By Jessica Claire Haney

I find it thrilling that Michelle Obama is taking on school lunches and paying tribute to places that make healthy food a priority. If children can be raised with an appreciation for natural, whole foods, we might have some hope of reversing the epidemic of childhood obesity and the increase in diabetes, trends that are fueled by the mass consumption of processed foods.

It’s great that Hollin Meadows Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia is harvesting lettuce from its garden to be served with lunch! Fabulous! Food without an ingredient list is great!

But the rest of the menu disturbs me. According to a recent Washington Post article by Michael Alison Chandler, students in the cafeteria were “munching on garden burgers with whole wheat buns and drinking low-fat milk” on the day the first lady and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited.

So why is this a problem? Those foods are all processed foods.

As a former vegetarian who used to think “garden” burgers were worthy of their own food group, I now understand that they are usually the furthest thing from the garden.

Many veggie burgers are made predominantly out of soy, which is a known endocrine disruptor. If the soy is not organic, it’s likely to be genetically modified (in addition to sprayed with a lot of chemicals). And it’s simply not a food our bodies were intended to eat in this form. Small amounts of raw tofu and miso as traditionally found in some Asian diets? Fine! But that’s not what you find in a garden burger.

The “classic” Gardenburger® starts outs with “soy protein concentrate with water for hydration.”  Does that sound natural? Even if this isn't a hidden source of MSG as some suggest, it's still not natural. The two other main ingredients in this burger are soy protein isolate and canola oil, a product that comes from hybridized rapeseed oil that is refined, bleached, degummed and deodorized prior to packaging, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Gardenburger®’s Sun-Dried Tomato Basil burger is low on soy but contains 10 different main ingredients (including rice, oats, bulger, wheat fiber and wheat gluten) before you get to the “contains less than 2% of” part of the label, where we see again the canola oil … and, incidentally, sun-dried tomatoes.

I don’t know if this is the brand of burger Hollin Meadows school serves, but it’s worth considering that these kids believe they are eating something healthy when the product is likley to be, in fact, highly processed. If, on the other hand, kids were eating burgers of grassfed beef, there would be just one ingredient. And the school system would be supporting the healthy use of land that does not contribute to the kind of pollution run-off created by the raising of all these non-organic crops we found in the Gardenburger.

Whole wheat buns often have -- in addition to a whole lot of gluten – a lot of sugar. Even Rudi’s Organic Bakery’s whole wheat buns  contain both organic sugar and organic molasses. Non-organic brands often contain high fructose corn syrup. Pepperidge Farm didn’t appear to list its ingredients for its whole wheat buns on its website, but it did not show for the buns the same “No HFCS” label that their Soft Honey Whole Wheat bread did. My search at Labelwatch.com  shows that the Pepperidge Farm whole wheat buns contain the following main ingredients: Whole Wheat Flour, Water, Wheat Gluten, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Soybean Oil. My guess is that the school's buns are probably in this same general camp. Oh, how I would love to be wrong!

Now, about low-fat milk. Guess what? Kids need fat. Their brains need fat. They shouldn’t have processed oils like canola and cottonseed oils, but if they are going to drink pasteurized milk, it should at least contain the naturally-occurring fat that helps calcium be absorbed.

It’s no surprise that schools think they are doing the right thing with these choices. They are not operating in a vacuum. This is a huge cultural shift I’m suggesting.

But if we are going to pay lip service to “healthy” foods, we need to realize that healthy means as close to the source as possible. Even when preparing frozen foods for a large number of kids, look for the simplest ingredient lists around and avoid foods that are never found in nature, like canola oil, high fructose corn syrup, and soy protein concentrate.

Go salad!

Jessica Claire Haney is a freelance writer, editor and tutor. Her writing has appeared in parenting publications and poetry journals. A former high school English teacher, Jessica is mother to one son and is passionate about holistic health. She is a Holistic Moms Network chapter leader. Read more from Jessica at Crunchy-Chewy Mama and on DC Metro Moms Blog.