Eating Healthy School Meals for Vegetarians

Making sure that your child is having healthy meals at school can already be a challenge; it is even harder if your child is a vegetarian. However, most schools today have dedicated plenty of time and effort in researching and coming up with options to improving their meal programs and ensuring that they are complying with the contemporary dietary recommendations. For example, there are some schools that are now serving yogurt as an alternative for meat as well as non-dairy cheeses instead of the dairy ones, provided that they offer the same nutrients. There are still a number of schools, though, that are still not offering healthy vegan options for school meals, giving vegetarian children even less choices. If you are looking for some ideas and options on how your children can have healthy vegetarian meals in school, read on.

1. First off, you could opt to prepare a bag lunch for your child or children. Bag lunches would make sure that they would be eating tasty and nutritious food, instead of having to settle for whatever is being served at school. You could make mini-pizzas which are made from whole wheat pita bread, tomato sauce, vegetarian salami or pepperoni slices, cheese and some vegetable toppings like mushrooms and bell peppers. You could also make build-your-own lunch boxes. This would include some high-fiber rye or wheat crackers and some cheese or vegetarian pate or vegetarian luncheon meat that your child could put on the crackers. Some other great choices would be fresh fruits, grilled cheese sandwiches, vegetarian pasta dishes and even vegetarian antipasto.

2. Check if you could get a copy of the menu of the school cafeteria. This would give you and your child the opportunity to pick the best food choices every day.

3. You could also talk with the food service personnel of the school and discuss some possible practical and economical solutions.

4. There are also some programs which encourage schools to serve fresher and more nutritious meals. One example would be the National Farm to School Program, a program which started in the late 1990s in Florida and California. The program aims to provide schools with more fresh and locally grown produce. Some of its other goals would be to support local agriculture, educate students and parents about nutrition and improve meal options in school cafeterias.

5. You can also check with the school if they have plans of using the nutrient-based menu planning system. It is a system which calls for the evaluation of a meal based on its overall nutritional composition instead of on whether or not it has a certain number of servings from the different food groups. This system would make it easier for schools to come up with meatless menus, since food servings that are made from the mat group would not be required. Today, though, only a few schools in the US are making use of this system because changing from the old system to this new one would call for more resources that plenty of schools cannot afford.

Shaz has written hundreds of articles online for almost 3 years. Not only does this author specialize in Proper Nutrition, you can also check out his latest website on hard pool covers which reviews and lists Mesh Pool Covers for adding beauty of your pool and to protect your children from some of the safety hazards that it poses.

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