This doesn’t seem quite as simplistic as most posters here are saying. The bias is that the big bad gummint is always going to provide worse food than parents, and in a lovely Pleasantville fantasy world this would be true. In the real world it isn’t. Some kids would bring better food no doubt, and it is a shame to force them to eat school lunches. But what do you say to the kid getting fatter and fatter because his parents send him to school with crap, or let him pack his own crap? Your obesity has kept us free? Do you want to pay for the healthcare of this person?
We grade homework, maybe we should grade lunches. An F on your lunch gets you a free voucher for a better one. Not practical I know but maybe better than the current algorithm of
It is in people’s best interests to bring a healthy lunch, so they will, and so government shouldn’t get involved.
People don’t bring healthy lunches.
Screw them - they deserve heart disease.
As RNATB points out, this is one particular school. It’s irrelevant what “most school lunches” are like. If the school lunches served at this particular school were neither healthy nor tasty, you’d have a point. But I suspect that, if you’re going to institute a policy like this in your school, you’d first make sure that the meals you were serving were halfway decent. The ban smacks of the good old diplomatic removal of competition.
“The right to eat freely?” Bwuh? When I was a kid, I didn’t have “the right to eat freely”; I ate what was served, at school and at home. In the world in grew up in, children did not as a general rule choose what they would eat at every meal.
Woah–there’s a private contractor providing these meals, who has a financial incentive to minimize the cost of each meal? Jesus, what a bad idea. Okay, I was wrong before; sorry!
That doesn’t surprise me. In high school our district’s caterer did things like threaten a lawsuit when the French Club was allowed to sell crepes for two mornings or the Spanish club tried to sell tapas once (both with school approval), shut down all the vending machines (which they owned :dubious:) during lunch hours (& sold the exact same products in the cafeteria), and complain several times over home ec students being allowed to go to the home ec suite during lunch to get food they’d preperared earlier in the day. They even tried to get teachers to buy lunches from them (I never saw any adult buy anything that was prepacked like chips or a beverage). :eek: Our social studies teacher told me that at one point they even asked that the microwave be removed from the teacher’s lounge. And yes, almost all the cafeteria food sucked, even the salad. Breakfast wasn’t actually that bad, but then again it’s really to screw up prepacked singe-serving boxes of cereal and muffins.
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
“The right to eat freely?” Bwuh? When I was a kid, I didn’t have “the right to eat freely”; I ate what was served, at school and at home. In the world in grew up in, children did not as a general rule choose what they would eat at every meal.
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No, but the parents did have the right to choose what their children ate. Can you imagine your school telling any parent they weren’t allowed to pack their own child a lunch? This is a *blanket policy /I]overiding the parent’s right to control what their children are eating. That’s much more disturbing than a overiding “the child’s right to eat freely”.
Removal of parental love through not having the parent be able to feed their child, replace with a cold state system.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.
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Are you kidding me? This is a child, the parents should be providing lunch, and the consequences of not doing it would be the same as a adult and should be the same as a adult, you buy lunch, ask friends or run a tab at the cafeteria till you can pay if you don’t ahve money on you. There is no reason to put a harder standard on children and consequences that they won’t ever face on their own.
I will say that that article suffers from two errors that jump out at me:
- If you have a seventh-grader speaking out, it’s not an elementary school.
- The Center for Consumer Freedom is a notorious astroturf organization to which no responsible journalist will turn for a quote. If you want to find someone critical of the program, turn to the Cato institute or the likes, not this sleazebag bunch of liars.
But neither of these errors affects the article’s central points.
We were poor when I was growing up and for many years I qualified for a free school-supplied breakfast and lunch (this was 1990 and onwards), which my parents signed me up for since things were so very tight. I admit I’ve always been a food snob, spoiled by my mom’s delicious home cooking with fresh ingredients; but the food was so very disgusting I often preferred to go hungry. And it was very, very far from anything I would consider ‘healthy’ now that I’ve taken an interest in nutrition. The quality and types of foods offered weren’t any better at the blue-ribbon high school I attended in the early 2000s.
