Noodles and Education

I was wondering how come the Department of EDUCATION in the Philippines is UNEDUCATED when it comes to instant noodles. They believed the noodles are highly nutritious thereby approving millions of people's money to feed them to school children.

I thought I was alone.

Here is a letter from an Inquirer reader:

Noodles: a lesson on eating

While many, myself included, were angered by the Department of Education’s controversial purchase of extremely overpriced (by about 400 percent) instant noodles for its feeding program, what I find more outrageous is the fact that the DepEd considers instant noodles a healthful, nutritional alternative supplement for children.

Never mind that 15 million packs of instant noodles were found to contain no egg or malunggay ingredients—thus belying the claims of Jeverps Manufacturing Corp., the supplier of the instant noodles. And how the DepEd officials had not known that instant noodles have a high (and therefore harmful) content of sodium and fat, not to mention MSG (believed to be correlated with obesity, asthma and other health problems) escapes me. In other words, instant noodles are empty foods (or “basura” in the words of my father).

What makes this issue more painful for me is that I have observed in Japan that children are required to eat lunch meals provided in school. The meals are carefully thought-out and prepared by well-trained cooks and dieticians, thus ensuring that there are foodstuffs from all the basic food groups.

One of the Filipina mothers I interviewed raved about how well her half-Japanese child is eating in school. A typical meal consists of a fresh salad, miso (soy product high in protein) soup with seaweeds (high in iron), fish or meat with vegetables and rice, and fruit. The lunch itself serves as a great lesson for the children about the importance of eating right.

If we have P284 million to spend on instant noodles, could we not use the money for more nutritious alternatives?

—SHERILYN SIY