Yuck! Fourth Grader Covertly Films School Lunches For Documentary

When I think back to what lunches were like at my elementary school, I really don’t remember them being that bad. Certainly frozen pizzas, barely-pork riblets and fruit cocktail couldn’t have equaled the end of innocence the way people are saying school lunches are doing nowadays. But the above trailer for the short film Yuck, found on the Yuck Movie website (via Movies.com), shows a large discrepancy between what is supposed to be fed to school children and what is actually fed to them.

Certainly, we probably won’t learn anything particularly new or noteworthy here, since the war against childhood obesity has had schools in its crosshairs for years, but this isn’t a figurehead rattling off a bunch of facts in a long study published in a journal that only other figureheads read. Yuck was made by a fourth grader named Zachary Maxwell, a New York City public school student who was having to put up with these meals every day - so the purpose behind the film is personal as well as informational.

Zachary was inspired to create this project after noticing how erroneous the Department of Education website was when describing the lunch menus, which were supposed to be nutritious and of restaurant quality. To prove his point, Zachary covertly filmed 75 of his school’s lunch breaks over a period of six months, even getting himself caught in the process. Instead of destroying the footage like he was told, he cobbled it all together for a twenty-minute short exposé, and it looks like quite a fun little film full of bland-looking food. You gotta love pizza and sandwiches that look like they’d be good sled substitutes.

The short has done well for itself on the smaller festival circuit, proving to be more subjective than films such as Super Size Me from fourth-grade-minded Morgan Spurlock. That said, it will probably fall into the “you should have already known this” documentary subset that films like Food Inc. find themselves in. But both of those movies were made by a bunch of adults, and there’s just one Zachary Maxwell behind Yuck. That’s something to gnaw on.

Nick Venable
Assistant Managing Editor

Nick is a Cajun Country native and an Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on TV and features. His humble origin story with CinemaBlend began all the way back in the pre-streaming era, circa 2009, as a freelancing DVD reviewer and TV recapper.  Nick leapfrogged over to the small screen to cover more and more television news and interviews, eventually taking over the section for the current era and covering topics like Yellowstone, The Walking Dead and horror. Born in Louisiana and currently living in Texas — Who Dat Nation over America’s Team all day, all night — Nick spent several years in the hospitality industry, and also worked as a 911 operator. If you ever happened to hear his music or read his comics/short stories, you have his sympathy.