It's the documentary that audiences and film critics are eating up.
In a covert six-month mission to expose the inside world of school lunches, 11-year-old Zachary Maxwell made "Yuck: A 4th Grader's Documentary About School Lunch" when he was a fourth-grader at a New York City public school.
Armed with hidden cameras, the precocious filmmaker went undercover to document dozens of lunches he was served at school.
During Zachary's investigation, he compared descriptions of lunch items on the school-provided menu with secretly recorded video of what he was actually being served.
"It sounded like it was coming from the finest restaurant, but what we were actually getting served, it wasn't too good," Zachary told ABC News.
His 19-minute movie has already been featured at film festivals this year, and will be shown in the Manhattan Film Festival June 21, something the now fifth-grader is quite proud of.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
It Won't Get Fixed Until It's Known
Gotta admire this kid's spunk:
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3 comments:
When I was in middle school, there were items that would repeatedly show up on the menu. One of them was this delicious dessert, white cake with pink frosting and coconut sprinkled on top. It made up for everything else on the lunch tray. Then, one day, a kid sitting next to me at the table found a beetle surprise baked into his cake ... bleah.
I realize this kind of stuff happens, but why couldn't it have crawled into the beets and liver instead? Even the bugs know what food to avoid, apparently.
I've never understood the requirement that kids be fed hot lunches. Simple sandwiches are harder to screw up than mystery meat cutlets or slab-o'-turkey with tan flour sauce. Peanut butter and jelly for the non-allergic, ham sandwiches with a slice of low-fat cheese (tomato and lettuce to be removed by child at the table,) etc., seem to me to be easier and would be more-appealing too.
The only protest I ever led was against school lunches in junior high. Our lunches were awful-bland greasy repetitions that led most of us to head for the soda and ice cream machines. When it was announced that the price of these lunches, which were a necessity for some kids, would go up 50 cents, we were outraged. So we simply didn't buy lunch one day. Nobody bought lunch. The cafeteria staff was furious. But even my Mom, who at the time was president of the district's PTA's said she never understood how such decent looking food going in could end up looking and smelling so hideous after cooking. The result, after a tense meeting with the principal, was to roll back prices and come up with menus that reflected better food for the money. Even today I refuse to cut in line and get food from our lunch line. I do sometimes get chai tea and a bagel from the coffee bar in our school library (yes, we have one)but that's made by the catering arm of our food service company and is lightyears better than what the kids get in the lines. When I do pass through the lunchroom, I see a lot of wasted food and many students who don't eat lunch at all because of the limitations of food offered.
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