'No Antibiotics Ever' for Chicken Served in 6 Largest U.S. School Districts

[Omaha Steve]

(Photo: Getty Images)

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/12/09/antibiotic-free-chicken-at-largest-school-districts?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-12-10

New standards will put meat raised without drugs on the trays of nearly 3 million students

December 09, 2014 By Jason Best

Jason Best is a regular contributor to TakePart who has worked for Gourmet and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Can you supply hundreds of thousands of schoolkids with their daily dose of chicken nuggets and fight a growing public health menace at the same time? Apparently, you can.

Today the Urban School Food Alliance announced plans to make antibiotic-free chicken the new norm in the lunchrooms of the six largest public school districts in the country.

This is big news: All told, these districts serve nearly 3 million kids every day, and you know chicken-as-finger-food is surely one of the most popular items on the menu. Not only that, but by marshaling their collective purchasing power—which amounts to more than half a billion dollars a year on food and supplies—the coalition is establishing a huge institutional market for antibiotic-free chicken that smaller districts nationwide may soon be able to take advantage of as well.

“The standards we’re asking from the manufacturers go above and beyond the quality of the chicken we normally purchase at local supermarkets. This move by the alliance shows that school food directors across the country truly care about the health and wellness of students,” Eric Goldstein, USFA's chairman, said in a statement. Goldstein is also the CEO of school support services for the New York City Department of Education, which makes up the alliance along with the school districts of Los Angeles; Chicago; Miami-Dade, Fla.; Dallas; and Orlando, Fla.

FULL story at link.

[Warpy]

1. Good luck with that

Chicken that is cheap enough to feed to school kids is either factory farmed or formed out of chicken "byproducts" whose origin is impossible to trace without putting a lot of money into it that could have been better spent getting decent food to children.

Factory farming means the birds are overcrowded by slaughter, barely able to move around and easy to scoop up. Overcrowding means diseases can spread quickly, killing off every chicken in a barn before it is noticed and identified, hence the antibiotics in the feed.

Either those kids will never see chicken on the menu again or this is just grandstanding, lots of winks and nods taking place with distributors.

[yeoman6987]

2. It's hard to believe I survived on

Peanut and jelly and an apple through my entire school life and never had a cafeteria at all. We ate in the school auditorium. And I graduated in 1987 so not terribly long ago.

[Warpy]

3. I didn't start eating school lunches until my mother went back to work when I was 12.

Peanut butter was a staple for me, too. Good days were when she allowed me to slap a sandwich together to stuff into my book bag, great days were when it was waiting on the counter because there was a lot of leftover turkey to use up before it went bad.