I don’t have kids, but if I do and their school adopts this kind of policy I will fly off the handle. Nutrition is very important to me, and I have little faith that what schools, the USDA or the AHA dictate as ‘healthy’ won’t have negative health effects rather than positive on any human. Why should my own child suffer with the bare minimum of ‘healthy’ just because so many other parents are sub-par at feeding their children appropriate lunches?
:smack: Note in case anyone’s confused: that last sentence was from the OP, which I neglected to delete when quoting and replying.
That certainly isn’t my position. The goverment, in the form of the school, may provide perfectly tasty & healthy meals. But it should not be within the government’s power to FORCE the kids to eat what they choose or go hungry. That is an impermissable expansion of state power to me.
It’s a (pre)K-8 school, what used to be called a “grammar school” when my father went to one. That means it has children as young as 4 (pre-kindergarden) and old as 14 (8th grade) in the same building. Some districts go the other way have 7th & 8th grades as part of the high school.
Why is everybody agreeing to this as if they never heard of child neglect? Parents have a responsibly to prevent the malnourishment of their children—a responsibility that is not being discharged if these daily Twinkie lunches are happening.
I know it isn’t. You are not in the “people should evaluate drugs themselves instead of the government” school. But I wonder if kids bringing food from home always choose it.
I’d like to maximize nutrition, which you don’t do either by forcing all kids to eat school lunch or turning a blind eye to kids bringing crap.
Shush. The government is never better than a parent - even if the parent is a crack whore. Get with the system.
***Pizza Burgers! *** Stale hamburger buns slopped with leftover spaghetti meat and a quivering slice of sickly yellow “cheese.” (And God help us, we loved that shit.)
Sure they have that responsibility, but I’m not sure the way to solve the problem is a blanket policy for the whole school. I have a first-grader who’s a picky eater. Our district has a pretty good lunch program…it’s fairly healthy, and most of the food is pretty kid-friendly. However, I’d say an average of 2 days a week they have something that I guarantee she won’t eat, even if that means she’ll be hungry for the rest of the day, so I pack her a healthy lunch that I know she’ll like. What would her rights be in this situation?
True, but what about the parents who’re sending their kid to school with fresh fruit, a bottle of water, and a salad with grilled chicken? They aren’t neglecting their kids so would she they not be able to send their kids to school with healthy homecooked lunches just because other parents load their kids up with junk food? We could use the same logic to decide something like “some parents are letting their kids stay up all night drinking soda and playing video games so now all children must board at the school so it can ensure that all students get enough sleep”. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
Those kids will probably continue to get fat. If their parents are giving them crap for lunch, there’s a good chance they’re also giving them crap for breakfast and crap for dinner and crap for snacks. One semi-healthy meal a deal isn’t going to help them get in shape.
Well, I don’t think it is a question of rights, really. For instance, a parent or student does not have the right to opt of out K-12 schooling (if they do wish to withdraw from them, they must show acceptable alternative schooling, either private school or homeschool). So just because there is an area that could be left to one’s conscience, whether it what’s for lunch or attending school, doesn’t necessarily have to be. We don’t allow people to choose the maximum speed that they can drive on the interstate, even though some drivers would be very good a determining an optimal driving speed. Likewise, just because some parents do provide healthful lunches, perhaps even more so than the school’s offering, does not, on its own, prevent the school from making this regulation, if they have the general authority to do so.
Of course, none of the above goes to the wisdom of the policy. Undoubtedly there are many approaches the school could take (do nothing, intervene in the case of particular students, impose a blanket policy) and each of these have advantages and disadvantages (a blanket policy is generally easier to enforce and less likely to stigmatize than a more selective approach).
If this school is like any other public school in the city, they have a parents’ council and other ways of making their views known. As far as I am concerned, this is the kind of policy decision just crying out for local control. And after all, there is a soupçon of hypocrisy in seeing conspiracies to acclimate people to thoroughgoing government oversight while at the same time telling these parents that one way of addressing this problem of unhealthful lunches is right off the table because it offends the ideals of autonomy held by buttinskis on the internet. 
Missed the edit window. D’Oh
One semi healthy meal a day…
Commie bastards.
Why doesn’t Michelle Obama go over there for a photo op, seeing how much she is concerned with childhood obesity? Sounds like a type of busybody fascism right up her alley.