Words are powerful forces for change. The 8th graders who crafted these speeches illustrate their ability to persaude audiences with impassioned soapbox speeches that discuss important causes and beliefs.
"The Case for Better School Lunches"
by Padric Hamlin
Every day all around the United States, children run into the cafeteria ready to eat lunch and relax. But what is it that they are eating? In most cases, they are eating school-provided lunches. These lunches are packed full of fat, calories, sodium and carbs without offering any real nutrition to the kids eating them. According to CBS, “Parents say much of the cafeteria food their children eat leads to childhood obesity.”
There are also questions on how sanitary these meals are. Because school food is bought from the lowest bidder, the factories where the food is made don't always have good cleanliness records. Of one particular school cafeteria, an ABC article stated, “Taylor also found cockroaches under a kitchen sink and a moldy drain.”
This issue doesn't just affect kids' health; it also influences how they perform in the classroom. According to Brooking Edu, “We find that in years when a school contracts with a healthy lunch company, students at the school perform better on end of year academic tests.”
You may be thinking there have to be some laws that regulate school lunch food. You would be right. The FDA requires schools to offer two vegetable servings to all students receiving school lunch. On the surface, this may sound great, but actually there are a lot of catches. The first one is how kids are not automatically served vegetables when they get their lunch. They have to go out of their way to get them by asking for them or taking them themselves. The criteria of what is and is not a vegetable is also sketchy. According to The New York Times, “A slice of pizza that contains at least 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce meets the vegetable requirement.” Business Insider also wrote, “Pastas made with potato, soy, or other starchy vegetable based flours will be considered one vegetable serving.”
One day, I hope that everybody realizes kids are people, too. They deserve to eat healthy and safe food just as much as anyone else does. Just because they aren't grown up doesn't make it okay that they are being served food that nobody would eat if they were given a choice.
"The Issues with Animal Testing"
by Eva Cohen
Paul McCartney, Leonardo Dicaprio, Charlize Theron, and many others are against animal cruelty and testing and you should be, too.
Every year there are over 110 million animals that die from animal testing. The reason this is such a big issue is that animals are dying of chemicals being dripped into their eyes, injected into their bodies with needles, and forced into their body just for us to have products tested so we can buy them. Buying these products encourages this action. Therefore, animals are exposed to drugs, chemicals, and infectious diseases that lead to pain, distress, and eventually death.
One day, I hope that people would actually care about the lives of animals who want to live a happy life like all of us. I hope that the next time someone buys a product that uses animal testing, they think about the process an animal has to go through just to make the product supposedly safe. Some approaches we can use to help reduce this situation are reading labels for products and buying cruelty-free ones, donating to multiple fundraisers, and advising others on this topic. In the end, we all need to stop buying products that are tested on animals and save their lives.