Garbage In, Garbage Out: You Are What You Eat?

I am on the fly here, making dinner and lunch for my graveyard shift tomorrow and clearing out the living room and getting ready to wash the dog. But I wanted to post something for folx to do.

My daughter goes to Grant High School in the Portland Public Schools District. She says her school cafeteria uses the same food service company as the local jail -- or maybe it's the state penitentiary. She's not sure.

My son, who also goes to Grant, says Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, reported the same thing in his book. Then I said, I think they use the same companies for hospital food at OHSU. When I was hospitalized in Minneapolis, Minn. three years ago for a kidney transplant, I only saw one piece of fresh fruit the whole time, and it was a creepy, droopy banana.

Here is homework assignment #2: Who can document whether or not Portland Public Schools and the Columbia Correctional Facility (or Coffee Creek Correctional Facility for women, or the Oregon State Penitentiary in the Salem area, or any others) use the same food service companies as ANY school dictrict in the state?

Here is a list of all Oregon prisons.

Bonus point goes to whomever can find out whether the same company provides food services to any hospital in the state.

Wierdly,

here is a complete listing, with links, of Oregon medical facilities put together by a 12-step group.

Right on!

Who can find out which are the top food service companies in the state? I know one is Aramark.

What would be the most timely news peg for such a story? I know that a report released last week showed Oregon spends more money per capital to incarcerate people than any other state. I also know that Oregon schools are chronicly underfunded and essentially FUBAR. Several years ago a report found that Oregon spends more $$ to incarcerate people than it does to fund higher education.

So ... what can we find out?