The Lincoln Log

If this isn’t your first year attending Lincoln you’ve probably noticed a change; it’s not the new color yearbook or the increase of new teachers. It’s the ban to buy snacks and soft drinks from vending machines. Still two years later there is no candy or sodas being sold but there are plenty of other places you can buy them instead and it has had a great impact on our clubs.

“Oh my god,” was Rosemary Kamkatr’s first reaction when asked about the Healthy Food Plan banning on-site candy sales. “It has had a negative impact on fundraising because clubs no longer get to sell food items daily.”

She went on to say that now only ASB and Leadership sells food during lunch which is provided by the cafeteria by room 137. They sell cheeseburgers, chocolate-chip cookies, juice and water.

Clubs can sell any kind of food (as long as its store bought) only twice a year at Octoberfest and Mayfest, but that’s only two afternoons of selling food as opposed to the clubs each getting a week to sell it.

According to Student Body Accounant Siddique Shaikh, the student body now makes around $300-$400 a week, which is 30% of the gross, or total income, of around $12,000 of total food sales sold by the ASB and Leadership. In the month of September, for example, the student body sold $1,850 worth of food at lunch but only made an income of $555.15.

The policy doesn’t ban food brought in for free; food for a potluck or a classroom party is allowed, as long as it’s not being sold.

This doesn’t stop students from going off campus to Lincoln Market or Taraval St. to fulfill their sugar intake.

“Not being able to get candy at school sometimes makes students want them even more. I know tons of people who go to Lincoln Market and Taraval just to get candy, the banning of candy isn’t stopping them,” senior Teddy Chung said when told about the new food policy.

If school clubs want to sell food on-site, they have to get it from the cafeteria and can only keep 30% of the gross, or total income.

This ban has been implemented because the California State Parent Teacher Association (PTA) started a program called the Healthy Food Plan. According to Caroline Grannan, the Executive Vice President of the PTA, who is also the PTA’s representative to the Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, the program is designed to help eliminate competition to Lincoln’s lunch line and beanery, so that more students would buy or receive their lunch from the lunch line.

The cafeteria is part of a federal program called the “National School Lunch Program” which ensures that all students have access to a nutritious meal. The way the Program works is that the more students get their lunch from the lunch line at school, the more money the Program receives, to make higher quality food available at the lunch line. If the lunch line does not receive enough money in food sales it has to be made up by providing lower quality food. It also needs to draw from the SFUSD General Fund which means there is less money for classroom expenses, which impacts all the students in the SFUSD.

The reason that California state law set restrictions for daytime school fundraising food sales is so that money isn’t taken away from the National School Lunch Program. It’s the reason why you can’t buy candy and soft drinks at Lincoln anymore.

“I think it’s wrong. I mean you can’t really enforce a Healthy Food Plan because people would just go out and buy candy somewhere else instead of supporting the clubs,” sophomore Yvonne Lun said.

“I think it’s done out of good intention, and I can see why they want to do it, but I guess some students also see it as unfair. Personally, I think the school shouldn’t have to enforce it like that because I feel it’s the student’s responsibility to take care of their own health, not the school’s,” junior Anthony Radianto said.

According to the California State PTA resolution that called for healthy food in public schools in May of 2004, 26% of children in the state and 50% in some districts are overweight or obese and 70-80% of obese adolescents are likely to become obese adults. Obesity is defined as being 30 lbs overweight. Life threatening obesity related conditions such as asthma, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular and coronary artery disease, certain cancers, and gallbladder disease have sharply increased. 300,000 premature preventable deaths are attributed to being overweight, and it costs California $24.6 billion annually.

Grannan wrote the resolution that called for healthy food in public schools in May of 2004. “This is about doing what’s right for the most vulnerable students in our schools, the youngest kids and the poorest kids. Those are the students who have to eat the lunch line food, so they suffer the harm when the quality drops because competing sales drain money from the meals” Grannan said.

Whether the Healthy Food Plan has made our schools better by encouraging us to eat healthier or made our schools worse because now we have less funding for our clubs and graduating classes, it has definitely had an impact on almost every Lincoln student.