This seems like a strange argument to me. I mean, of course a high school should be able to prohibit vodka because a) having the place full of drunks would not help them achieve their stated (and statutory) aim of educating children and b) it’s not legal in most places for children of high school age to drink alcohol.
Really? Couldn’t we just, like, define what is and isn’t a parental responsibility, and tell schools that it’s none of their damn business what my child eats? It would be so much healthier for civil society.
Meh. I ate much “junk food” as a kid for my lunch every day and it was probably more nutritious than the cafeteria food. When we had to eat in the cafeteria in middle school, a friend and I would eat our packed lunches and mock the school food mercilessly with most vile terms, most of which it deserved. Also: I was always the scrawny little kid, the one picked on for being little by the bumbling bullies. I didn’t need to be eating all “healthy food” to avoid getting fat. NOT EVERY CHILD IS GOING TO BALLOON UP OR HAVE HEALTH ISSUES BY EATING POTATO CHIPS WITH LUNCH. In fact, would have loved to have gained weight, but couldn’t, regardless of my diet. This impacted me to the point I still have self-esteem issues related to my body to this day (I’m in my late 30s). Having a meddling school interfering with my eating habits would have made it worse.
Fortunately, none of the schools I went to could have cared less about what I ate and my parents weren’t swayed by the then current dogma/fad on what is or isn’t “healthy food”. If they had and taken away my “junk” food, I was an extremely stubborn child and would have just refused to eat anything at all, even if I got violently ill each day. What probably would have happened is that I would have gotten a note from my doctor allowing me to eat whatever I wanted. A medical doctor’s intervention is about the only thing so sacrosanct that even nanny state school administrators won’t interfere further.
Sure, define it. And if I still see kids coming to school with a lunch box full of Kool Aid (or Capri Sun, same thing), Oreos, Pixie Stix, and jam sandwiches to chew up with their silver teeth, I’ll think you’ve defined parental responsibility poorly.
It’s the school’s damn business how your kid treats other kids, how your kid learns math, how your kid learns science, how your kid learns manners, how your kid learns language arts, how your kid learns good exercise routines, how your kid learns art. Why shouldn’t it be the school’s damn business how your kid learns nutrition? What separates nutrition from all the other areas of life that schools do teach?
I really don’t see why it’s more healthful for civil society not to concern itself via the schools with what kids eat.
If a school is teaching about healthy eating, it does undermine the curriculum to then merrily watch them much away on complete crap without comment.
Note that these policies are not enforcing that your kid has to eat tofu cubes and hummus with acai berries on the side. They are banning a handful of categorically unhealthy foods, and I’m sure it’d be trivially easy to get an exception. For anyone using any sense in packing their kid’s lunches, these rules will have only the slightest effect- so your kid has to wait until 2:45 instead of 12:15 to get his weekly Little Debbie treat. Big whoop. Is it really that big of a burden to make one out of the three meals a day at least nominally healthy?
I was a skinny kid, too. In high school, my standard lunch was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a 20 oz. Mountain Dew. So what? It was dumb. It was bad choices, and I didn’t even know I was making bad choices because I had no other reference point. I thought that was normal. I don’t think I wrecked my health, but when my metabolism slowed in my 20s, I started to feel it and I did get in to some bad habits that took a lot more time and willpower to break than if I never got into them.
Incedently, there is plenty of research showing that what kids eat at school plays a critical role in health.
The message in question being that “healthy eating is a club control freaks beat you over the head with”.
At best, we aren’t talking about what’s “healthy”, but what happens to be on the list for a particular school or even a particular teacher. Not what happens to be in the market. And some schools aren’t allowing lunches to be brought at all. And forcing kids to eat food they don’t want to eat is a great way to create a lifelong aversion to it; I can’t think of a single food my parents made me eat that I’ve touched since I was a kid.
Well, it’s pretty simple. The school can define how my kid treats other kids, because that affects other kids. They can define how my kid learns science because that’s their job. They can even define how my kid learns nutrition - there are facts and I want my kid to learn those facts. Hopefully the science teachers will teach those facts.
What separates nutrition is that while we don’t all have to play football, we don’t all have to learn physics, and we don’t all have to learn linguistics, we do all have to eat.
So sure. Teach my kid about nutrition. Educate them about the fact that Snickers bars are bad for you. But whether they get to eat Snickers bars, when and how often? That’s my call.
What kids bring to school does affect other kids. Do you remember being in school? Kids trade, gossip, rank and generally make a huge deal out of what each other are eating. I remember a huge to-do about Lunchables. Everyone wanted Lunchables, and if you could somehow manage to you’d be king. I remember begging and begging and begging for Lunchables, which I didn’t even like.
