill up well, you can go through lunch with ease, and occasionally, when timed well, a moderate dinner will get you through the night, allowing your calorie consumption to decrease as well.

Despite this major advantage, it seems like schools really hate serving a GOOD and affordable, breakfast all around the school. When I say good, I don’t mean a simple bagel and cream cheese+chips. I’m talking about food that could be confused with a Panera Bread cafe. The minimum requirement for a “nutritious” breakfast in school is- well anything goes. I was unable to find any mandated regulations for a good school breakfast.

But what makes a good breakfast? Well, we all have a ton of different preferences, and the American School system is well known for getting by on basic lunches. Unfortunately, I was unable to find breakfast meals in other countries, so we can compare Apples to Apples in lunch instead.

“French school meals are superior to ours–quelle suprise! According to this report, the amount spent on the food in French school meals can exceed two dollars—twice what American districts are left with after overhead. And I actually suspect that the money available to schools for food may be much higher, given this post by Karen Le Billon which indicates that parents are assessed a price on a sliding scale, with the wealthiest parents paying a whopping $7 per meal. More importantly, as Le Billon so well documented in French Kids Eat Everything, almost every aspect of French food culture, including widespread nutrition education and early “taste training,” supports better school meals, both their provision by schools and their acceptance by children.”

-Civil Eats, 2015

And according to reports made by Penn State, France has a literacy rating of about 99%. Correlation?

Maybe.

"According to the country-facts data, the literacy rate in France is 99% with a rank of 37 out of 215 countries."

-Penn State, 2013

Then, when we go back to breakfast, reports made by NPR claim that, yes, breakfast does significantly help a child’s performance, in memory at least.

"Dozens of studies from as far back as the 1950s have consistently shown that children who eat breakfast perform better academically than those who don’t. In a recent study of 4,000 elementary school students, researchers measured the effects of eating breakfast by administering a battery of attention tests. To measure short-term memory, researchers read a series of digits out loud — 5, 4, 2 and so on — and asked the children to repeat them. The children were scored on how many digits they could remember correctly. To test verbal fluency, the kids were asked to name all the animals they could think of in 60 seconds. Across the board, Murphy says, the breakfast eaters performed better than those children who had skipped breakfast."

-NPR, 2006.

So, now we know what general breakfast does, but what if we went a step forward and pulled a France? By offering better quality, well-made breakfast items, kids wouldn’t be distracted by hunger nearly as often, and if good-quality coffee is also offered, maybe they won’t sleep as much.

Of course, this requires money. But hey, considering how profitable the school system is, maybe it’s time they put it into good use for once in their lives. It doesn’t take a master chef to be able to create good-quality bagels, soup, and eggs. It just takes a well-trained cook.

At least then, us students get SOMETHING out of waking up at the crack of dawn. Which, by the way, shouldn’t happen in the first place.