Customers crowd around a chip wagon on Bank Street.
It’s lunch hour at Glashan Public School, and students are flocking to the chip wagon. Its greasy, cheesy, ooey-gooey poutine, burgers and dogs are a hit with kids.
Harshan Anton, 14, a Grade 8 student at Glashan, who holds a Styrofoam cup full overflowing with poutine, says there are benefits to having fast food available at lunchtime. “We only have less than an hour to eat. We come here because it’s fast.”
Paul Kim, 14, says he tries to limit his trips to the chip wagon. “I try to save on money, so [I go] probably two times a week.”
He acknowledges the availability of fast food in the area around his school. “There’s lots of fast food, especially on Bank Street.”
It takes less than a minute to walk from Glashan to the chip wagon. But this isn’t the only public school in Centretown located within walking distance of a fast food outlet. The 2009 Ottawa Neighbourhood Study reports that “all of Centretown’s seven schools are within 500 metres (or less than eight minutes walk) of a fast food outlet.”
Glashan encourages students to choose healthier foods over the unhealthy ones which are so prevalent in the area. Vending machines at Glashan don’t carry the usual array of pop, chips and chocolate bars. Instead, they sell juice and water. This change has been in place since 2004, when the Ontario Ministry of Education ordered the removal of junk food from school vending machines.
Mary Young, a member of Glashan’s parent council, provides pizza lunch for the students every Thursday. She says that the school tries to keep kids healthy by providing breakfast, healthy snacks and lunch.
She says there are two 15-minute nutrition breaks each day when students can grab a snack from home. In the afternoons, students can buy a healthy snack, such as fruit or baked goods, or simply get a drink of water.
“It’s best to have small meals throughout the day,” she says. “It gives them a break, it gives them time to refuel . . . It’s good for brain power.”
Young adds that teachers often bake muffins and other treats with the students, and then sell the snacks at nutrition breaks. “I heat that one of the teachers has an excellent recipe for sticky buns!”
Young says while her son Tim, 12, comes home for lunch most days, but Glashan offers lunch a few times each week, providing kid-friendly options such as grilled cheese and hot dogs.
Tim says there are some options off school grounds where kids can get nutritious meals, but these tend to be more expensive. That is why many students choose the less healthy options.
“The chip truck is very close and very cheap . . . There are some other restaurants nearby, but the prices are higher.”
As for the food at school, “It’s pretty good,” Tim says.
Young says while the nutrition program is satisfactory, there is still room for improvement. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board could provide hot lunches.
“Nothing fancy,” she says. “We’re not talking about fettuccine alfredo served by candlelight . . . (They could serve) very simple food, portion-sized for children.”
At Tim’s previous public school in Vancouver, lunch options included rice, soup, and pasta.
“The lunches were reasonably priced at $3 per meal,” Young says.
Gilles Cloutier, a public health dietician with Ottawa Public Health, says it would be difficult to find a school in an urban setting that is more than eight minutes away from some kind of fast food establishment.
He says Centretown is a good place to live from a body weight point of view because the commercial areas are right beside where people live and go to school.
Cloutier identifies Centretown as a “mixed-use” community, one where it is practical to walk to a community centre, to a park, or to a shop where you buy your specialty foods or groceries.
However, he notes that the closeness of residential and commercial areas means that it’s easier to access fast food.
Unfortunately, Ottawa Public Health doesn’t have any say in how close fast food outlets are to the city’s public schools.
“We don’t have much jurisdiction over the McDonald’s and the Burger Kings of the world. The jurisdiction for those is always through the feds or the through the provinces. There’s very little that I know of that we can do.”
While Ottawa Public Health cannot make a difference in terms of city planning, they make a difference inside Centretown’s public schools. Ottawa Public Health dieticians work in elementary and secondary schools, instructing students on healthy living and providing materials about healthy eating for school nurses.
Cloutier says a major factor in making healthy eating decisions is teaching kids to prepare healthy food.
“We’re trying to teach people to say, ‘Fast food is fast, but I can be faster in my own kitchen.’”
To encourage kids to eat healthy, Cloutier says parents should steer clear of fast food, in favour of fast, home-cooked meals.
“(Parents say) ‘I’ll go get takeout, bring something back and we’ll eat that.’ In the time that it takes to get in the car, walk to the place and come back, you could easily make a meal that’s quite quick, healthier, cheaper, and if you have the right food skills it’s quite simple.”
Cloutier says two major factors affect our ability to make healthy choices. First, the high sodium content of many foods is not always apparent to consumers. Sodium sneaks into our diets, and too much of it can cause high blood pressure.
“High sodium in the food supply is one of the barriers to making healthy choices. Just like five years ago when the trans fat got reduced in a lot of foods, it was difficult to find foods without trans fats,” Cloutier says.
He explains a major issue for Health Canada is trying to find a way to reduce the amount of sodium in restaurant food, without making the food unappealing to customers.
The other obstacle to healthy eating is a lack of food skills. While the Ottawa Health website has instructions for making a quick omelette, some people don’t have the skills to carry out even this simple recipe.
“If the most complicated thing you’ve made in your life is toast, that omelette looks a little daunting,” Cloutier says.
He adds that, as with most foods, fast food is best consumed in moderation.
“Nutrition is always a world of grey, there’s no black and white. I mean, nuts are good for you, but if you have a pound a day, it might be deleterious.”