Reuters says a federal agriculture agency is funding surveillance of school lunches

Using a $2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.

Kids are going to become so used to surveillance and monitoring as an every-day fact that they are going to be far better equipped than previous generations to avoid it or game it. It’s like they are being trained to break common security controls at an early age.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino of the San Antonio-based Social and Health Research Center, which is implementing the pilot program at five schools with high rates of childhood obesity and children living in poverty.

“When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”

I hope I am not the first person to point this out but kids swap food at the table, and kids cheat. What they take from the line and what they throw away does not necessarily reflect what they actually eat.

It seems that a test of their body would be a more common sense approach. In the old days we used to joke about toilets that could print out a receipt with your health information when you finished. What happened? Where did our future go?

A camera that watches lunch trays? I have a feeling this system has more to do with regulating the kitchen, the register and the garbage collection than the health of the kids. After all, the monitors are focused on what’s served, what’s purchased and what’s thrown away.

Echon on Wednesday showed reporters a printout of the reading from one student’s tray at W.W. White Elementary School. It listed the size of the serving, and its calorie, fiber, sugar, and protein count.

He said the program can break down the data into total monounsaturated fatty acids, soluble dietary fiber, and more than 100 other specific measures.

Brilliant. That should make lunch-room trading and haggling far more interesting. Kids now can say “I’ll trade you an empty carton that will show 5g soluble dietary fiber at the garbage sensor for that bag of red corn syrup twists”.

Here’s my idea for how to do this and retain some futurist flair — give students a mouse for a computer when they take a test that also assesses their health and nutritional intake. When their hand touches the mouse it first authenticates them and then reads their data. Tiny pin-prick of blood like those new diabetic tests, etc. show that we already have the technology. Just need to put it together.

Privacy is a problem, but for the sake of argument let’s say the data can be made private enough to meet HIPAA/HITECH. Even better would be, instead of a mouse, for kids to order lunch from a touch-screen register. They first authenticate with their full hand and their body outline (via camera). Then it reads their health data. Then it records what they order. They can swap food later but the health data will be matched to their biometric.