Idk what you think is going to turn bad after 4 hours. It’s still cold from home for some, or most, of those hours. Lunch meat is highly preserved. PB doesn’t need refrigeration. The jarred mayonnaise in egg salad actually helps to preserve it a bit, and the jarred mayo itself doesn’t need refrigeration for moderate periods of time. Until not that many years ago, mayo jars didn’t even advise refrigerating after opening. Eggs spoiling in a very short time is more a concern with raw unshelled eggs than it is for cooked eggs
Presumably people know to either use an insulated lunch bag or not bring highly perishable foods in a Mediterranean climate.
Lunch meat taken out of a properly working fridge, packed in a bag that might be insulated along with other cold goods, and eaten within three or four hours shouldn’t be dangerous. A lot of food handling guidelines are based on a risk calculus that involves the actual danger of contamination multiplied by how severe its effects will be. A restaurant serving greens prepared by someone who doesn’t wash his hands is going to get 500 people sick. One child making himself sick with bad meat - surrounded by peers, teachers, and parents all day who will presumably notice and treat him - simply isn’t as big a deal, so the “1 in 5000” chance of something happening doesn’t become a crisis. If you stop them from bringing fresh protein, then kids having negative health effects from eating exclusively hyper-preserved crap or skipping meals because they don’t like what’s on the school menu is also a concern. You have to weigh the totality of the circumstances. On balance the unrefrigerated lunches just aren’t worse than the other options.
I do wish that schools would take more time to not perpetuate myths, though - it is conclusively scientifically proven that there is no such thing as “being allergic to seeing someone else eating nuts” or restatements of that phenomenon such as the mythical “peanut dust.” Banning nuts from the entire school because of one kid’s allergy is a dumb policy that should have been ended 30 years ago when this research came out.
You didn’t bring anything that was going to get you in under 3 hours. Your lunch box wasn’t insulated, but it was closed to outside air. Did you bring raw fish or raw chicken? How hot were your classrooms?
The fact is that kids share their lunches with other kids, no matter how much they’re instructed not to. I’ve worked in school cafeterias. It happens. Is it worth one kid having a life-threatening allergic reaction? I had one Cambodian kindergartener who was deathly allergic to strawberries, in addition to more common allergens like fish and nuts. Other kids aren’t going to be aware of what every kid is allergic to.
It may be the Gen X talking, but shouldn’t children with life-threatening allergies be taught self-advocacy from the beginning? I’m not supporting deliberately putting kids in danger, but if I were a parent of a kid with any severe allergy, he would know to say “I’m sorry I can’t eat that” anytime he’s offered something that he’s severely allergic to.
I’m reminded of something I read once, somewhere. A mom said that her Kindergarten aged son learned from watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that if you say you’re allergic to something, you don’t have to eat it. So the kid, with no allergies, took to telling other adults, when offered something he didn’t like, “I can’t eat that, it will make me sick with itchy bumps,” which is what the character in the show says. The mom was ready to strangle “that fucking tiger.”
And were strawberries and fish totally banned from the school? Anyone could be allergic to something. Dairy and shellfish allergies are very common (way more common than peanut allergies). The reason peanuts in particular get this treatment is because of the myth about “dust,” not because someone could theoretically share food, which would imply no one ever eating anything at school and is a later back-reasoning to justify the pseudoscience.
Of course they should be taught. Do very young kids always do what they’re supposed to do? In life-threatening conditions with kids, you play it on the safe side. And schools don’t want to take on that risk
Did you never do something dumb you were told not to do at school? Did you deserve to die for it?
Look, I get the need for safety above all else, I truly do. I think there are ways schools can deal with this that don’t involve prohibiting children from bringing their own food from home, is all I’m saying. I don’t know what those ways are, and there are people who get paid far more money than I do to figure that out.
Most every lunch meat that a kid is likely to have is cured and/or fully cooked, so it’s not likely to grow a whole lot of bacteria at room temperatures in 4 hours. Same thing with peanut butter, cheese or anything else that’s not lunch meat that is in a sandwich, save maybe egg/tuna salad.
I would think the bigger risk is indifferent sanitation at home for many kids.
“Perpetuating myths”, if that is indeed what we would be doing, is preferable to the whopping lawsuit we’d without doubt lose if a child somehow ingested food brought by another student because we would be held responsible.
