No wonder so many Americans eat iceberg lettuce, and put added sugar in bread.
And for all the flaws of the food pyramid, I can remember a time before that when it was even worse. We had the "Basic Four" food groups: meat, dairy, fruit+vegetables, and grains.
You aren't hurting yourself by eating lettuce, but it's a missed opportunity to do so much more for your diet. See the difference for yourself.
https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Lettuce%2C_raw%2C_iceberg_%28...
https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Spinach%2C_raw_nutritional_va...
But I'm sure the reason kids threw away fruits and vegetables because they were terrible; not necessarily because they were healthy. I don't know if it's a low value put on food or cost-cutting...I'm sure both are related. You can see this in places other than schools, outside of every corporate meeting is a tray of terrible honeydew and cantaloupe. Most lettuce and tomato don't really have flavor but seem to leach off-flavors. In my personal experience, when I find out someone says they don't like a certain food about half the time it's because they've never had a good example of it.
It's difficult because fresh food spoils so much more quickly than other, cheaper, and less healthy foods. But what's crazy is that today we have way better technology than most of human history to make even the foods most prone to spoilage cheaper an accessible...it's just relative to frozen pizza and ketchup it's more expensive.
Ha! I suppose fruit roll ups[1] are also "fruit" then right?
One thing I've noticed is that a huge percentage of the American population had been tricked into thinking that fruit juice is healthy.
It isn't healthy. It is soda with some vitamins tossed in as far as the body is concerned.
I fully blame the US government for this. Even liberal cities that pass soda tax laws ignore fruit juice, because hippies with a naturalistic fallacy are a powerful voting bloc on the Democratic party.
I would say that MOST toddlers I see drink several juices a day.
For my kids, it was always a treat, and served incredibly watered down, as in 1 part juice to 6 parts water. So sweet that they don't even know that.
Insanity.
I also see lots of parents offering "fruit snack" candies to their kids as if that's a legitimate substitute for actual fruit.
Don't even get me started on breakfast cereal.
Our milkshakes will have other additives such as malt, vanilla extract, and some sweetener.