You are already wrong. A child cannot eat a Snicker’s Bar for 90% of the school day.
There’s the rub. A Snickers bar is not unhealthy. A serving of chips, some soda pop and even some friend potatoes are not unhealthy. These are all items that can be part of a nutritionally sound diet provided you don’t over do them to the exclusion of fruits, veggies, etc., etc. A child can have a serving of chips with his lunches M-F and maintain a healthy diet.
That wasn’t at all my experience in school. Nobody from middle school on up really cared what other people were eating for lunch. Can you show me how lunches were at all disruptive or violated the rights of any other students? Because kids can gossip about a lot of things.
The majority of their argument is predicated on the fact that because the school can require students to behave a certain way and prohibit certain items from being in the school, the school can therefor restrict anything.
Two things: your argument seems to boil down to, “It’s not the teachers’ job to monitor what my child eats, because it’s not the teachers’ job to monitor what my child eats.” That’s circular reasoning that appears to be predicated on a false premise. Second, teaching involves more than the memorization of facts. It involves, to borrow from Bloom’s Taxonomy, higher-order thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation. It is at least arguable that by putting in place a set of requirements for home lunches, students will evaluate, analyze, and apply the nutrition facts they have memorized.
As even sven said, teachers already get to say when and where and how often kids eat anything. If a kid breaks out a bag of chips in the middle of a test, it’s uncontroversial (Der Trihs possibly excepted) that I can tell the kid to put the chips away. Your argument appears to be that lunch is a free-for-all: kids can bring anything for lunch as long as it’s not illegal or of negative impact on other students. Why do you think lunch is so different from the rest of the school day?
This argument is nonsensical and only works if students are allowed to eat during other classes as long as the food is healthy.
Lunch is different from other classes in that it is when you eat. If eating were permitted in other classes, presumably similar restrictions on type of allowed food would apply.
Your first paragraph a non sequitur. Students aren’t allowed to do math during reading workshop as long as the math is accurate; they’re not allowed to read during math class as long as the book is good. The school day is divided into structured periods during which teachers guide students in their behavior. Lunch is the time you eat, just like math is the time you work with numbers and reading is the time you read. There’s nothing in there saying that lunch is the only time during which teachers may not guide student behavior.
There is no such thing as a “categorically unhealthy” food. Teaching kids that is BS.
There are foods that have more or less of certain nutrients. Processed foods tend to have lots of fats and sugars, so its easy to get too many of those nutrients, and not enough of others, if you eat too much of them. That doesn’t make them “categorically unhealthy”.
The difference is that during math time and reading time, the teachers are trained to provide that guidance, and follow a curriculum developed by people who are experts in that field. A random teacher deciding what my kid can and can’t eat is no different than a teacher deciding to teach creationism during history class because that’s what they think the kid needs to learn. If a group of experts were to develop a lunch curriculum and train teachers how to follow it fairly and consistantly, then by all means.
That would be awesome, since every group of experts I have seen comes to the conclusion that the worst thing you can do for kids wrt nutrition is to be controlling about what they eat.
Well, yeah, I agree! I just meant that if a school insists on controlling what kids eat, I would prefer that they at least have some idea what the hell they’re talking about.
Most schools in the UK now have a healthy eating policy but over here it seems to be more accepted that schools play a large part in the process of socialisation young people have to go through.
So they also teach things like manners, personal hygiene etc. I guess I don’t have that much to say apart from when people are making sweeping statements you should be aware of the cultural context. The UK recommendations are based upon reports like this from theuniversity of leeds (PDF- there are fuller ones, this was first page on google) which demonstrate that improved diets at school have a causal relationship with learning outcomes.
That seems pretty important to schools.
I don’t know about other parts of the UK but in Redbridge most infants/junior schools have a colour code system i.e. you need to choose one of each sticker colour to get a well rounded meal which should help picky eaters.
Indeed. The menu list I posted also linked to the composition of the group that set the menus, which consisted of a parental representative, one or two school board representatives, a cafeteria service representative, and one of the administrators of the school. No dietitians were on the list. That, combined with the fact that french fries were a menu option every single day, leads me to believe that my local district is not even remotely qualified to dictate what kids can and can’t bring into their packed lunch. Luckily, my district does no such thing, so I don’t care.
Looking at runnerpat’s links, the Chicago one doesn’t publish its menu. The New Haven district does have a menu that looks fine, although their breakfast options consist mainly of sugared cereals and muffins, to which I wouldn’t exactly give a gold star. They say the cereals are “reduced sugar,” but I’m not sure what reduced sugar fruit loops are.