It’s a moot point, though, because we provide our children with both breakfast and lunch at zero cost, so virtually no one brings their own lunch. Our district finds it morally unacceptable to deny any child a meal because they don’t have any money.
I’m not aware of any schools that do this or what was the factor that caused it. Google says it’s exceeding rare, like virtually never. One example that pulls up is the one Jasmine referred to, at (public) Little Villa Academy, but that was back in 2011, and it wasn’t for medical reasons, “The principal stated that the policy was intended to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.” The other one I saw was for a private school (also in 2011) that didn’t want white flour, refined sugar, or other processed foods.
But to say that a child needs to bear all responsibility for not eating the wrong food is one of those “say you don’t have children without saying you don’t have children” tropes.
I have to push back on that because I see that sentiment a lot and people love to bash school lunches. Breakfast and lunch are free in Michigan. I believe mist schools publish their menus online. Take a look at your local public school district menu then come back and report on the crap served I’m curious.
I checked online a local district and this weeks menu at the local high school I see everyday options include a Taco bar, salad bar, pizza, cheeseburgers, hoagie station, hot veg options and deli style to go containers with raw veg sticks, hummus and pita, fruit and yogurt parfaits. Then there is a main line option that changes everyday. Pulled pork sliders, chicken stir fry, chicken mashed potato bowl, spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic toast and today it was homemade pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage patties with hash brown
So if it’s crap served at your school go talk to the school board who allocates the dollars to food service.
Food poisoning from a brown bag lunch is virtually unheard of. I grew up in subtropical Florida and brown bagged it all through school. Never ate a spoiled sandwich, meat cheese tuna pbj whatever. Went on field trips and left lunch on a hot bus. No one puked.
Kids are little shits, though, and especially now when teachers are more likely to get in trouble if they try to discipline them, how likely is it for a scenario like this to happen:
JOHNNY (when offered peanut butter): Sorry, I can’t eat that. I’m allergic and it’ll kill me.
OTHER KIDS: Oh, yeah? Let’s find out! (Holds Johnny down and smears him with peanut butter)
JOHNNY: dies
Doesn’t matter if the little shits feel bad afterward. Johnny’s still dead.
That’s fair. There are more than 12,000 independent school districts in the United States and experiences can vary wildly between them. It doesn’t help that I graduated more than thirty years ago. I looked up what they’re serving at my old alma mater, Bowman Middle School in Plano, Texas, and the menu looks fine. On Tuesday naan bread and huumus was on the menu, something we certainly never saw in 1989, so the menu looks just fine to me. But then the menu looked fine when I was in school too. The food was edible, but it wasn’t very good at all. Even as I got older and less picky, I was a hamburger and fries kid until I graduated because most of the food was poorly prepared.
Even raw eggs are good for a month or so unrefrigerated. Eggs have a reputation for going bad, not because they go bad easily, but because when they go bad, they go very bad.
Mayonnaise, by the way, also gets a bad rap. People hear about food poisoning cases involving pasta salad or potato salad, and blame the mayo, but the culprit there is actually the high-water-content starch.
Peanuts aren’t even the most common allergy, nor the one that’s most likely to be severe. Though I suppose that there’s not much risk of accidental exposure to shellfish.
I didn’t expect (think about) allergies. I was just wondering about unrefrigerated storage in warm climates in uninsulated containers (except for the Thermos flasks of milk). Thank you for the answers about that.
Does climate affect whether you should refrigerate peanut butter?
If you live in a hot or humid climate, you may not have a “cool, dry place” for storing your peanut butter and might want to consider refrigerating it (even if the jar says it’s not necessary) to extend shelf life. Epi’s Joe Sevier is a committed peanut butter refrigerator: “my New York kitchen gets too hot,” he says. “Things that ‘don’t go rancid if you eat them fast enough’ always go rancid.” If your kitchen is cooler and less humid, though, the oils in the jar will not go rancid as quickly—so if you go through a jar in less than a month, it’s fine not to refrigerate!
When I first started living in the tropics I was advised to refrigerate my peanut butter, so I did. I was told (incorrectly, it seems) that otherwise there was a risk of aflatoxins. I later learned this applies to growing peanuts - not to PB.
We don’t refrigerate our PB any more, although after reading the above-quoted article I think maybe I should refrigerate the PB I eat - slowly, so it’s in the cabinet for many months - which is all natural and contains no preservatives. (My spouse eats Jif or Skippy and that definitely survives forever without refrigeration.)
