Assuming that the article is accurate, I disapprove of the school’s policy for several reasons.
First of all, in my experience, most school lunches are bad, particularly at the elementary and middle school level. They are neither healthy nor tasty. The ban smacks of the good old diplomatic removal of competition.
Second, many children, if given only the option of eating the school lunch, will choose to eat nothing at all. This is bad for their health and will hurt their academics.
Third, all the issues surrounding regulation of food always include the pro-regulation side insisting that they don’t want to use outright force, but only to encourage healthy choices. Yet here is an obvious case where that’s not true. I feel that the right to eat freely is being subjected to death by a thousand cuts, of which this is one cut.
Fourth, it is a way of introducing children to the idea that the government knows what is best for them and that it’s bad for them to make their own choices. The dangers of shoving that idea onto children at a young age are, to me, self-evident.
Fifth, having children pack their own lunches is often a step twoards maturity. They can learn about consequences and the importance of planning. Fail to pack a lunch Tuesday night and the consequence is that you don’t eat on Wednesday. Pack a lousy lunch on Thursday night and the consequence is that you eat a lousy lunch on Friday. With this school’s policy there’s no chance to learn those particular lessons.
This sounds like complete bullshit. When I saw the thread title I naturally assumed this was about an elementary school banning students from bringing in food from home because of peanut allergy concerns. Also who does the school think is packing lunch for the youngest students? :dubious: Kindergardeners don’t pack their own lunches, the parents do. Even the older kids are packing things their parents brought. It does sound like whoever has the catering contract is putting pressure on the school. That was a minor issue at my high school (though it never got to the point of banning baged lunches).
No doubt that’s true, but it is still not the school’s business. The bar for intervention needs to be much higher than “Mrs. Jones gives her daughter Twinkies for lunch”.
It’s all about money. The school gets more funds with each student they feed and that includes breakfast. It’s just a matter of time before they feed them dinner too.
Agreed. If the teacher has reason to suspect Mrs Jones is abusing her daughter or “loaning her out” to her boyfriend du jure then she should call child protective services. If it doesn’t warrant a call to CPS then the teacher should just wait until the next parent teacher conference or send a note home or mind her own business. Also this school policy applies equally to parents who do send their kids to school with healthy lunches.
And how does the school want to go re getting every child to order a school meal? Are they going to force each child to sit at a table in front of a lunch tray and not let them leave until it’s finished? :rolleyes: This vaguely reminds me of my elementary school policy on milk. If you ate school lunch you had to take a carton of milk (only kids with doctor’s notes could get the little carton of OJ). I didn’t like milk so I’d just give mine to another kid or throw it away unopened and get a drink at the water fountain. I did get told not to do that by some of teachers, but only one of them (my 2nd grade teacher, whom Mom disliked for several other reasons) went to the trouble of mentioning at at an (already scheduled) parent-teacher conference. Mom asked her if she had anything better to due like pay more attention to her actual teaching.
If schools are teaching children to accept authority, I imagine that it’s not lunchtime that is going to be the critical element.
I don’t think it’s inherently unreasonable for schools to provide lunches. Plenty of other countries do it- in fact, it may be the norm around the world. It is certainly in teacher’s interests that their students have had a fulfilling and balanced noon meal. And, objectively, it is good for the student’s health as well. And it is true that students do pack a lot of crap that is unlikely to get them through the day with enough energy- I remember happy lunches of Doritos, little packs of cookies, sodas and a sandwich that I’d cheerfully throw away or trade.
And, of course, in every thread about poverty and obesity, the conclusion is that a lot of obesity is coming out of ignorance regarding healthy eating and ingrained habits. Wouldn’t it be a good thing to expose kids to at least one health balanced meal a day?
That said, our school lunches suck. There are new school lunch guidelines, and maybe those are better. But if the food being served at these school is the same “soggy square pizza, a side of soggy french fries, and a popsicle” that I got in school, that’s a problem.
You left out the most important thing, methinks. If the students want to bring their lunch, or the parents want them to, it’s none of the school’s business to tell them what is in that lunch.
It’s one thing for schools to decide to promote good eating habits by not selling (and thus profiting from) junk food in vending machines, or to hire actual certified nutrititionists to manage their cafeterias, and so forth. That is perfectly fine with me; it’s appropriate. But they do not have the right and should not have the authority to gainsay the parents’ food choices, which is what they are doing here.
I recall when I was a kid how pissed off my mom got when I told her that the lunchroom policy was that I had to eat everything in my lunchbox before I could be excused for recess. She thought they had no business dictating even such terms as those when she had no similar concerns.
I’m almost certain you’re wrong on this: I know our school loses money from the cafeteria program every year. Yes, tehre are federal funds that go toward some students’ school lunches. But it’s not a profit-driven system for the school. Do you have evidence that some schools make a profit off of lunches?
I don’t think this is a good idea, on balance, but I can certainly understand the impulse: it’s pretty hard to watch a kid eat a lunch of candy and cookies and kool-aid and then have a lousy afternoon. I don’t have any such students this year, but I’ve had them in the past.
As for the improvement of school lunches, I’ll tell you some things about my school:
-Most pork has been replaced by turkey (e.g., turkey corn dogs, turkey ham, etc.)
-Nothing’s fried anymore; when fries are served, they’re really bakeds.
-Fresh fruit is served almost daily–usually an apple or an orange or a banana.
-Bread is whole-wheat.
-Our kitchen manager has paired with a chef at a local nationally-known restaurant to add new things to the menu.
That said, I still don’t eat the school lunch very often, because it emphasizes canned vegetables, the meat is very low-quality, and the food is generally very bland. (Our kitchen manager made up her own recipe for spaghetti meat sauce that’s actually pretty tasty, but that’s an exception). School lunches, I believe, use commodity products whenever possible, which means very inexpensive, not very high-quality products. Even though our kitchen manager is streets ahead of most kitchen managers, what she gets to work with isn’t nearly as good as the food I’ll bring from home.
Looking closer, lunches under the new guidelines seem pretty good, if we can keep them from getting corrupted by subsidized waste food and big agricultural interests again.
As for the “money” aspect…yeah? It’s not like that money goes to bonus checks for the prinicipal or anything. That money goes back into the school. It would be a HUGE help for schools to have a consistant lunch budget. That would allow them more flexibility to serve stuff like fresh fruit, rather than frozen crap.
Boy, that conjures up some not so pleasant memories of the stuff we had in our lunchroom - sauce covered doormats that passed for pizza, burgers that tasted like shredded up tires (and gave you a wicked case of the runs) and burritos that looked like someone had literally taken a dump in them. I usually bought chips and Hostess cakes from the snack bar we had in our cafeteria, because I couldn’t stomach any of most of the other “food.” Given the choice between eating that crap and eating nothing, I’d probably go hungry.
